A Night at the Movies in Newt Gingrich’s America (ca. 1994-98)
Newt Gingrich. Caricature by David Levine, New York Review of Books, March 23, 1995.
N.B.: I wrote the following in the mid-1990s, shortly after Newt Gingrich, brandishing his Contract With America, led Congressional Republicans to victory in the mid-term elections of 1994. I never did anything with it. Writing about movies and politics is strictly avocational with me. And then Gingrich’s ouster in 1998 seemed somehow to have placed an expiration date on most of what I had to say. And so this foray into the movies and Gingrichite politics has lain, these intervening sixteen years, on successive floppy-disks and hard-drives, following me through ever-newer computers, from PCs to iMacs, and from the Michigan to Kyoto. I now consign it to The Cloud, for what interest it may bear, as a relic, in this new season of Gingrich. I am less persuaded now than I was in 1998 that, in the sentences that close this visit to Hollywood, I had gotten my prognostications wrong.
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JUST CAUSE, JUNIOR, AND “THE CONTRACT WITH AMERICA“
What are the specific political relations between the New Right and the entertainment industry? The question is intriguing in light of attacks lodged in the 1990s from the Right against the industry, as when Bob Dole condemns Hollywood and corporate entities like Time Warner for inculcating counter-cultural, corrupt values, or when Dan Quayle complains that popular media reflect liberal habits of mind.
Kenneth Burke
But the Right’s patent hostility to the entertainment industry obscures certain latent political and ideological affiliations that bring the two together. Nowhere are these affiliations better exhibited than in Ivan Reitman‘s Junior (released in November 1994) and Arne Glimcher‘s Just Cause (released in February 1995). Taken together, these two popular films ingeniously “advance” (if I may put it that way) the twin agenda of the Republican Right: Law & Order and Family Values. They constitute (and reflect) an assault on American liberalism. And they do it in an engaging fashion that perhaps helps us understand the political temper of the electorate circa 1995. Junior and Just Cause set up a “frame for accepting” (as Kenneth Burke would say) the fundamental arguments of the Gingrichite Contract With America. They help us understand, to my mind anyway, why that Contract initially met with such remarkable popular success.
1. Law & Order, or “Natural” Anti-Liberalism: Just Cause
Poster, issued in 1995.
Just Cause represents violent crime in such a way that we are not encouraged to alter the “social” conditions that give rise to it. The film abstracts criminal behavior from its social context and places it instead in a context of “natural” pathology where, we are meant to concede, our only recourse is incarceration. This sounds like the sort of talk we hear from the Right about Law & Order, and that’s precisely what it is: an abdication of “social” responsibility. On this view, the criminal justice system ought chiefly to punish criminals rather than reform or rehabilitate them. (Systematic crime “prevention” is an enterprise that the New Right by now regards as thoroughly quixotic.) Just Cause harmonizes perfectly with the “Taking Back Our Streets Act” of the Contract With America, with its calls for cuts in “social spending”—as Gingrich derisively says—the better to fund construction of prisons.† But first, the plot of the movie. Read more…
Some Notes on “Ozymandias”
As printed in "Rosalind and Helen; a Modern Eclogue and Other Poems" (London: 1819). Click on the image to enlarge it. The notes are worth reading.
Percy Bysshe Shelley published his “Ozymandias” in The Examiner, edited by his friend Leigh Hunt, on January 11, 1818 (#524 of the journal). It appeared under the pen-name “Glirastes.” His friend Horace Smith published a sonnet on the same theme in The Examiner for February 1, 1818 (reprinted below). The following passage from Diodorus Siculus‘s Library of History (1.47) provided a source (there may have been others) for the poets:
Ten stades from the first tombs, [Hecataeus of Abdera] says, in which, according to tradition, are buried the concubines of Zeus, stands a monument of the king known as Osymandyas. At its entrance there is a pylon, constructed of variegated stone, two plethra in breadth and forty-five cubits high; passing through this one enters a rectangular peristyle, built of stone, four plethra long on each side; it is supported, in place of pillars, by monolithic figures sixteen cubits high, wrought in the ancient manner as to shape; and the entire ceiling, which is two fathoms wide, consists of a single stone, which is highly decorated with stars on a blue field. Beyond this peristyle there is yet another entrance and pylon, in every respect like the one mentioned before, save that it is more richly wrought with every manner of relief; beside the entrance are three statues, each of a single block of black stone from Syene, of which one, that is seated, is the largest of any in Egypt, the foot measuring over seven cubits, while the other two at the knees of this, the one on the right and the other on the left, daughter and mother respectively, are smaller than the one first mentioned. And it is not merely for its size that this work merits approbation, but it is also marvellous by reason of its artistic quality and excellent because of the nature of the stone, since in a block of so great a size there is not a single crack or blemish to be seen. The inscription upon it runs: ‘King of Kings am I, Osymandyas. If anyone would know how great I am and where I lie, let him surpass one of my works.’ There is also another statue of his mother standing alone, a monolith twenty cubits high, and it has three diadems on its head, signifying that she was both daughter and wife and mother of a king.
C. H. Oldfather prepared the foregoing translation for the Loeb Classical Library‘s 1933 edition of Diodorus (fl. 60-30 B.C.E.). He points out in a note that Diodorus relies, here, on an account given by Hecataeus of Abdera, a historian of the early third century B.C.E., and the author of an Aigyptiaka. “What Diodorus gives,” Oldfather indicates, “is no more than a paraphrase, not a quotation, of Hecataeus.” I do not know what translation Shelley read, or if he read it instead in the Greek (unlikely), or if he knew it by reputation. In Sites of exchange: European Crossroads and Faultlines, the Egyptologist Adriana Corrado points out that “Diodorus’s enthusiastic account of Ozymandias, who was clearly based on Rameses II, had been well-known since Poggio Bracciolini‘s Latin translation of 1472 (further popularised by Serlio in Book III of his treatise on architecture, which adds much on Egypt, including the 1530′s observations of the future Cardinal, Marco Grimani). In all versions, including Baldelli’s 1574 Italian version, the statement (presumably once in hieroglyphs) was printed in uppercase and highlighted: ‘I am Ozymandias, King of Kings, if anyone would know how great I am and where I lie, let him surpass/see my works.’ Belzoni says that Frederik Ludvig Norden saw Abu Simbel [the site of two temples built by Ramses II in southern Egypt] but it is usually thought to have been discovered in 1813.”
Whatever the case, here’s Shelley’s sonnet on Ramses II/Ozymandias:
Percy Bysshe Shelley, portrait by Alfred Clint. 1819. Now in the National Portrait Gallery.
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings;
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
This week, anyway, I find myself convinced that few other sonnets open with such a fine shot as this one: “I met a traveller from an antique land / Who said . . .” Full stop. Caesura in the first position of line two (uncommon in sonnets). Only the word “antique” rises, and it hardly, above the conversational, so clean and direct in its address is Shelley’s diction. He uses “antique” in the sense one associates with such lines as these: “The famous warriors of the anticke world” (Edmund Spenser: the Amoretti), and “The Senatours of th’ antique Rome” (Shakespeare: “Prologue” to act five of Henry the Fifth). “Antique” may strike our ears as a strange bit of diction here, but it certainly would not have so struck Shelley’s ears, or those of his readers. Shelley opens the sonnet right there on the lapel-seizing plane, so to speak, and he holds to it through to the end. Of the 111 words in the sonnet, 87 are monosyllabic: 78%. The verbs are for the most part dynamic or transitive or both. Only “stand,” “lies,” “remains,” “tell,” “appear,” “remains” and “stretch” are stative (as I believe the grammarians say). And the sonnet nicely makes dynamic what otherwise would function as a stative verb: “despair.” We were always to have looked on Ozymandias’s works and despaired; such was his sneering brag, as Shelley renders it. But his works long ago reached their expiration date; in short, their capacity to inspire despair had duration; it fell away. The Shelleyan irony is that the “mighty” may yet “despair” when looking on Ozymandias’s now un-seeable “works,” brought into the theater of the imagination by this sonnet—and despair not because they can’t hope to match either Ozymandias’s works or Shelley’s, but because their own “works,” whatever they may be, will wind up a colossal wreck (unlike Shelley’s, needless to say). So let’s call “despair,” here, stative and dynamic: it no longer works on us; and yet it does its work on us (at least it should). The events of recent days in the sands of Libya bear it all out. Read more…
“Buried above ground”: Notes on a Poem by William Cowper
Portrait of William Cowper (1731-1800), by Lemuel Francis Abbott (c. 1760 – 1802). Date: 1792. Oil on canvas. Now in the National Portrait Gallery.
Cowper’s Tirocinium (1784) proves that he formed a low opinion of English public schools.† The severity of his judgment upon institutions where religious instruction was scanty and temptations to vice abounded is explicable without supposing that he was himself unhappy.
—Dictionary of National Biography‡
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William Cowper (1731-1800) (pronounced “Cooper”), born at Berkhampstead, was the son of the clergymen John Cowper and Anne Donne. Anne died early, while giving birth to Cowper’s brother John, whereupon William was sent to a school administered by one Dr. Pitman at Market Street, Hertfordshire. There, by his own (at times excruciating) report, in a posthumously published Memoir, Cowper suffered at the hands of a regular terror of a bully, who was, fortunately, later expelled. The poet-to-be suffered troubles with his eyes, relief from which he attributed not to treatment by the oculist he sought but instead to an attack of small-pox. At the age of ten, he entered Westminster School, a “public school,” as the English style them, and, enjoying the company of several of his mates, he became adept, as he later put it, “in the infernal art of lying”—which is to say, misleading his schoolmasters with excuses for work undone. He was handy with a cricket bat, good on the pitch, and had a knack for writing verse in Latin. At the age of eighteen Cowper left to read for the law with a solicitor called Chapman, but took, it would seem, a livelier interest in his own uncle’s daughters, with whom (again by his own report) he passed a good many hours “giggling and making giggle” with his friend Edward Thurlow (1731-1806), later Lord Chancellor of Great Britain under no fewer than four Prime Ministers. Cowper, notwithstanding his casual engagement with the law, was called to the bar on June 14, 1754. Here, as the Dictionary of National Biography has it, Cowper “was seized with an ominous depression of spirits during the early part of his residence in chambers. He found some consolation in reading George Herbert‘s poems, but laid them aside on the advice of a relation, who thought that they stimulated his morbid feelings,” which had already become quite apparent. “After a year’s misery,” continues the DNB, “he sought relief in religious exercises. He was advised to make a visit of some months to Southampton, where he made yachting excursions with Sir Thomas Hesketh. One day he felt a sudden relief. Hereupon he burnt the prayers which he had composed, and long afterwards reproached himself with having misinterpreted a providential acceptance of his petitions into a mere effect of the change of air and scene.” Here arose the “morbid” pattern of penitence and scathing self-reproach that would sound the awful leitmotif in Cowper’s long life. One notices, in this episode, Cowper’s tendency to assume that Providence took a peculiar interest in him—a matter less unusual in character (many Christians think this way) than in intensity: it was as if God were singling him out for special notice.
There followed the death of his father; the usual, thwarted love-affair; the diddling in law, while preferring a life of letters; the fading fortunes and uncertain patronage; and then the first of his great crises, in 1763. I find the account given in the DNB of the latter episode quite charming in style and give it whole here:
His cousin, Major Cowper, claimed the right of appointment to the joint offices of reading clerk and clerk of the committees, and to the less valuable office of clerk of the journals of the House of Lords. Both appointments became vacant in 1763, the latter by the death of the incumbent, which Cowper reproached himself for having desired.
With alarming grandiosity, mingled with conviction of his own depravity, Cowper, as he states in his own Memoir, convinced himself that his desire for the office had by some means brought about, or at any rate hastened, the incumbent’s death. The DNB continues:
Major Cowper offered the most valuable to Cowper, intending the other for a Mr. Arnold. Cowper accepted, but was so overcome by subsequent reflections upon his own incapacity that he persuaded his cousin to give the more valuable place to Arnold and the less valuable to himself. Meanwhile the right of appointment was disputed. Cowper was told that the ground would have to be fought by inches and that he would have to stand an examination into his own fitness at the bar of the House of Lords. He made some attempts to secure the necessary experience of his duties by attending the office; but the anxiety threw him into a nervous fever. A visit to Margate in the summer did something for his spirits. On returning to town in October he resumed attendance at the office. The anticipated examination unnerved him. An accidental talk
—and here, be it noted, our DNB biographer relies, again, on Cowper’s own account in his Memoir—
directed his thoughts to suicide. He bought a bottle of laudanum; but after several attempts to drink it, frustrated by accident or sudden revulsion of feeling, he threw it out of the window. He went to the river to drown himself, and turned back at sight of a porter waiting on the bank. The day before that fixed for his examination he made a determined attempt to hang himself with a garter. On a third attempt the garter broke just in time to save his life. He now sent for Major Cowper, who saw at once that all thoughts of the appointment must be abandoned. Cowper remained in his chambers, where the symptoms of a violent attack of madness rapidly developed themselves. Cowper’s delusions took a religious colouring. He was convinced that he was damned. He consulted Martin Madan, his cousin. Madan gave him spiritual advice. His brother came to see him, and was present during a crisis, in which he felt as though a violent blow had struck his brain ‘without touching the skull.’ The brother consulted the family, and Cowper was taken in December 1763 to a private madhouse, kept by Dr. Nathaniel Cotton at St. Albans. A copy of sapphics written in the interval gives a terrible description of his state of mind.
“Cowper’s religious terrors,” the DNB concludes, “were obviously the effect and not the cause of the madness, of which his earlier attack had been symptomatic.” In any case, the poem in question, indeed in Sapphics, engages me here:
Hatred and vengeance, my eternal portion,
Scarce can endure delay of execution:—
Wait, with impatient readiness, to seize my
Soul in a moment.
Damn’d below Judas: more abhorr’d than he was,
Who, for a few pence, sold his holy master.
Twice betray’d, Jesus me, the last delinquent,
Deems the profanest.
Man disavows, and Deity disowns me.
Hell might afford my miseries a shelter;
Therefore hell keeps her everhungry mouths all
Bolted against me.
Hard lot! Encompass’d with a thousand dangers,
Weary, faint, trembling with a thousand terrors,
Fall’n, and if vanquish’d, to receive a sentence
Worse than Abiram’s:
Him, the vindictive rod of angry justice
Sent, quick and howling, to the centre headlong;
I, fed with judgment, in a fleshly tomb, am
Buried above ground.
That first stanza is Old Testament stuff, or worse. I’m not sure it doesn’t court some kind of blasphemy. Read more…
“Untroubling and untroubled”: Notes on a poem by John Clare
The Blue Bell Inn. Clare lived in the cottage next door. Photo by "uplandswolf" (at Flickr).
The following anthology piece laid hold of me when I encountered it, some decades ago now, in Arthur Quiller-Couch‘s Oxford Book of English Verse. It’s by John Clare, of course, born into poverty in 1793 in Helpstone, a village named as if somehow for the purpose of bringing about, in the ripeness of time, such a poet as him.
Clare’s father was on parish relief, and his twin sister died in infancy. At age seven Clare was “put to keep sheep and geese,” in the inimitable prose of The Dictionary of National Biography, “where he learnt old songs from ‘Granny Bains,’ the village cowherd.” In about 1808 (here the DNB equivocates) Clare took employment as “an outdoor servant” with Francis Gregory, “landlord of the ‘Blue Bell’” in Helpstone. (I find, on inquiry, that the Blue Bell remains open for business to this day, at #10 Woodgate, Helpston, as it is now spelled, in Peterborough.) Here Clare had the first of his unfortunate love affairs (with a young lass named Mary Joyce), but, what’s more important, began reading James Thomson’s The Seasons.
Detail, introduction to "Poems descriptive of Rural Life..."
His next job, as “under-gardener at Burghley Park, seat of the Marquis of Exeter,” as the DNB tells us, put him in “bad company, who taught him to drink and whose brutality induced him to run away after eleven months.” The pronoun “whose,” I take it, refers to the bad company, not to the Marquess of Exeter. A stint in the local militia amounted to nothing, nor did “another luckless love affair,” and the now-journeyman poet returned in poverty to his father, “joined some gipsies for a time” (again, our DNB), and eventually took a job at a limekiln. He courted one Martha Turner, but her parents “objected to Clare’s poverty, and his suit languished,” and, adding insult to injury, he “was soon discharged by his employer [at the limekiln] for wasting his time in scribbling.” But wasted time it certainly wasn’t and, on January 16, 1820, the firm of Taylor & Hessey published Poems, descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery, by John Clare, a Northamptonshire peasant. The introduction made much of the latter fact: “though Poets in this country have seldom been fortunate men, yet he is, perhaps, the least favoured by circumstances, and the most destitute of friends, of any that ever existed.” Clare’s poverty sold him, and, his suit now no longer languishing, he married Martha “Patty” Turner on March 16, 1820. The DNB takes care to inform us that “their first child was born a month later.” It seems “that Clare’s fidelity had wavered.” Jonathan Bate‘s biography makes clear that it wavered often enough to occasion considerable worry that gossip might tarnish Clare’s reputation—as it had tarnished Robert Burns‘s—on entering the literary world with his forthcoming Poems. But nonetheless he proved “a good husband and father,” reports the DNB, at least until began the troubles of which the poem printed below is so unforgettable a record.
Clare’s mental illness first manifested itself publicly when “a decided fit of insanity showed itself during a performance of The Merchant of Venice,” as the DNB phrases it. In their edition of the poems (done for Oxford), Eric Robinson and David Powell report that “the nature of Clare’s illness has never satisfactorily been established. There seem to have been epileptiform incidents in his early life, experiences during his visits to London which suggest a shaky hold upon reality, confusion about his relationship to Mary Joyce, nightmares, some bouts of heavy drinking, and the suggestion, by Clare himself, that he might have been venereally infected.” Robinson and Powell continue: “The account of Clare’s escape from [the asylum at] High Beach,” where he was first confined, and whence he returned to Helpstone, “is a strange mixture of dream-world, literary reminiscence, and realistic reporting. There are the first recorded signs that Clare is not sure of his own identity. Is he Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver, Queen Victoria’s father, or just a battered piece of flotsam? Clare himself is not sure. The two major undertakings of this period,” the editors point out, “are ‘Child Harold’ and ‘Don Juan,’ names which suggest still another persona for Clare”—that is to say, Lord Byron. Both poems are in fact “concerned with Clare’s struggle to know who he is.” After making his way back to Helpstone, where he stayed awhile, both vexed and vexing, he was (voluntarily) confined to the Northamptonshire County General Lunatic Asylum, where he remained until his death. (Incidentally, the asylum is now called St. Andrew’s Hospital and contains a ward named for Clare.)
But now the text of the poem known to us simply as “I Am”:
John Clare, as painted by William Hilton in 1820, the year his first volume of poetry appeared. Now in the National Portrait Gallery.
I am—yet what I am none cares or knows;
My friends forsake me like a memory lost:
I am the self-consumer of my woes—
They rise and vanish in oblivion’s host,
Like shadows in love’s frenzied stifled throes
And yet I am, and live—like vapours tost
Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life or joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems;
Even the dearest that I loved the best
Are strange—nay, rather, stranger than the rest.
I long for scenes where man hath never trod
A place where woman never smiled or wept
There to abide with my Creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept,
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie
The grass below—above the vaulted sky.
Clare read the Bible when a child, and, while in the asylum where he wrote these lines, he composed also verse paraphrases of several books of the Bible, including Job and Exodus. I doubt whether we can entirely rule out some possible echo of Exodus 3:13-14 in that first “iamb” of the poem: “And Moses said unto God, Behold, when I come unto the children of Israel, and shall say unto them, The God of your fathers hath sent me unto you; and they shall say to me, What is his name? what shall I say unto them? And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you.” But I’m no more certain what to make of such an allusion, if allusion it is, than Clare is sure of what to make of himself. Who knows but that something of the tautological self-involution of “I am that I am” bears on the poem, with a slightly bitter tang of irony? Clare is “the self-consumer of [his] woes,” after all. He is what he is, which is—well, none can say “what” he is, and none “cares.” That initial “I am,” with its un-predicated copulative grammar, opens the poem up with pained wonder.
And isn’t there something a bit queer in that second line? Read more…
Discoveries, etc.
An intersection in New Jersey. From the masthead of "College Hill Review."
A quick note today to acknowledge the new number of The College Hill Review, an excellent on-line quarterly edited by James Barsczc (et al).
At the top of the page you’ll find a wonderful bit of work by the poet Mark Scott (author of Tactile Values and A Bedroom Occupation: Love Elegies): “Discoveries,” a collection of epigrams and observations whose title recalls, of course, Ben Jonson‘s Timber; or, Discoveries Made Upon Men and Matter.
I reprint here one passage from Scott’s “Discoveries,” the better to give you its savor:
“Emerson is a superficial writer. ‘In skating over thin ice,’ he says, ‘our safety is in our speed. We live amid surfaces, and the art of life is to skate well on them.’ This is the foundation of transcendentalism: that Emerson liked to watch boys skate on the Concord River.”
Take a look at the whole of the issue.
Kinds of Rhyme: “She Walks in Beauty,” “Dulce et Decorum Est,” “Base Details,” & “Blighters”
George Gordon Lord Byron. 1824 portrait by Thomas Philipps (1770-1845).
A relatively short bit today, illustrating a few kinds of rhyme, including (for starters) “conjunctive” and “disjunctive” rhymes. Those terms are not, so far as I know, in common use. But they serve a good enough turn. (I dropped “disjunctive rhyme” into Google Books and, as of this writing, came up with two results; “conjunctive rhyme” also yields only two.) I aim to deal here largely with disjunctive (or ironic) rhymes. But for purposes of contrast I think it best to start with a fine example, one of the best I know, of conjunctive rhymes.
Following is Lord Byron’s “She Walks in Beauty,” several rhymes in which have always seemed to me ideally “conjunctive”—by which I mean that the rhymes harmonize and affiliate words not in sound merely but in sense also. Rhymes like these don’t simply hold the lines and stanzas together; they exceed “infrastructural” purposes, so to speak. They signify; they’re a significant feature of the poem’s meaning, all the more so as they work on us in ways equally auditory and rational.
She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes;
Thus mellowed to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.
One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impaired the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress,
Or softly lightens o’er her face;
Where thoughts serenely sweet express,
How pure, how dear their dwelling-place.
And on that cheek, and o’er that brow,
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent!
"Walk," in one of its senses, from the Oxford English Dictionary; click for a larger image.
I’ll concern myself chiefly with rhyming, but some brief discussion of the theme and “argument” of the lyric is called for, given that the rhymes complement (and complete) both.
Certainly no beauty myself, I have nonetheless “walked in beauty”; any time I wish, I may take the bus round to Ryoanji or Ginkakuji (two temples here in Kyoto) and do that.
But Byron’s lady isn’t out for beauty. She possesses it such that every footfall she takes “walks” her more deeply “in” it. Here we have a case where the sometimes-equivocal nature of English prepositions (in this case “in”) does good work. She inhabits beauty, whether “walking” or not (it’s no question of her having a lovely gait, though doubtless she does). Beauty hangs about her like an atmosphere as she moves, or, to be more precise, like a climate (or “clime”). But given the long and curious history of “walk” in English—see the note at the end of this entry, quoted from the Oxford English Dictionary—I think more is a-foot, here, than a stroll. The moral emphases brought out in the second and third stanzas—having to do with “grace,” “goodness,” and “innocence,” lest anyone suppose Byron to have his eye only on the woman’s physical beauty;—as I say, these moral emphases bring out in “walk” a more vocational sense of the word (as in idioms speaking of what “walk of life” one moves in). Scriptural precedents come to mind, owing to the muted religiosity of the last twelve lines. The O.E.D. tells us (see the image above): “Chiefly after biblical usage: to pass one’s life; to conduct oneself, behave (well, badly, wisely, unwisely, etc.). Often with reference to a metaphorical ‘path’ or ‘way.’” As in these examples, from Tyndale‘s translation of the Bible: “1526 Bible (Tyndale) Luke i. 6 Booth‥walked [Gk. πορευόμενοι] in all the lawes and ordinacions of the lorde. 1530 Bible (Tyndale) Gen. To walke with god is to lyve godly and to walke in his commaundementes.” Byron’s lady “walks in beauty” in these vocational senses, too (not merely in some “atmospheric” sense). Beauty is her calling. She goes about her walk of life in all innocence and purity; her beauty is not of the flesh alone. Byron takes care to distinguish her “winning” charms from those that might, in a lesser woman, a more worldly woman, be turned to cunning (her smiles “tell of days in goodness spent,” not of days spent in coy flirtation, say). Read more…
What are days for?
Philip Larkin, photograph by Fay Godwin.
Philip Larkin wrote the following poem—as his editor Anthony Thwaite tells us—on August 3, 1953. He later collected it in The Whitsun Weddings (1964), where it appears between “Take One Home for the Kiddies” and “MCMXIV.”
“Days”
What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?
Ah, solving that question
Brings the priest and the doctor
In their long coats
Running over the fields.
A simple enough beginning, such as might open a conversation with a child, or such as a child might say in opening a conversation. “What are days for?” The answer to the query comes in the fifth line. Days, it seems, “are to be happy in.” A typical reader of Larkin might well reply in turn: Says who? Days are also to be anxious in, to be angry in, to be lovesick in (or sick of love in), to be bored in, to be bereft and sad in, and so on. Larkin’s own poems are my register, here. Days are to be happy in! Set aside, for the moment, the question begged here: Why should “days”—the diurnal cycles that mark out our threescore years and ten—have any “purpose” at all but those we give them anyway? Set that aside, and the answer (“Days are to be happy in”), as with the query it answers, certainly does (as I say) sound like something one might say to a child (or on a greeting card posted for birthdays). What are days for? Why, my sweet, they are to happy in! This is the proposition against which, even as we find it laid out in these lines, the poem (with its ingenious barbs) somehow works. Read more…
Cover, Ralph Pite's biography of Hardy.
Today, a glance at a familiar anthology piece by Thomas Hardy: “Neutral Tones.” I’m not certain we usually do justice to one feature of the poem: namely, the fact that it tells us that “love deceives.” This distinction might (or might not) seem a matter of great consequence, but I will take it seriously (some may say absurdly seriously). Consider how often bitter love-poems authored by men imply, or state outright, that not so much “love” as woman “deceives.” The poetry of the English Renaissance, of course, takes woman as the very type of inconstancy; it rests on a foundation of happy misogyny. Hardy’s up to something different—something I believe his biographers, in pinning the poem to this young woman or that with whom we know Hardy to have been involved (his cousin Tryphena Sparks, for example), have perhaps led us to miss.
Ralph Pite, in Thomas Hardy: The Guarded Life, does rather well with what biographical matter may be brought to bear. “As Hardy’s home receded from him [while he lived in London],” Pite notes, his ideas about women and courtship changed somewhat. “The virginal,” Pite suggests, seemed to Hardy “more and more like the unsophisticated.” For these reasons, Pite surmises, the aforementioned Tryphena, a likely early love of Hardy’s, “became linked” in the poet’s mind “with feelings of claustrophobia,” by which I believe Pite to mean something like (or including) provinciality. Essentially, Pite continues, “Hardy started to judge her more. He looked at her with London eyes and she seemed far less special than before. Now she appeared ‘but one / Of the common crowd.’” This line, Pite continues, is from “‘At Waking,’ a poem written in Weymouth in 1869. It is an anguished piece, as powerful as anything Hardy had written before, in which he confronts the bleak experience of ‘waking’ up from a dream to find everything prosaic and plain. He was to have the same experience again, many times. On this occasion, it is love that becomes illusory and Tryphena does seem to be secretly referred to.”
And there’s more. Tryphena, Pite explains, “was becoming ‘a blank’ to [Hardy]—not just valueless and not wicked or deceitful (there’s no sense of Hardy’s being jilted here); instead Tryphena has somehow become meaningless to him, empty and ungraspable. Try as he might, resist it as he might, nothing could halt the dream’s decline. Other poems from this period—such as ‘The Dawn After the Dance‘ and ‘In the Vaulted Way‘—are variants on the same essential situation, confirming that Hardy went through some change of heart, which he could scarcely account for himself, still less explain satisfactorily to anyone else. ‘A Waking’ is closest in feeling, however, to the desolation expressed in his earlier poem ‘Neutral Tones,’ and out of these experiences Hardy later wrote with extraordinary insight about the way that love could mysteriously disappear—how lovers could be abandoned by love itself.” That last turn of phrase (my emphasis) bears all the insight. Love has its own agency: it comes over us, takes us up; and it just as often abandons us, quite without regard to such petty things as our private expectations and aspirations. Is that so, as Hardy sees it? Is Pite correct? In what sense? And how does such an insight, if insight it is, illuminate (say) “Neutral Tones”? The text of the poem:
Title page of the volume in which "Neutral Tones" was first collected.
We stood by a pond that winter day,
And the sun was white, as though chidden of God,
And a few leaves lay on the starving sod;
—They had fallen from an ash, and were gray.
Your eyes on me were as eyes that rove
Over tedious riddles of years ago;
And some words played between us to and fro
On which lost the more by our love.
The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing
Alive enough to have strength to die;
And a grin of bitterness swept thereby
Like an ominous bird a-wing. . . .
Since then, keen lessons that love deceives,
And wrings with wrong, have shaped to me
Your face, and the God-curst sun, and a tree,
And a pond edged with grayish leaves.
Samuel Johnson says of the witches’ wicked incantations in Macbeth (IV.i) that “it is observable that Shakespeare, on this great occasion, which involves the fate of a king, multiplies all the circumstances of horror. The babe, whose finger is used, must be strangled in its birth; the grease must not only be human, but must have dropped from a gibbet, the gibbet of a murderer; and even the sow, whose blood is used, must have offended nature by devouring her own farrow.”
Something similar might be said of how thoroughgoing Hardy is, in “Neutral Tones,” with the imagery and phrasing of abjection. The scene must be barrenest winter, of course. The sky should be not merely pallid, but pallid as with fear, having not simply been cursed but “God-curst.” The leaves must be “few” in number (poverty even here!), and, of course, from an “ash”—with the available figurative extension into the gray “ashes” of a desire now utterly extinct. The sod must be “starving.” The riddles must be “tedious.” And above all, that “smile” must be “the deadest thing / Alive enough to have strength to die”—and, moreover, must be complemented by a “grin” that crosses it “like an ominous bird a-wing.” Could any poet “multiply” the circumstances of bitterness more fully? The poem, it seems, touches every possible ramification of the matter, such that I find it hard, at times, to keep my mind fixed on its argument, as I may call it, rather than on the sheer feat of its achieved, appalling—almost comically so—extravagance. Who could possibly outdo Hardy here? “The deadest thing alive enough to have strength to die”! Many a poet must have envied Hardy that line. Read more…
God’s “unweeting way”; a few notes on Hardy.
Thomas Hardy
With this entry I miss the New Year by a month or so. But laggard that I am, what excuse?—all the more given that Thomas Hardy collected the following poem first in Times’s Laughingstocks and Other Verses (1909).
“Now that the miscellany is brought together,” Hardy writes in his brief preface, “some lack of concord in pieces written at widely severed dates, and in contrasting moods and circumstances, will be obvious enough. This I cannot help, but the sense of disconnection, particularly in respect of those lyrics penned in the first person, will be immaterial when it is borne in mind that they are to be regarded, in the main, as dramatic monologues by different characters.” He continues, with customary modesty: “As a whole they will, I hope, take the reader forward, even if not far, rather than backward.” The “forward” movement—”even if not far”—in the poem under discussion here interests me. Hardy lays his pen upon that hinge, so to speak, that swings from a 19th century dispensation to a post-Darwinian 20th one. And he does it at the hinge of the year.
NEW YEAR’S EVE
- From a 1919 reprint of “Time’s Laughingstocks.”
“I have finished another year,” said God,
“In grey, green, white, and brown;
I have strewn the leaf upon the sod,
Sealed up the worm within the clod,
And let the last sun down.”
“And what’s the good of it?” I said,
“What reasons made you call
From formless void this earth we tread,
When nine-and-ninety can be read
Why nought should be at all?
“Yea, Sire; why shaped you us, ‘who in
This tabernacle groan’—
If ever a joy be found herein,
Such joy no man had wished to win
If he had never known!”
Then he: “My labours—logicless—
You may explain; not I:
Sense-sealed I have wrought, without a guess
That I evolved a Consciousness
To ask for reasons why.
“Strange that ephemeral creatures who
By my own ordering are,
Should see the shortness of my view,
Use ethic tests I never knew,
Or made provision for!”
He sank to raptness as of yore,
And opening New Year’s Day
Wove it by rote as theretofore,
And went on working evermore
In his unweeting way.
—1906.
Any reader of Hardy’s poetry knows how conversant he is with God, and with the stars and the dead for that matter. In this poem, God has the first word, gratified, as he is, at having logged in yet another year:
“I have finished another year,” said God,
“In grey, green, white, and brown;
I have strewn the leaf upon the sod,
Sealed up the worm within the clod,
And let the last sun down.”
Sarah Bernhardt as Hamlet, gazing on Yorick's skull.
We have emblematic colors for the seasons, winter on through autumn: grey, green, white, and brown—and for the latter, dead leaves as well, “strewn” “upon the sod” as with workmanlike deliberation. But best in this first stanza is the penultimate line, where God speaks of himself as having ”sealed up the worm within the clod,” where “clod” means what it does in O.E.D. sense 3a: “A lump of earth or clay adhering together.” The “worm”: so nicely resonant in English poetry, particularly of the Renaissance, as a token of death and decay. Bear in mind Shakespeare’s fine understatement, as given to Rosalind in reply to Orlando, her suitor, in As You Like It (IV.i.1876ff.): “No, faith, The poor world is almost six thousand years old, and in all this time there was not any man died in his own person, videlicet, in a love-cause. Troilus had his brains dash’d out with a Grecian club; yet he did what he could to die before, and he is one of the patterns of love. Leander, he would have liv’d many a fair year, though Hero had turn’d nun, if it had not been for a hot midsummer night; for, good youth, he went but forth to wash him in the Hellespont, and, being taken with the cramp, was drown’d; and the foolish chroniclers of that age found it was—Hero of Sestos. But these are all lies: men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love.” Or, better still, Hamlet‘s apt rejoinder to Claudius (IV.iii.2731ff.):
Claudius. Now, Hamlet, where’s Polonius?
Hamlet. At supper.
Claudius. At supper? Where?
Hamlet. Not where he eats, but where he is eaten. A certain convocation of politic worms are e’en at him. Your worm is your only emperor for diet. We fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots. Your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service—two dishes, but to one table. That’s the end.
We are deep in O.E.D. sense 6c for “worm”: “worm’s or worms’ meat, said of a man’s dead body, or of man as mortal.” Would that God had really “sealed” the damned creature up “within the clod”; he is rather too busy about his office. Read more…
Our Highest Liveliness (Frost, Burke, Derrida, Foucault, et al)
Robert Frost, at about the age of 40.
The academy has generated a good deal of heat but still relatively little light in its discussion of “personality” in poetry, 30 years notwithstanding. We might do better by engaging more general problems of literary “authority,” about which, as it happens, Robert Frost is quite illuminating. We needn’t confine ourselves to Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida, though that is what we’ve tended to do. (Of course, Richard Poirier is the exception here, as in a few other ways.)
Frost has much to contribute to still-contemporary debates—these didn’t all end, or shouldn’t have anyway in the 1980s and 1990s—over the meaning and constitution of “authorship.” But in this respect his work has been utterly overlooked. As who should expect otherwise? I’ll take a look here at certain similarities among writings by Frost, Derrida, Kenneth Burke, and Foucault that bear variously on the matter of “authorship.” I set Frost’s remarks on the subject in this context in order to show that his concerns are really perennial. (We now hear mumblings coming out of such journals as PMLA of a “return to literature,” or of the re-birth of the author that Barthes declared “dead” so many years ago, in whatever sense.) And into the bargain Foucault’s work helps us see how, in thinking about his own writing, Frost often relies, in an intriguing fashion, on what we used to speak of (after Foucault’s manner) as the “author-function.” Such is the diction of bureaucracy—which is part of Foucault’s point in so phrasing it. But I really mean to trace out the path by which Frost diverged from the kind of thinking (and prose) we associate with Derrida and Foucault. Along this divergent path, Frost’s more immediate connection to Burke, Dewey and Emerson become clear. One more remark before getting on with it all. Because I’m writing more about a concept in Frost’s writings (“authorship”) than about any single work, and because Frost nowhere considers this concept at length, I’ll draw together a number of passages from lectures, essays, letters, and poems, the better to arrive at a composite sense of his thinking about “authorship.” Read more…
Compassion is a very untenable ground: Thoreau’s Dead Horse
Daguerreotype of Henry David Thoreau (1856).
Toward the end of Henry David Thoreau‘s Walden falls this remarkable passage:
Title page, first edition. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1854.
“Our village life would stagnate if it were not for the unexplored forests and meadows which surround it. We need the tonic of wildness—to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and the meadow-hen lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe; to smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder and more solitary fowl builds her nest, and the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground. At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and titanic features, the sea-coast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the thunder-cloud, and the rain which lasts three weeks and produces freshets. We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander. We are cheered when we observe the vulture feeding on the carrion which disgusts and disheartens us, and deriving health and strength from the repast. There was a dead horse in the hollow by the path to my house, which compelled me sometimes to go out of my way, especially in the night when the air was heavy, but the assurance it gave me of the strong appetite and inviolable health of Nature was my compensation for this. I love to see that Nature is so rife with life that myriads can be afforded to be sacrificed and suffered to prey on one another; that tender organizations can be so serenely squashed out of existence like pulp—tadpoles which herons gobble up, and tortoises and toads run over in the road; and that sometimes it has rained flesh and blood! With the liability to accident, we must see how little account is to be made of it. The impression made on a wise man is that of universal innocence. Poison is not poisonous after all, nor are any wounds fatal. Compassion is a very untenable ground. It must be expeditious. Its pleadings will not bear to be stereotyped.”
“Compassion is a very untenable ground,” Thoreau says. “It must be expeditious.” “Expedite,” from the Latin “expedere,” literally means: to remove the fetters from a person’s ankles, where the morpheme “ped-” of course has to do with feet (hence its antonym, “impede”). From this we have, for “expedite,” Oxford English Dictionary sense 1: “To clear of difficulties; to clear up (confusion); to facilitate (action or movement); to disentangle, untie (a knot).” Why must our “compassion” be expeditious, which is to say quick and fleet? Because it always stands on “untenable grounds,” grounds which cannot be held (“tenable” deriving from the Latin “tenere,” or “to hold”). To compassionate, as the now disused verb has it, is to “suffer with” (com-, or “with” + pati-, or “suffer,” from which root we have also the word “patience,” e.g.). I go into such nervous detail for good reason. Thoreau is up to his usual verbal excavations in this passage, as also with “stereotyped.” The word belongs to the technology of printing, of course, as in O.E.D. sense 1 for “stereotype” (noun): “The method or process of printing in which a solid plate or type-metal, cast from a papier-mâché or plaster mould taken from the surface of a forme of type, is used for printing from instead of the forme itself.” From which we get the figurative extensions more familiar to most readers (O.E.D. senses 3a-b): “Something continued or constantly repeated without change; a stereotyped phrase, formula, etc.; stereotyped diction or usage. A preconceived and oversimplified idea of the characteristics which typify a person, situation, etc.; an attitude based on such a preconception. Also, a person who appears to conform closely to the idea of a type.”
But let us speak of the earth’s tonic appetite for dead horses, and of good cheer and carrion. Read more…
Who is the Emperor of Ice Cream?
Wallace Stevens (1879-1955). Image from the Bettmann Archive.
I think readers of Wallace Stevens‘s lyric “The Emperor of Ice Cream” often miss the full significance of the line: “Let be be finale of seem.” And by way of glossing it I here offer, in a sense, a “vocational” reading of the poem. Which is of course only one possible reading of it. Others I may attend to later, while holding what follows in essay, so to speak—on trial.
“Finale” belongs to the concert hall, or the theater. The sentence in which it appears is a kind of motto for the end-game: act five, the drawing of the curtain on a play. As in Oxford English Dictionary senses 1-3: “The last movement of a symphony, sonata, concerto, or other instrumental composition. The last scene or closing part of a drama or any other public entertainment. The conclusion, end; the final catastrophe. Also transf,” as in fact it is transferred into another context here: the poem describes a funeral, an end of the merely apparent “seeming” that any life somehow always is (a life, in the larger sense, being a thing we have to “get up”). Whether there’s any catastrophe in this old woman’s funeral I leave it to those who read these pages to decide. But the poem’s queer, playful mode—its affective register—doesn’t strike me as involving anything particularly catastrophic, or even anything much to be regretted. There’s a chill at the heart of it, such that with a little rock salt and a churn one might well get a pint of ice cream out of it.
Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month’s newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.
Take from the dresser of deal
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.
A cast-off dresser identified by the Flickr photographer (one Ashur) as of deal. This one lacks more than a few glass knobs.
In low-rent American settings like the one depicted here, “finale” (when pronounced) often follows “grand”: the metaphor is theatrical, as I suggested, or as is plain to any reader I should say. But in “The Emperor of Ice Cream” the “finale” is not at all “grand.” Among the props are flowers “in last month’s newspapers.” Why not last week’s, or yesterday’s? Must we fetch the papers up from a dusty heap? (That little detail always strikes me as adding to the slightly absurd pathos of the poem, though at least the papers aren’t last year’s.) And then there is that cheap “dresser of deal,” missing a few of its glass knobs. “Deal” in this context means, as our O.E.D. has it: “1. a. A slice sawn from a log of timber (now always of fir or pine), and usually understood to be more than seven inches wide, and not more than three thick; a plank or board of pine or fir-wood.In the timber trade, in Great Britain, a deal is understood to be 9 inches wide, not more than 3 inches thick, and at least 6 feet long. If shorter, it is a deal-end; if not more than 7 inches wide, it is a batten. In N. America, the standard deal (to which other sizes are reduced in computation) is 12 feet long, 11 inches wide, and 2½ inches thick. By carpenters, deal of half this thickness (1 ¼inches) is called whole deal; of half the latter, slit deal.” More detail than we need for present purposes, perhaps. But deal furniture is often veneer (though not always), as when sheets of oak or maple are laid over the plain pine. This would entail another kind of seeming. But whatever the case, here, our deal dresser, lacking its three glass knobs, is already well on its way to disintegration; it registers (a little sadly) one more plea for an end to fiction, to seeming. (N.B.: On a whim I set about to find a deal dresser via Google Images and was led to the old outcast you see pictured to the above left. The snow and the green siding place this somewhere in the American Midwest of my imagination. Ohio? Michigan?)
Eleanor Cook has pointed out several Shakespearean echoes in “The Emperor of Ice Cream.” Let me tentatively add another. Behind “The Emperor” (very faintly) is a passage from the “finale” of Macbeth, at least insofar as that tragedy marks what is surely the best known use in English poetry of the metaphor of life-as-a-play:
Orson Welles as Macbeth.
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
“Let be be finale of seem” is essentially Macbeth’s line, as the dark woods of Birnam, full of animus, encroach. That Macbeth ever supposed himself master of his own destiny at all was catastrophic error, a veer off into a “seeming” life in which not he, but the three Weird Sisters, took Scotland by the scruff of its neck. Macbeth had thought he was a player, as we Americans now say, but in fact he was, simply, a “player.” Or perhaps we should think of Sir Walter Raleigh’s fine quatrain, whose sardonic humor sorts well with Stevens’s little elegy:
Our graves that hide us from the searching Sun
Are like drawne curtaynes when the play is done.
Thus march we playing to our latest rest,
Only we dye in earnest, that’s no Jest.
Who knows but that all lives aren’t merely apparent, merely exercises in “seeming,” or what you will? (Renaissance England loved the trope, and that fact alone makes it pass current with me.) In any event, if not a Scottish king, then at least the “Emperor” of Ice Cream “speaks” in Stevens’s poem. The locutions are recognizably imperial, and savor a little of the decree: “Call the roller of big cigars,” “bid him whip,” “Let the wenches dawdle,” “Take from the dresser of deal,” and so on—all spoken in the indulgent, slightly condescending imperatives of majesty, and in a tone quite outside (or above) the key we might associate with a wake. If you would look for an emperor here you’ll not find one; but if you listen for one, you will. “Let the wenches dawdle in such dress as they are used to wear.” Well, OK. So be it. The decree stands. Read more…
“A Mass of Morbid Melancholy and Apology”
William James
N.B.: Today I borrow shamelessly from the fine model Ian Wolcott sets up in his Marginalia series at The New Pslamanazar.
Must my thoughts dwell night and day on my personal sins and blemishes, because I truly have them?—or may I sink and ignore them in order to be a decent social unit, and not a mass of morbid melancholy and apology?
One might suppose “sinking” an effortless enterprise. It asks of us only inaction. But as to this “sinking,” well, sometimes how hard it is to rise to the occasion. Which is, of course, what I suppose James to mean.
“Two human beings are like globes, which can touch only in a point, and, whilst they remain in contact, all other points of each of the spheres are inert…” —Emerson, “Experience”
* * *
“Talking in Bed” (with the last poem addressed in these pages) appears in Philip Larkin‘s 1964 volume The Whitsun Weddings. The title speaks of couplings, and the title poem, as any reader of it knows, fairly crackles with acerbic sparks of the sort we expect from Larkin when he writes about such matters. Here’s the dour, chill heart of it, which I’ll quote but set aside for another occasion for commentary. Save, that is, for three things, of which I can’t not speak: the bleakly perfect touches of that “uncle shouting smut,” “those women [sharing] / The secret [of marriage] like a happy funeral,” and the perfection of the verb “larking” in reference to the porters with the mails.
Cover of the Faber & Faber re-issue.
At first, I didn’t notice what a noise
The weddings made
Each station that we stopped at: sun destroys
The interest of what’s happening in the shade,
And down the long cool platforms whoops and skirls
I took for porters larking with the mails,
And went on reading. Once we started, though,
We passed them, grinning and pomaded, girls
In parodies of fashion, heels and veils,
All posed irresolutely, watching us go,
As if out on the end of an event
Waving goodbye
To something that survived it. Struck, I leant
More promptly out next time, more curiously,
And saw it all again in different terms:
The fathers with broad belts under their suits
And seamy foreheads; mothers loud and fat;
An uncle shouting smut; and then the perms,
The nylon gloves and jewellery-substitutes,
The lemons, mauves, and olive-ochres that
Marked off the girls unreally from the rest.
Yes, from cafés
And banquet-halls up yards, and bunting-dressed
Coach-party annexes, the wedding-days
Were coming to an end. All down the line
Fresh couples climbed aboard: the rest stood round;
The last confetti and advice were thrown,
And, as we moved, each face seemed to define
Just what it saw departing: children frowned
At something dull; fathers had never known
Success so huge and wholly farcical
The women shared
The secret like a happy funeral;
While girls, gripping their handbags tighter, stared
At a religious wounding.
Whitsunday (“white Sunday”) falls on the seventh sabbath after Easter, the Pentecost. Whitsun week—coming, as it does, in full spring—is notable for weddings in England, as (say) June is in the United States. Into this general context, then, established by the title and title-poem of the book, falls “Talking in Bed.” Which does not necessarily have to do with a marriage at all, of course; only with a couple de-coupling.
“Talking In Bed”
Philip Larkin, photograph by Fay Godwin.
Talking in bed ought to be easiest,
Lying together there goes back so far,
An emblem of two people being honest.
Yet more and more time passes silently.
Outside, the wind’s incomplete unrest
Builds and disperses clouds about the sky,
And dark towns heap up on the horizon.
None of this cares for us. Nothing shows why
At this unique distance from isolation
It becomes still more difficult to find
Words at once true and kind,
Or not untrue and not unkind.
In speaking of that “emblem of honesty” that a couple “talking” or “lying” in bed together “ought” to constitute, Larkin doubtless has in mind for “emblem” O.E.D. senses 2a and 3a: “a drawing or picture expressing a moral fable or allegory; a fable or allegory such as might be expressed pictorially. Obs.,” and “a picture of an object (or the object itself) serving as a symbolical representation of an abstract quality, an action, state of things, class of persons, etc.” The “easiest” place not merely to talk but to do so honestly ought to be in bed, then, partnered, coupled—in fact, “post-copular,” one inevitably supposes, whether with or without that old cinematically iconic cigarette.
George W. Bush, deplaning after pseudo-flying in to the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln off of San Diego, May 1, 2003. An emblem of talking and lying of another sort. So much for Honest Abe.
Whatever the case, the poem has to do, in some sense, with blowing smoke, right there at the outset, with that wily pun: “lying together goes back so far…” Well, yes, back even into antiquity. (Re-read a bit of Catullus or Propertius as to the dubiety of “lying” in bed.) Lying in bed together may well be an “emblem of two people being honest,” but not every sign signifies what (or as) it ought to. Emblems typify by abstracting this or that quality from their real-worldly entanglements anyway. (Cf. “Mission Accomplished” & presidents in cod-piece jumpsuits.)
So, equivocation is our theme, or one of our themes: “lying together,” which in every sense “goes back so far.” How confidential is all this “talking in bed” anyway? And not only how confidential, but how frequent, and for how long: “Yet more and more time passes silently.” Here the grammar has about it some slight equivocation. Is the duration of time that passes silently, or the frequency of it, most in question? That is, do we hear the line as “Yet, more and more, time passes silently” (which would have to do with frequency: the thing happens more often). Or as “Yet, more and more time passes silently” (which would mean that the silences grow longer)? Well, it hardly matters as to general import. Though, if you’re to read the poem aloud, you must decide how to lay your voice into the sentence. I quibble it out here simply to suggest that equivocal matters of all sorts make their way into the bedroom imagined in this poem.
Even the couplings in rhyme are not “true” for the duration of the piece. “Far” has no partner anywhere, and the relatively full rhymes of easiest/honest/unrest run down the page alongside the sight rhyme of silently/sky, the almost full rhyme of horizon/isolation, and the triplet rhyming of the last tercet where the second and third lines involve a kind of quasi-repetend that engages its own semi-negation (in sense): kind/not unkind. The rhyming is irregular, never quite in harmony, or at ease, with itself—as of course is only fitting in a poem on the theme in question here. And who knows but that we ought to score a point or two for Larkin for having written a poem about a slowly de-coupling couple in tercets? Why should he write of this couple in couplets? He makes four threesomes of his coupling conundrum, and gives us three sets of triple rhymes (easiest/honest/unrest, silently/sky/why, & find/kind/unkind). But nothing requires us to make the supposition. I’ll leave it merely as an agreeable possibility, as to his poetics, in this instance. Larkin’s crafty. Read more…
“That vase…”: or, some notes on Philip Larkin
Cover of the Faber & Faber re-issue.
His biographer, Andrew Motion, tells us that Philip Larkin penned the following poem after a visit to his mother’s house in Loughborough, some 2 to 3 hours distant from his own residence in Hull. Anthony Thwaite, editor of Larkin’s Collected Poems (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1988) dates its composition precisely: 31 December 1958 (indicating that the visit to his mother had been for the holidays). Larkin published the poem in his 1964 volume The Whitsun Weddings.
None of these facts is especially pertinent to the poem, however. Its melancholy is so perfectly generalized, most precisely so when its references become strangely poignant in the closing lines, with their imperatives and that terminal two-word demonstrative: “That vase.”
“Home is so Sad”
Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,
Shaped to the comfort of the last to go
As if to win them back. Instead, bereft
Of anyone to please, it withers so,
Having no heart to put aside the theft
And turn again to what it started as,
A joyous shot at how things ought to be,
Long fallen wide. You can see how it was:
Look at the pictures and the cutlery.
The music in the piano stool. That vase.
Let’s say that house is to home as brain is to mind. No one knows quite what the latter two terms mean, other than that we inhabit them and they “inhabit” us, whether, on the one hand, as some constellation of memories and affect (the good with the bad); or, on the other, as a barrier to getting away from that constellation of memories and affect (the good with the bad); or as a barrier (say) to detaching the affect from the memories. “Home” takes it root in the German word heim, whose negation Sigmund Freud so effectively put into circulation: unheimliche (“un-home-like”), for which term we have, in English, “uncanny.” The experience so named combines the familiar with the strange in such a way as to unsettle us. “Home is so Sad” makes “home” unheimliche, and yet also so utterly familiar. Because, after all, we “can see” perfectly well “how it was,” can’t we? Just look at “that vase,” for example.
Philip Larkin
But before taking larger matters up, I’ll address certain features of the poem’s form. It falls so readily into two five-line stanzas of that most heimliche line (to readers of English poetry): iambic pentameter. And it rhymes, so simply, A-B-A-B-A. The “A” rhymes in stanza one are perfectly conjunctive, by which I mean they bring together words related not by sound merely but by meaning also. From “left” to “bereft” to “theft”: three registers of loss, each one successively a greater violation (abandonment, bereavement, crime). From the perfect rhymes in the first stanza we “move house” (as the British say) ever so slightly into a trio of near-rhymes in the second (as/was/vase).† That’s one kind of dislocation, hinging precisely, here, on the 50th syllable in this 100 syllable poem: “theft.” Notice how well Larkin lays his sentences into these ten lines, from the poverty of that terminal two-word/two-syllable sentence, which is a severe sentence indeed (“That vase”) to the 37-word sentence that begins with “Instead, bereft of anyone to please” and extends on down through that “joyous shot” that’s “fallen so wide” of the mark it should have hit: the way “things ought to be,” so as fully to distinguish home from house, the quaintly affective from the merely architectural. And what variety in the two-stanza house Larkin has built of what used to be this “home”! Taking independent grammatical units for sentences, here they range in length from 2 to 4 to 6 to 7 to 21 to 37 words. Larkin makes his rhymes, conjunctive (in sound and sense) when they ought to be, oblique when they must, without ever allowing a single rhyme to fetch in a word that doesn’t already belong to the conversational, even homely, diction of the poem (and of most all his best poems). “You can see how it was”: the voice knows perfectly well what to do with sentences such as this, even as every obligation to form, throughout the poem, is paid in full. No mortgaging here. Read more…
Would someone raise William Empson from the dead?
One of the Elgin Marbles: A Centaur and a Lapith fighting.
CHRISTMAS IN THE ELGIN ROOM
BRITISH MUSEUM: EARLY LAST CENTURY
“What is the noise that shakes the night,
And seems to soar to the Pole-star height?”
—“Christmas bells,
The watchman tells
Who walks this hall that blears us captives with its blight.”
“And what, then, mean such clangs, so clear?”
“—’Tis said to have been a day of cheer,
And source of grace
To the human race
Long ere their woven sails winged us to exile here.
“We are those whom Christmas overthrew
Some centuries after Pheidias knew
How to shape us
And bedrape us
And to set us in Athena’s temple for men’s view.
“O it is sad now we are sold—
We gods! for Borean people’s gold,
And brought to the gloom
Of this gaunt room
Which sunlight shuns, and sweet Aurore but enters cold.
“For all these bells, would I were still
Radiant as on Athenai‘s Hill.”
—“And I, and I!”
The others sigh,
“Before this Christ was known, and we had men’s good will.”
Thereat old Helios could but nod,
Throbbed, too, the Ilissus River-god,
And the torsos there
Of deities fair,
Whose limbs were shards beneath some Acropolitan clod:
Demeter too, Poseidon hoar,
Persephone, and many more
Of Zeus‘ high breed,—
All loth to heed
What the bells sang that night which shook them to the core.
1905 and 1926.
Section of a frieze from the Elgin Marbles.
Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin (1766-1841).
During the first decade of the 19th century, Elgin’s agents removed a large portion of the surviving sculptures of the Parthenon, transporting them by sea to Britain. The acquisition, if acquisition it can be called, stirred up a controversy, with some of his harshest critics accusing Lord Elgin of looting and vandalism. (Elgin had to sever certain parts of some of the marbles in order to extricate them. Hence the lines above: “the torsos there / Of deities fair, / Whose limbs were shards beneath some Acropolitan clod.”) Parliament ultimately vindicated Elgin, allocating funds to purchase the pieces in 1816, after which they were displayed in the British Museum. One can gather, from reading this poem, some sense of where Hardy stood, I suppose, with respect to Lord Elgin, and with respect as well to the larger business of the British empire, in the discourse of which enterprise this poem registers its queer anecdote. And as for that Borean English “gold”: Elgin paid £75,000 for the marbles, of which he recovered slightly less than half from Parliament.
But today, my question pertains, as I say, to stanza one:
“What is the noise that shakes the night,
And seems to soar to the Pole-star height?”
—“Christmas bells,
The watchman tells
Who walks this hall that blears us captives with its blight.”
What, specifically is the meaning and function of the word “tells” here? The fiction of the poem asks us to imagine the Elgin marbles—or rather, the gods they represent—conversing one with another. A circumstance not unusual in Hardy’s poetry, given that persons speak from beyond the grave, or that a star and a man hold a brief conversation, and that he often inquires into the consciousness of animals. But as I now learn, some readers suppose also that the poem may ask us further to imagine that the watchman “tells” the marbles what the Christmas bells are for and what they signify. After all, what the marbles know of Christmas must come from some source. What is it? In the first line of the poem one of the marbles puts the question, and, in answering, a second speaks of the watchman as “telling”—something. Whereupon one of the more unknowing marbles just as quickly asks what all the fuss is about, which prompts, of course, the explanation. I suspect the location of the “telling” amidst the Q&A is why some readers suppose that what the marbles know must come from a contemporary, English source—in that place where now they stand on display for an onlooking Christian public. But what does our watchman “tell”?
Read more…
Frost, Freud, Nietzsche, Mencken, and “Mending Wall”
Cover, 1985 edition (University of Wisconsin Press)
Richard Poirier writes in A World Elsewhere (1966): “The classic American writers try through style temporarily to free the hero (and the reader) from systems, to free them from the pressures of time, biology, economics, and from the social forces which are ultimately the undoing of American heroes and quite often of their creators.” In a later book, Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing (1977), Poirier essentially excepts Frost from the writers described here, and with that exception I concur. Frost developed a style that could accommodate him to the “social forces” of which he was in some sense an “effect.” He developed a style that could integrate, or establish correspondence between, the imaginative “world” he created and the “real” or “given” world he found himself inhabiting—both as a man and more particularly as a professional poet writing in America in the early decades of the 20th century. He felt no need to find a world elsewhere. Frost struck a compromise between the claims of “difference” and of “correspondence,” as he liked to put it. I take quite seriously his remark in a 1936 talk at the Bread Loaf School of English: “I am so made that I accept almost anything that exists, that really is going—I accept going concerns and I expect everyone to do the same.” Frost’s conservatism (and I don’t speak here of the political sort) finds its roots in sentiments such as these.
Frost’s writing accommodates potentially intransigent, even counter-cultural dispositions while at the same time maintaining an altogether sociable surface. Frost seems to be thinking of this aspect of his work when he writes to Louis Untermeyer in 1917:
Louis Untermeyer, date of photograph unknown. George Grantham Bain Collection (Library of Congress).
“You get more credit for thinking if you restate formulae or cite cases that fall in easily under formulae, but all the fun is outside saying things that suggest formulae that won’t formulate—that almost but don’t quite formulate. I should like to be subtle at this game as to seem to the casual person altogether obvious.“ This dubiety—I hesitate to say “duplicity”—held a certain fascination for Frost, and I find it symbolized (if I may say so) throughout his work. It reappears, for example, in the dialectic of “conformity” and “formity” he speaks of in a 1934 letter to his daughter Lesley, which is another way to frame the opposition of “formulaic” to “unformulaic” writing. I find it yet again in his parable of Martin Luther in the introduction to Edwin Arlington Robinson‘s King Jasper (1935). Surprised, excited, and a little troubled by his sense of his own difference, Luther represents, for Frost, the struggle between heresy (formity) and congregation (conformity), or between the “unformulaic” and the “formulaic.” The same struggle obtains between “going concerns” (formulae) and the innovations or heresies that we are always building into them.
Sigmund Freud, founder of psychoanalysis, smoking a cigar that was a cigar, 1914.
I am reminded, here, of a passage in Freud‘s Civilization and Its Discontents. The analogy may at first seem unlikely, but Frost and Freud are, I think, confronting similar questions about human experience, and about the motives of creative artists. Freud writes:
The hermit turns his back on the world and will have no truck with it. But one can do more than that; one can try to re-create the world, to build up in its stead another world in which its most unbearable features are eliminated and replaced by others that are in conformity with one’s own wishes. But whoever, in desperate defiance, sets out on this path to happiness will as a rule attain nothing. Reality is too strong for him. He becomes a madman, who for the most part finds no one to help him in carrying through his delusion.
Cover of "Civilization and Its Discontents" (in the W.W. Norton edition of 2005).
Frost makes a similar point in “The Constant Symbol” when he acknowledges the necessity of our accession to “the harsher discipline from without,” or when, in the introduction to King Jasper, he warns against the willful and “anxious” cultivation of personal “difference” on the part of creative artists (or religious thinkers). Such remarks are echoed often in Frost’s work. One thinks, for example, of his essay “Caveat Poeta”: “The conventions have to be locked horns with somewhere,” he says. And his acknowledgement of worldly coercions unmistakably recalls the psychology and philosophy of William James, not simply of Freud in Civilization and Its Discontents. For when Frost and James welcome rather than attempt to refine away the “crudity,” “rawness” and imperfection of the world—to adopt the terms they sometimes use—clearly they reject the alternative that Freud names only to dismiss: “to re-create the world,” building up in its stead “another world in which its most unbearable features are eliminated.” In its context, the passage from Freud presents an example of the artistic impulse in extremis; it follows a discussion of the satisfactions, through fantasy and illusion, that works of art afford. As Freud explains, creative art is in part a process of “making oneself independent of the external world by seeking satisfaction in internal, psychical processes.” It is crucial to recall that the “external world,” as Freud earlier points out, includes the sphere of social relations, not simply, or perhaps even chiefly, the pressures of what we call Nature. Read more…
The Root of the Matter: Frederick Douglass’s New World Columbiad
Frederick Douglass, ca. 1860.
Probably the best-known chapter in Frederick Douglass’s 1855 autobiography My Bondage and My Freedom is “Covey the Negro Breaker.” This is the first in an astonishing series of chapters chronicling Douglass’s ultimately successful struggle to recreate himself along properly “Columbian,” “New World” lines—a trajectory that would carry him, after a first failed attempt, out of slavery and into the free states and one of more remarkable careers of the 19th century. Douglass will, in this section of the book, be placed in the hands of a “Negro breaker,” whom he must either dominate or be dominated by. He will come of age, entering upon his “manhood,” thereby evading the fate of the perpetual “infancy” that a life in slavery simply is for him (he was 16 years old at the time). He will, at the moment of his deepest despair, be seduced by the “superstitious” and compromising strategies of accommodation evolved by the weaker sort of slave, here represented by Sandy Jenkins—the sort of slave who remains in “infancy,” without the redemptive (and rational) power of the word, of literacy. He will again take up his role as teacher and expounder of the word, with the Columbian Orator—an anthology of orations, many devoted to republican ideals, edited by Caleb Bingham and generally in use as a “reader” in the early 19th century—as his text. He will conspire to escape, and, though the conspiracy fails, he will find himself at last so situated as to make his decisive break for freedom.
Douglass’s achieved self-mastery is registered even in the style of the book, which in these chapters acquires a particularly elegant sort of “literacy.” This fluency figures in My Bondage and My Freedom as his “Columbian” ideal—as the wings that shall bear him away into realms of possibility—and it everywhere distinguishes the highly artful 1855 text from the much more Spartan (and more widely taught) narrative of 1845. Douglass writes with urbanity and humor, with a novelist’s eye for detail, and a satirist’s for the ridiculous. Read more…
“Weird John Brown”: The Meteor of the War
Dedication of "Battle-Pieces," from the first edition.
I number Herman Melville‘s 1866 volume, Battle-Pieces And Aspects of the War, among the best literary responses to the American Civil War. It’s of course a solid Unionist book, and an abolitionist one, too, as its dedication and contents make clear. Melville dedicates the book not to the 600,000 who died in the war, but “to the memory of the THREE HUNDRED THOUSAND who in the war for the maintenance of the Union fell devotedly under the flag of their fathers.” The colors are clear. Here, Melville is perhaps not quite so ecumenical as Lincoln in his Second Inaugural Address, and at Gettysburg. But he echoes Lincoln in the latter address by associating the Union dead with the “fathers,” to whose nation they gave what Lincoln calls a “second birth of freedom.” And yet, notwithstanding the Unionist-Abolitionist convictions that underlie the book—which speaks of America as “the world’s fairest hope linked with man’s foulest crime“—Melville confesses to a certain bewilderment in the preface, which is at once strange and beautiful:
Melville's preface to "Battle-Pieces"
WITH few exceptions, the Pieces in this volume originated in an impulse imparted by the fall of Richmond. They were composed without reference to collective arrangement, but, being brought together in review, naturally fall into the order assumed. The events and incidents of the conflict making up a whole, in varied amplitude, corresponding with the geographical area covered by the war from these but a few themes have been taken, such as for any cause chanced to imprint themselves upon the mind. The aspects which the strife as a memory assumes are as manifold as are the moods of involuntary meditation—moods variable, and at times widely at variance. Yielding instinctively, one after another, to feelings not inspired from any one source exclusively, and unmindful, without purposing to be, of consistency, I seem, in most of these verses, to have but placed a harp in a window, and noted the contrasted airs which wayward winds have played upon the strings.
Herman Melville. Photo in the Hulton Archive/Getty Images.
He speaks of the “impulsive” origins of the book, undertaken without reference to “collective arrangement,” but which “naturally” fell into order, as against artfully (he has no designs on his reader). Melville implies that this befits the war itself as an experienced thing, in all its amplitude and disarray, which nonetheless bent toward one consummation. Such themes as he touches on here, we note, are simply those that “chanced to imprint themselves upon the mind” (not “my” mind necessarily, but, it may be, some other, more abstractly conceived and widely dispersed intelligence). He “yields” to “moods of involuntary meditation—moods variable, and at times widely at variance.” He “yields” “instinctively” (as with the “impulse” already spoken of). He is “unmindful of consistency.” In fact, the book seems to have written itself: “I seem, in most of these verses, to have but placed a harp in a window, and noted the contrasted airs which wayward winds have played upon the strings.” Battle-Pieces, it turns out, is an exercise in “notation,” not composition. Notation of “contrasted airs” played by the wind, as on an Aeolian harp. Which is ironic, sadly so. Read more…
Cover of the Zephyr Press edition (2001)
On Thursday, August 30, 1962, Robert Frost dined on marinated mushrooms, dark bread, caviar, salt herring, salmon, sturgeon, radishes, tomatoes, beet salad, “small, sweet cucumbers,” Georgian wine, and vodka. This was at the Moscow apartment of K.G. Paustovsky, the Russian novelist, an apartment which, in those days of the Khrushchev “thaw,” gave the visitor a sense of “tranquil, cultured excellence.” Back at the Sovietskaya Hotel, on the other hand, Frost inhabited “a kind of dreary ornateness.” “Mottled marble columns, stolid as elephants legs,” stood in the lobby, and among them the poet encountered overstuffed leather armchairs and “rose-plum” carpets with floral borders on a chocolate background. Behind the “heavy chocolate-colored” door of Room 207, of whose key a maid in a white apron and starched fillet head-band was the custodian, lay a drawing room with French doors, a balcony, more overstuffed armchairs, and a table attended by four more chairs, dark and straight. On the desk sat an inkwell with purple ink and two pens. The bedroom, to the left, contained a large bed with a blanket-in-a-jacket (i.e., a sheet and quilt combined). Beside it, on a table, stood a lamp with an “elaborately rigged green glass shade.” The room had no view, save for the tops of the trees that lined the Leningrad Highway.
Robert Frost in his later years.
Robert Frost didn’t hand these details down to us, of course. Franklin D’Olier Reeve, father of the actor Christopher Reeve, did. He was the specialist in Russian literature who accompanied Frost to the USSR in the summer of 1962. Reeve is a connoisseur. He knows the difference between a pretentious use and an unpretentious use of limestone in a building. His memoir of that strange 1962 journey, Robert Frost in Russia, is everywhere marked by an epicurean sensibility. Which is all the more interesting given that Frost himself had so little of that in him (Lucretian though he may have been). For the politics of the 1962 trip to Russia, read Stewart Udall’s The Myths of August; for a dutiful account of it, the third volume of Lawrance Thompson’s biography. But if you would know what Frost was served for dinner, what he slept under, what color his lampshade was, and what the officious maid wore, turn to Reeve. There is an engaging vividness, here. It is satisfying to think of Frost in all that “dreary ornateness,” sending down for his Spartan breakfast of raw eggs and milk.
That’s not all we look for in Reeve’s book, of course—not by any means. He intends to document what he regards as an especially promising, and later betrayed, moment in the history of the co-evolving intellectual lives of Russia and America. The particular edition of Robert Frost in Russia under discussion here, republished in 2001 by the Zephyr Press, includes a retrospective introduction. I find it telling that Reeve should begin this introduction by revisiting the 85th birthday dinner at which Lionel Trilling declared Frost a “terrifying” poet. Trilling’s speech contributed, Reeve suggests, to the “modernization of Robert Frost.” Thenceforth, he explains, “critics understood that Frost, putatively eclipsed by Eliot, Pound, and Stevens, was not to be set beside guitar-strumming [Carl] Sandburg, booming Vachel Lindsay and timidly patterned Amy Lowell.”
Sarah Palin addressing the Republican National Convention, September 3, 2008.
It is important to Reeve’s purposes that Frost be set alongside the high modernists, who neither strummed, nor boomed, nor patterned timidly. He evokes a time, in the years after the Second World War, when the high culture of the West (even the avant-garde culture of the West) enjoyed an esteem, and was characterized by a seriousness, that would soon be adulterated by “popular” culture—by entertainment. The temper of the new introduction recalls, it may be, a little of Dwight Macdonald, and a little of The Partisan Review. Reeve’s is a sensibility for which philistinism—whether of the sort enforced by Stalin and Leonid Brezhnev, or of the sort so richly rewarded by the right wing of the Republican Party between 2000 and the advent of Sarah Palin—is the only truly unforgivable affront.
Wikipedia Commons image illustrating Cold War era economic alliances (created by user San Jose).
That’s why the limestone at the Sovietskaya Hotel bothers him. That’s why he takes care to remind us that, in 2001, “today’s presidents simply don’t read.” It is as if he wants a republic of letters in which, paradoxically, literary figures are also counter-cultural; that is to say, a situation in which the institutional prestige attached to literature inevitably evolves from its being counter-institutional. In this Reeve is, I suspect, rather closer to Pound than to Frost. And the idea leads him to a surprising conclusion. Reeve reminds the reader that in 1958 Frost intervened on Pound’s behalf to get the younger poet released from St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, where he had been confined as incompetent to stand trial for treason. Then he makes his point: “Frost’s role in rehabilitating Pound coincided with similar Russian efforts on behalf of venerable friends and the cultural tradition. People like the poet and critic Kornei Chukovsky, the musician Mstislav Rostropovich, and the physicist Pyotr Kapitsa helped to safeguard the lives and restore the reputations of poets like [Anna] Akhmatova, scholars like Oksman, and novelists like Solzhenitsyn. Despite ideological hostilities and Cold War rhetoric, outstanding intellectuals in both countries were moving toward a common goal.” Read more…
Crane in Greece in 1897, where he helped create the role of the dashing war correspondent. This portrait was purportedly taken in a studio, with props.
One of Crane’s best effects depends on a kind of tonal polyphony that oddly harmonizes what would otherwise be discordant moods. The effect usually suggests the complexity, or the ironic objectivity, of Crane’s point of view. A fine example occurs early in Red Badge of Courage.
After complicated journeyings with many pauses, there had come months of monotonous life in a camp. [Henry Fleming] had had the belief that real war was a series of death struggles with small time in between for sleep and meals; but since the regiment had come to the field the army had done little but sit still and try to keep warm.
He was brought then gradually back to his old ideas. Greeklike struggles would be no more. Men were better, or more timid. Secular and religious education had effaced the throat-grappling instinct, or else firm finance held in check the passions.
He had grown to regard himself merely as a part of vast blue demonstration. His province was to look out, as far as he could, for his personal comfort. For recreation he could twiddle his thumbs and speculate on the thoughts which must agitate the minds of the generals. Also, he was drilled and drilled and reviewed, and drilled and drilled and reviewed.
From the first edition.
The rhetoric of the first paragraph is uncomplicated. It merely gives us to understand that army life and army myth are not the same. The second paragraph is a repetition, almost verbatim, of an earlier passage describing the content of Henry’s “ideas.” Crane often resorts to repetition of this sort. Here, it suggests (somewhat condescendingly) the poverty of Henry’s mentation, and also its wavering incoherence. Men no longer fight because they are “better”; men no longer fight because they are too “timid”; men no longer fight because they have been educated out of the instinct; men no longer fight because the lords of the land find it unprofitable to allow them to do it. The alternatives in each case exclude one another, and should a single mind contemplate them all simultaneously, it would be an incoherent mind indeed. But as I say, no single mind is before us here. Crane’s mind—the mind of his ironic narrator, if I may speak of a narrator as having a mind—overlaps and circumscribes the more limited mind of his protagonist. I suspect we’re to understand that Henry sees no irony in his “old ideas,” that he regards the pairs of alternatives as in each case live, whereas for Crane the second in each pair pretty clearly undercuts the first, with the final irony being, simply, that timidity, prudence, decency, and altruism are insufficient, even in combination, to moderate an undignified “throat-grappling instinct” in men. The third paragraph quoted revives the uncomplicated mode of the first, with a flourish of repetition in the last sentence registering the tedium of camp life. We are getting a fair picture of the alienation of the common infantryman who learns to regard himself as “part of a vast blue demonstration.”
That much seems to me more or less unremarkable, though fine. The next two paragraphs of the passage, however, are pure Crane:
The only foes [Henry] had seen were some pickets along the river bank. They were a sun-tanned, philosophical lot, who sometimes shot reflectively at the blue pickets. When reproached for this afterward, they usually expressed sorrow, and swore by their gods that the guns had exploded without their permission. The youth, on guard duty one night, conversed across the stream with one of them. He was a slightly ragged man, who spat skillfully between his shoes and possessed a great fund of bland and infantile assurance. The youth liked him personally.
“Yank,” the other had informed him, “yer a right dum good feller.” This sentiment, floating to him upon the still air, had made him temporarily regret war.
Cover, 1895 edition.
Detail. Cover of the Library of Virginia Press re-reprint (1992). It was not uncommon to associate the Old Virginia land-grant families with the Royalist or "Cavalier" partisans during the English Civil Wars (1642-1629). Use of the term in this sense occasionally crops up in accounts of the American Civil War given by Southerners. R. E. Lee, e.g., was cloaked in a kind of aristocratic mystique, such that it was considered bad form to speak ill of him even at the North by the 1890s.
Here, Crane wryly bullies his characters. Notice how he narrates at once from inside and outside his hero’s sensibility, so to speak. Henry might well see the rebel pickets as “sun-tanned,” of course, and perhaps also as “philosophical” in the colloquial sense of “mature” and “steady of nerve.” But Henry would not think of their pot-shots as “reflective”—an adjective motivated by the term “philosophy,” but ironically so, in that the idle shooting is almost certainly thoughtless and cruel. To say that the offending pickets are “reproached” by their targets is to speak as if their musketry is essentially a show of bad form—“barbarously abrupt,” as the difficult breakers are said to be in “The Open Boat.” It might be regarded as such either by (let us say) a cavalier Virginia officer, or by the grunts in his command, though the two parties would resent the sniping for different reasons: the first as a sin against honorable combat, the second as a sin against the fellowship that ought to bind together in solidarity against the conceit of the officer corps the poor grunts on both sides of the skirmish—a solidarity which is, in fact, a theme in this passage.
But what is Crane’s investment in the affair? It is the amused “investment” of an onlooker who sees little sense in the whole display—whether on the grunts’ part or the officers.’ In any case, to speak of “reproaches” and the “expression of sorrow” is ironically to pretend that the business is more dignified and politic than it really is. But that is precisely what the soldiers themselves sometimes do. The youth, for example, appears to believe that his rebel picket possesses an admirable assurance. That is the pretense. But in fact, his “great fund” of assurance is said to be “bland and infantile”—two terms that Henry would neither contemplate nor apply in this situation, their complexity of implication (and their ironic affect) clearly being beyond him. Other readers—W.M. Frohock, for example—have noticed this technique of Crane’s. Crane will often lay into the “free indirect discourse” associated with Fleming—i.e., into language ostensibly originating in, and loosely inhabiting, Fleming’s mind—words and phrases that Fleming himself would neither use nor entirely understand.
From the first edition.
A typical example occurs in this passage: “He had no rifle; he could not fight with his hands, said he resentfully to his plan. Well, rifles could be had for the picking. They were extraordinarily profuse. Also, he continued, it would be a miracle if he found his regiment.” The phrasing of the second sentence (“Well, rifles could be had for the picking”) is conditioned by Henry’s mind, while that of the third, which merely re-states the idea in a sort of whimsically high diction (“They were extraordinarily profuse”), is conditioned by Crane’s. The phrases “said he” and “he continued” disingenuously specify the “habitat” (so to speak) of all these reflections as interior to Henry. But in fact there is, in this passage, a tactically seamless blending of two trains of thought—the character’s and the narrator’s—just as when the adjectives “bland and infantile,” which reflect the view Crane takes, are dropped in to qualify and vitiate the impressive “assurance” Henry credits the Confederate soldier with.
The first instance in the book when Crane deploys the archly pejorative term "yokel." His men are caricatures, not characters.
The effect is to make us always feel that Crane exercises a kind of leverage over against his yokel hero—that he has, so to speak, mirthfully colonized his mind. In any event, we understand, in the longer passage quoted above, the impression the rebel picket makes on Henry, and are also given to understand that he is a little foolish to be so impressed: “`Yank,’ the other had informed him, `yer a right dum good feller.’ This sentiment, floating to him upon the still air, had made him temporarily regret war.” Crane, too, may “regret” war. But not because it has no respect for the dignity of encounters like this one. Crane himself allows for no dignity in them. Henry is a fool for “regretting” war and a fool (a moment before) for not “regretting” it. Crane simply will not let him alone.
Immediately following that passage I’ve been discussing occurs the best part of this, the first chapter of the novel.
Various veterans had told him tales. Some talked of gray, bewhiskered hordes, who were advancing with relentless curses and chewing tobacco with unspeakable valor; tremendous bodies of fierce soldiery who were sweeping along like the Huns. Others spoke of tattered and eternally hungry men who fired despondent powders. “They’ll charge through hell’s fire an’ brimstone t’ git a holt on a haversack, an’ sech stomachs ain’t a’ lastin’ long,” he was told. From the stories, the youth imagined the red, live bones sticking out through slits in the faded uniforms. Read more…
Which and What is “The Road Not Taken”?
Herbert Read in 1958, Photo by Roloff Beny.
In 1934 Robert Frost‘s eldest daughter Lesley Frost Francis delivered a lecture on the so-called New Movement poetry of the mid-1910s (work done by such writers as Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, T.E. Hulme, H.D., and Frost himself while he was in England from 1912-1915). Apparently at her request, Frost wrote her a long letter sketching out his own history of the “movement” and summarizing the aesthetic doctrines of the poets involved. In the letter he refers to the poet and critic Herbert Read, author of Form in Modern Poetry (1932), to whom he attributes “the doctrine of Inner Form”: adherence exclusively to “the form the subject [of the poem] itself takes if left to itself without any considerations of outer form. Everything else,” Frost goes on to explain, “is to have two compulsions, an inner and an outer, a spiritual and a social, an individual and a racial. Everything but poetry according to the Pound-Eliot-Richards-Reed school of art.” Over against this position Frost asserts his own, arguing that everything, even a poem, has “not only formity but conformity.” “I want to be good,” he says, driving the point home, “but that is not enough the state says I have got to be good.” The latter remark succinctly frames Frost’s interest in the general question of motivation, not simply in Herbert Read and his “school.” And in what follows I consider his contribution to the theory of motive and personality in poetry. As I am concerned with it here, a theory of personality in poetry addresses the question of who or what chiefly motivates a work of literary art. Is the controlling discipline (or “compulsion”) in a poem the “inner voice” of the writer, his will to expression? Is it the impersonal agencies either of language, form, society or tradition? Or is it rather a mixture of personal and impersonal motives? If the latter, then what sort of mixture? In considering Frost’s answers to these questions we confront some of the most important matters addressed in his essays and letters on poetics. Thinking about his theories of personality in poetry also helps us place his work more clearly within the context of his modernist contemporaries.
Robert Frost, at about the time he was in England.
“I want to be good but that is not enough the state says I have got to be good”—an elegantly simple statement of a complex problem. With characteristic concision and informality Frost suggests how difficult it is to know where external “compulsion” ends and where “inner” desire begins. The idea is that, at least until the state withers away, we simply cannot speak of pure acts of “goodness.” There’s always an incalculable element of coercion, whether by force or by incentive, since we always act within a texture of constraints and goads ranging from convention to legal imperatives. Frost describes a dialectic of necessity and freedom. Everything has “two compulsions, an inner and an outer, a spiritual and a social, an individual and a racial.” Or: “Every thing has not only formity but conformity.”
Kenneth Burke‘s remarks on a related problem of motivation are illuminating. He is discussing, in A Grammar of Motives, what he calls the “paradox of purity” or of “the absolute”:
Cover of the University of California Press paperback edition.
The question is whether “collective,” external motives exist in antithesis to individual motives, or whether the former “parent” the latter. Of course, Frost deals with the paradox implicit in “collective motivation” more bluntly in saying that he wants to be good, but that is not enough—the state says he must be. Is his virtue enforced by a “collective” will working against his own “inner” form? Or does his inner desire to “be good” itself derive from his engagement in a collective social enterprise? Collective motives—what Frost would call motives of “conformity”—may be described genetically. They exist in harmony with individual motives as their originating principle. Or they may be described contextually. They work in antithesis to strictly personal motives—what Frost would call the motives of “formity.”
Later in the Grammar Burke makes a suggestion that helps bring out the broader implications of Frost’s remarks to his daughter. He asks whether or not, strictly speaking, “action” is compatible with “motivation”:
Jacques Derrida, suave French philosopher & literary critic.
Cover, Northwest University Press edition.
Frost asks a similar question in his letter. Does the motivation to conform exercised on us by social forces actually rob individual actors of their agency? Is it possible, again strictly speaking, to perform a “good” action if virtue is also somehow enforced? Inner and outer motivation may negate rather than complement one another. In the “Afterward” to a second edition of Limited Inc (1988) Jacques Derrida makes much the same point, though in more high-flying diction: “A decision can only come into being in a space that exceeds the calculable program that would destroy all responsibility by transforming it into a programmable effect of determinate causes. There can be no moral or political responsibility without this trial and this passage by way of the undecidable.” Where Derrida writes “moral responsibility” I read “self-hood” or “agency” since that is really what we’re talking about. Agency and self-hood are what exceed “calculation” and prediction. Frost, Derrida and Burke address the same basic set of questions. What is the meaning of “agency”? Is it personal? Impersonal? Is it masterable? What are its conditions? Read more…
“The Wife of His Youth”: Charles Chesnutt
Chesnutt, at about age 40.
Charles Chesnutt could not long remain satisfied mining a vein, as he had done in The Conjure Woman (1899), adulterated by what literary historians now call “the plantation myth,” and by the largely white-defined conventions of the “dialect tale.” All this notwithstanding that he had, in The Conjure Woman, quite ingeniously subverted both the plantation myth and its associated conventions. These latter inevitably included a highly artificial dialect put into the mouths of African-American characters. For purposes of ridicule, comedy, etc. And on occasion to portray African-American men and women (and “characters”) sentimentally as the childlike figures white readers so fatuously needed them to be. The “myth” also involved the notion that relations between masters and slaves were paternal and familial. (For a entry in The Era of Casual Fridays on the first story in The Conjure Woman—an entry that also takes up the matter of the “plantation myth”—click here.) No better expression of this myth than Jefferson Davis‘s own, in his benighted (by white-supremacy) Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government (1881). Here, he is reacting to Lincoln‘s Emancipation Proclamation, and also to Lincoln’s decision to field black soldiers—many thousands of them former slaves—in the Union Army:
Photograph of Jefferson Davis. From the Brady-Handy Photograph Collection (Library of Congress).
“Let the reader pause for a moment and look calmly at the facts presented in this statement. The forefathers of these negro soldiers were gathered from the torrid plains and malarial swamps of inhospitable Africa. Generally they were bom the slaves of barbarian masters, untaught in all the useful arts and occupations, reared in heathen darkness, and, sold by heathen masters, they were transferred to shores enlightened by the rays of Christianity. There, put to servitude, they were trained in the gentle arts of peace and order and civilization; they increased from a few unprofitable savages to millions of efficient Christian laborers. Their servile instincts rendered them contented with their lot, and their patient toil blessed the land of their abode with unmeasured riches. Their strong local and personal attachment secured faithful service to those to whom their service or labor was due. A strong mutual affection was the natural result of this life-long relation, a feeling best if not only understood by those who have grown from childhood under its influence. Never was there happier dependence of labor and capital on each other. The tempter came, like the serpent in Eden, and decoyed them with the magic word of ‘freedom.’ Too many were allured by the uncomprehended and unfulfilled promises, until the highways of these wanderers were marked by corpses of infants and the aged. He put arms in their hands, and trained their humble but emotional natures to deeds of violence and bloodshed, and sent them out to devastate their benefactors. What does he boastingly announce? ‘It is difficult to say they are not as good soldiers as any.’ Ask the bereaved mother, the desolate widow, the sonless aged sire, to whom the bitter cup was presented by those once of their own household. With double anguish they speak of its bitterness. What does the President of the United States further say? ‘According to our political system, as a matter of civil administration, the General Government had no lawful power to effect emancipation in any State.’ And further on, as if with a triumphant gladness, he adds, ‘Thus giving the double advantage of taking so much labor from the insurgent cause, and supplying the places which otherwise must be filled with so many white men.’ A rare mixture of malfeasance with traffic in human life! It is submitted to the judgment of a Christian people how well such a boast befits the President of the United States, a federation of sovereigns under a voluntary compact for specific purposes.”
From the passage in question, in a 1958 reprint of Davis's masterwork.
In this passing-strange fable, slavery blessed the Africans who suffered the Middle Passage. Lincoln emerges as Satan (“the Tempter”) who brought about the Fall of the Edenic ancien regime of the Old South. Africa is “inhospitable” to the slaves, relative, say, to the cotton plantations of Davis’ “hospitable” Mississippi. Slavery bestowed on Africans the great blessing of Christian charity and civilization. The whole enterprise accorded with the African’s natural “servile instincts.” One wonders what Nat Turner, Denmark Vesey, and Frederick Douglass would say to this—but then of course one knows what they actually did say and do. And what of this remark? The slaves’ “strong local and personal attachment secured faithful service to those to whom their service or labor was due. A strong mutual affection was the natural result of this life-long relation, a feeling best if not only understood by those who have grown from childhood under its influence. Never was there happier dependence of labor and capital on each other.” Where even to begin? With Davis’s coy abuse of the already appallingly euphemistic language of the Constitution (“those to whom their service or labor was due”)? (He has in mind Article IV Section 2: “No person held to service or labor in one state, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due.” Of which clause John Jay Chapman rightly says, in his William Lloyd Garrison: “The African slave trade is probably the most brutal organized crime in history. Our fathers did not dare to name it. So of the fugitive-slave law;—the Constitution deals with it in the cruel, quiet way in which monstrous tyranny deals with the fictions of administrative law. . . In an age in which the Inquisition is absolutely dominant, its officials are almost kind. The leaden touch of hypocrisy was thus in the heart of our Constitution.”) Or shall we begin instead with Davis’s inadvertent concession that the South was not some species of “agrarian” society such as Thomas Jefferson may have dreamt on, but a capitalist one (which produced commodities for sale on a world market: indigo, rice, tobacco, cotton)? With the “strong mutual affection” that characterized the relation of Old Massa to the black persons whose “labor,” as the Constitution has it, was “due to him”? Or with that perfect moment of ideological inversion whereby Lincoln and the abolitionists, not slaveholders, “traffic in human life”? Astonishing. Only: not really. Read Karl Marx, from The German Ideology: Read more…
Brief Notes on Stephen Crane’s Prose Style #1
N.B.: This is the first in a series of brief commentaries on the prose style of Stephen Crane.
Any practiced reader of Crane can cite examples of slightly queer or disorienting metaphors in his prose. Consider the famous beginning of “The Open Boat“:
First page, "The Open Boat," edition of 1898.
None of them knew the colour of the sky. Their eyes glanced level, and were fastened upon the waves that swept toward them. These waves were of the hue of slate, save for the tops, which were of foaming white, and all of the men knew the colours of the sea. The horizon narrowed and widened, and dipped and rose, and at all times its edge was jagged with waves that seemed thrust in points like rocks.
Many a man ought to have a bathtub larger than the boat which here rode upon the sea. These waves were most wrongfully and barbarously abrupt and tall, and each froth-top was a problem in small-boat navigation.
“Colours” may take on a quietly figurative significance, as the subsidiary, and somewhat archaic, meaning of “aegis” stands off somewhere in the background (as in the phrase “under colour of law”). We are concerned with the “colour” of the sea—with its integrity, its agency, its antagonism, its character, its felt “authority” to decide matters of life and death. To say that all of the men know the colours of the sea is to understate the case, of course. They are sick with knowledge of it. And what’s more, a certain knowingness attaches to the word “knew” as Crane uses it. Their common knowledge of the sea is the basis of the “brotherhood” Crane later speaks of—a notably “manly” camaraderie that allows these men to speak to one another in hints and gestures, in tones of irony, and in the blacker shades of humor.
Crane in Greece in 1897, where he helped create the role of the dashing war correspondent. This portrait was purportedly taken in a studio, with props.
Notice also how Crane gives an account of the ocean—as if contradicting its proverbial breadth—that is positively claustrophobic. His men are hemmed in; they inhabit a world circumscribed by the gunwales of a dingy and the next wave alone. And as for the waves, these are “of the hue of slate,” and appear to the men like jagged points of rock, as if they, in the little boat, were negotiating a mountain pass and not a patch of ocean—an arresting metaphor that paradoxically takes sea for land, water for rocks. Either way the passage goes hard. I should note here that, to my mind and ear anyway, Crane almost conscripts the word “jagged” into playing the role of a verb (pronounced with one syllable). This sort of grammatical boundary-testing is not at all uncommon in his prose. Consider an example from The Red Badge of Courage, where we read the following sentence: “Strange gods were addressed in condemnation of the early hours necessary to correct war.” The phrase “to correct” seems by turns to mean “to conduct war correctly,” or to “put war aright,” or “to admonish war,” and yet can be reduced to none of these; its grammatical ambiguity, its suspension, is precise and perfect (such grammatical ambiguity as there is has to do with whether or not “to correct” is an infinitive, or whether “correct” is an adjective modifying “war”).
A new element emerges in the second paragraph of *The Open Boat.” The comparison of bathtub to boat is no doubt funny, pathetically so. Why? Because our relation to water in a bathtub differs so utterly from our relation to it in a storm-tossed boat: the one is recreational or hygienic, the other antagonistic. Also, of course, bathtubs are meant to keep water in, boats to keep it out. So, it’s not just the size of the boat that is the point here, not just the absurd proposition of fitting four men into a bathtub of such commodious size as most men “ought to have” in the late 1890s. The play is more complex.
The waves are described as “most wrongfully and barbarously abrupt and tall.” This language belongs to the parlor, or at least to polite society, where we sometimes meet with forces we call “barbarously abrupt” (rude taxi-cab drivers or shop-clerks, for example, or tourists abroad under some absurd flag of entitlement). It is as if the waves had committed an unpardonable sin against good breeding—as if the waves were exhibiting genuinely uncivilized behavior, damn them. One can well imagine this belief forming a part of the men’s relation to the water. They feel not merely threatened. They feel insulted, indignant.
A page from Lt. Col. Sterling's book illustrating "The Koch Plotter," a device for solving problems in small boat navigation.
Reprint of the original 1916 edition. "Problems" are discussed on no fewer than 22.72% of its pages.
But Crane turns us about yet again in the last sentence quoted above: “Each froth-top,” he says, “was a problem in small-boat navigation.” This understates the matter in a special way. Problems in Small-Boat Navigation might well be the title of a text-book, something assigned for study at the Coast Guard Academy, say. And, lo, a number of books more or less by that title have been published, as the illustrations here attest. To use the language Crane here uses—problems in small boat navigation—puts the relation of men to water in a slightly clinical or “academic” light. With this idea, we are no longer in the game. We are watching a film of it after the fact. We are being debriefed. Read more…
Advertisement for Pears' Soap. 1890s.
Following are some notes on Stephen Crane’s novella The Monster. I will assume some familiarity with the book, but the plot is easy to summarize. Dr. Trescott, an important figure in Crane’s fictional Whilomville, employs an African-American hostler named Henry Johnson, who has an affectionate relationship with the Trescotts’ young son, Jimmie. When a fire destroys the Trescott house, Henry dashes in to rescue the boy, and manages to reach the rear exit of the house (via the doctor’s laboratory). There he sets the little boy down at the threshold before himself being overcome with the fumes and smoke of the fire, which has now enveloped the lab, with all its beakers of pharmaceutical chemicals, etc. He collapses. The heat of the fire causes the beakers to shatter, and an acid of some sort streams down along the table and falls directly onto Henry’s face, disfiguring him appallingly, and—though by means never made clear—rendering him feeble-minded. Some of the townsfolk accuse Henry of arson, others celebrate him as a hero, and then once the truth emerges—the fire was an accident—the problem around which the novella is built becomes clear. What’s to be done with the newly incapacitated “hero” Henry? What white man will take up his burden? Dr. Trescott manages to save his life. But other town worthies advise him that it would be better—would have been better—simply to let Henry die. Household by household the town ostracizes him and his family, until they alone are left with to handle what used to be called, in the 1890s, “the negro problem.”
Some regard The Monster as an indictment of racism. It will become clear that I find that notion, well, “problematic,” as the English professors say. Others regard it as a satire of small-town pettiness, such as we find in Mark Twain‘s The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg. I think Crane’s investment isn’t really in moralizing or satire of any kind, but instead in the writing itself—in the prose. (I’d say the same of nearly everything he wrote, and intend this entry in The Era of Casual Fridays to the first in an occasional series devoted to Crane’s style. Well, so much by way of preface.
* * *
Crane in Greece in 1897, where he helped create the role of the dashing war correspondent. This portrait was purportedly taken in a studio, with props.
Often one encounters in Stephen Crane’s prose metaphors that startle and disorient the reader, at times to surreal effect. Here’s a description of the house fire, as it begins, in The Monster, a short novel published in 1899:
A wisp of smoke came from one of the windows at the end of the house and drifted quietly into the branches of a cherry tree. Its companions followed it in slowly increasing numbers, and finally there was a current controlled by invisible banks which poured into the fruit-laden boughs of the cherry tree. It was no more to be noted than if a troop of dim and silent gray monkeys had been climbing a grapevine into the clouds.
Title page, first edition of 1899.
Several things strike me. The first is the comparison of the smoke to water—a confusion of the elements that works by paradox: air, too, can be “poured,” after all. But the truly odd feature of the passage, the feature so characteristic of Crane, is the suggestion in the last sentence: namely, that the progress of the smoke is “no more to be noted than if a troop of dim and silent gray monkeys had been climbing a grapevine into the clouds.” No more to be noted? How are we to understand such a remark? Most observers would “take note” if they saw a troop of dim and silent gray monkeys climbing a grapevine into the clouds, even if they saw it in Crane’s fictional town of Whilomville. To an extent, the metaphor works by visual analogy on the basis of color: a rising column of smoke is compared to a chain of gray monkeys trooping their way up—to a chain of something gray, anyway. But the monkeys and the grapevine are sheer extravagances, as is also the disclaimer that there might be nothing “noteworthy” in the prospect they afford.
This brings me round to what I like to call the technique of narration by inappropriate affect—sometimes used to sound ironic purposes, sometimes not, and sometimes not really “used” at all but simply stumbled into. In The Monster the structure of feelings that might be said to characterize Crane’s narrator often seems oddly out of place. The fire that lies at the center of the novella’s action is for him an occasion for play of a notably whimsical sort. I feel little gravity in the narration. The tone always alerts us to the fact that Crane is an observer, but never, sympathetically speaking, a participant-observer in the scenes he describes. He is a god paring his nails who hardly deigns to notice when a troop of silent gray monkeys climbs a grapevine into the clouds. So, he describes Mrs. Trescott, in her alarm for the safety of her son Jimmie, in language that veers toward ridicule. She is incontinent in her emotions. And Crane—always cool, no matter what the situation—disdains her. She is said to wave her skinny arms about “as if they were two reeds.” He makes a straw woman of her. She is “maniacal.” She “babbles.” She is as much a spectacle as an object of sympathy. Come to that, Crane’s art often works in a region somewhere amid spectacle, ridicule, and sympathy.
The interest of the narrator is more in the fire itself than in anything the fire might destroy. The fire is to him a lovely thing. Little Jimmie Trescott’s room, we are told, “had no smoke in it at all. It was faintly illuminated by a beautiful rosy light reflected circuitously from the flames that were consuming the house. The boy had apparently just been aroused by the noise. He sat in his bed, his lips apart, his eyes wide, while upon his little white-robed figure played caressingly the light from the fire.” The narrator misses not the smallest effect of grace in this tableau. His investment in the scene is essentially that of a connoisseur, as when he reports that Jimmie, having been seized by Henry Johnson, the man who will save him, “let out a gorgeous bawl.” A a bawl to be appreciated, on its own terms, and not simply as a cry of distress. Plainly, the narrator’s interest in the scene stands somewhat apart from the interest the characters themselves take in it. His “affect” is dislocated.
But the best awaits us in Dr. Trescott’s laboratory. “At the entrance to the laboratory,” Crane writes, Henry Johnson and the boy he carries meet “a strange spectacle. The room was like a garden in the region where might be burning flowers. Flames of violet, crimson, green, blue, orange, and purple were blooming everywhere. There was one blaze that was precisely the hue of a delicate coral. In another place was a mass that lay merely in phosphorescent inaction like a pile of emeralds. There was an explosion at one side, and suddenly before [Henry] there reared a delicate, trembling sapphire shape like a fairy lady. With a quiet smile she blocked his path and doomed him and Jimmie.” Henry is able, in his last exertion, to lay Jimmie down near a window. But he himself collapses onto the floor beneath a table on which sit beakers and jars of various chemicals, one of which seems “to hold a scintillant and writhing serpent. Suddenly the glass splintered, and a ruby-red snake-like thing poured its thick length out upon the top of the old desk. It coiled and hesitated, and then began to swim a languorous way down the mahogany slant. At the angle it waved its sizzling molten head to and fro over the closed eyes of the man beneath it. Then, in a moment, with a mystic impulse, it moved again, and the red snake flowed directly down into Johnson’s upturned face. Afterward the trail of this creature seemed to reek, and amid flames and low explosions drops like red-hot jewels pattered softly down at leisurely intervals.”
Extract from the first edition of the book (1898).
In connection with this remarkable passage, I want to ask a question about point of view that is also a question about the narrator’s mood. What sort of mind could see this particular fire in this particular way? It must be a mind unaffected and unsentimental, a mind capable of seeing in the fire a show of light, color, and form; a mind provisionally indifferent (Olympian, even) to the exquisite suffering the fire causes the men and women immediately touched by it. After all, they are—or so the possessor of such a mind must feel—a little selfish in seeing the fire only in terms of what it can do to them. Doesn’t, and shouldn’t, the fire have a life of its own?
Crane’s manner, if I may say so, allies him with the “high cold star” that looks on the suffering men in “The Open Boat” with such sublime indifference. Crane’s narrator is like the Universe in his best-known poem. When reminded that men exist, the Universe replies that the fact creates in it “no sense of obligation.” Such is the indifferent force with which Crane affiliates himself as a writer, or so the evidence of his cool prose suggests. The Monster may be about a black man, defaced and compelled to live behind a veil. But no one, I think, would find in it any real exception to the general drift of things in a nation that was (as W.E.B. DuBois said) “a little ashamed,” in the 1890s, “at having bestowed so much sentiment on Negroes.” This will become much clearer when I consider, in a moment, a passage describing Henry Johnson and his sweetheart Bella Farragut.
Transmission Electron Micrograph of the Ebola Virus.
From the 1916 edition of "Pragmatism." Click on the image for a full-sized view of the passage in question.
William James points out in Pragmatism that, from our point of view, the astonishing “fitness” of the woodpecker’s beak to get at the grubs hiding beneath the bark of a tree appears beautiful and perfect. It seems to argue “design” in the universe of a remarkably harmonious and symbiotic sort. From the point of view of the grubs, of course, it is evidence of something else altogether: a diabolical sort of “design” (if design govern in a thing so small, as Robert Frost puts it). All depends on perspective.
One sometimes hears epidemiologists speak of the “elegance” or “beauty” of a particularly nefarious virus. It is possible to regard ebola zaire, for example, with a certain aesthetic detachment—to regard it as ebola zaire might wish to be regarded. Namely, as a strand of RNA ideally suited to painting a room with human blood. When we think that way we are, finally, interested only in power, only in force. We have, so to speak, transcended merely “human” interests. Crane’s fiction usually tends in precisely this direction. We are in any case—to recur to the novella at hand—well beyond jeremiads about the plight of black folk in the 1890s, and the nuanced interest these jeremiads inevitably take in the more “human” significance of events.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844–1900). Photo from Hulton Archive/Getty Images.
A Nietzschean detachment, combined with often startlingly incongruous metaphors, is what accounts for the peculiar feeling of disorientation we feel in reading Crane’s most characteristic prose. In The Monster, the fire that disfigures Henry Johnson is described precisely as a fire might like to be described. The fire is done justice to. The fire is flattered. It has good reason to deploy its flames like “flags” “joyfully” waving in the wind, as Crane puts it. No wonder the townspeople look up with eyes that “shine” with “awe,” as Crane says they do. For they, too, are pyrophiliac, and can appreciate a fire. To appreciate it—as theater, as a spectacle, as a thing of force and beauty—is in fact what they came to the Trescott’s burning house to do. They are, so far as their moral investment in the scene is concerned, rather like the narrator himself: indifferent, and, as the story soon permits them to show, for the most part incapable of empathy. They would as soon kill the disfigured Henry Johnson as look at him—if they could do so merely by taking thought. The local boys, as boys will, hurry to the fire as to a circus. They are “deeply moved” by the “whole affair,” and take special pleasure in it (after all, “it was fine to see the gathering of the [fire] companies,” and the lads display an “impish joy” at the sight of the flames). One might write this off as childish insouciance, which is what it is, but the adults are the same. Their eyes “shine with awe” at the spectacle; the men are at their best when describing the affair to their fellows in a theatrical, self-dramatizing way. The whole business takes on, by turns, the holiday air of a parade and the histrionic air of bad melodrama. And lest we ascribe this to a forgivably human weakness for excitement and sensation, Crane soon shows us that the townsfolk care nothing at all for the suffering of Henry Johnson. The judge speaks for them all: “Somehow,” he says, “I think that that poor fellow ought to die.” It is “one of the blunders of virtue,” he suggests, to care for him any longer, because to care for him is a nuisance, an embarrassment. So much for the white man’s burden, which Rudyard Kipling admonished Americans to take up in 1899, the same year The Monster was published. The Monster might well be a satire of the bad faith with which that “burden” was everywhere assumed.
W.E.B. DuBois, Boston, Summer 1907.
Now, clearly Crane invites us to condemn the townspeople for their detachment. They cut Dr. Trescott off when he refuses to turn Henry out to die. They abandon him. No woman comes to his wife’s afternoon teas. His medical practice suffers. But we’re never invited to judge the narrator, and I want to make the implications of this fact clear. The reason we condemn the townsfolk is apparently that, under the circumstances, they ought to be committed to seeing the fire in terms chiefly of what it can do to them, and to their fellows; they ought to be humanists. That is to say, they ought to be humanly self-centered, as the grubs in James’s analogy are self-centered in a grubbish way, for that would mark the beginning of real empathy. No time out to admire the woodpecker’s plumage (i.e., the fire). After all, they are not writers describing imaginary events, as is Crane; they are characters in a story behaving like writers describing imaginary events. That is precisely the moral problem to which Crane’s novella alerts us. At the end of the day, Henry Johnson is not, for the good white people of Whilomville, real. He is not one of their fellows. They see him, if they see him at all, as through a veil of unreality. In fact, Crane has Henry wear a veil, as if anticipating W.E.B. DuBois’s great metaphor in The Souls of Black Folk: “After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.” The townsfolk do, in fact, look on Henry, veiled as he is, with “amused contempt and pity.” And it would have been much more convenient (as they let the doctor know) if Henry Johnson had been allowed to die. Read more…
