American Writers, Supplement 2

SUPPLEMENT II, Part 1 W. H. Auden to 0. Henry

SUPPLEMENT II, Part 2 Robinson Jeffers

to Yvor Winters

AMERICAN

WRITERS

A Collection of Literary Biographies A. WALTON LITZ Editor in Chief

SUPPLEMENT II, Part 1 W. H. Auden to 0. Henry SUPPLEMENT II, Part 2 Robinson Jeffers to Yvor Winters

CHARLES SCRBNER'S SONS MACMILLAN LIBRARY REFERENCE USA SIMON & SCHUSTER MACMILLAN NEW YORK SIMON & SCHUSTER AND PRENTICE HALL LONDON MEXICO CITY NEW DELHI SINGAPORE

SYDNEY TORONTO

Copyright © 1981 Charles Scribner's Sons Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Main entry under title:

(Revised)

American writers. The 4-vol. main set consists of 97 of the pamphlets originally published as the University of Minnesota pamphlets on American writers; some have been rev. and updated. The supplements cover writers not included in the original series. Includes bibliographies. CONTENTS: v.l. Henry Adams to T. S. Eliot.—v.2. Ralph Waldo Emerson to Carson McCullers.—v.3. Archibald MacLeish to George Santayana.—[etc.] 1. American literature—History and criticism. 2. American literature—Bio-bibliography. 3. Authors, American—Biography. I. Unger, Leonard, ed. II. Minnesota. University. Pamphlets on American writers. 73-1759 PS129.A55 810'.9 [B] ISBN 0-684-16104-4 (Set) ISBN 0-684-16233-4 (Supp. I, Part 2) ISBN 0-684-13673-2 (Vol. I) ISBN 0-684-16482-5 (Supp. II, Set) ISBN 0-684-17592-4 (Supp. II, Part 1) ISBN 0-684-13674-0 (Vol. II) ISBN 0-684-17593-2 (Supp. II, Part 2) ISBN 0-684-13675-9 (Vol. III) ISBN 0-684-13676-7 (Vol. IV) ISBN 0-684-15797-7 (Supp. I, Set) ISBN 0-684-16232-6 (Supp. I, Part 1) Charles Scribner's Sons An Imprint of Simon & Schuster Macmillan 1633 Broadway, New York, NY 10019-6785 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without the permission of Charles Scribner's Sons. 21

Printed in the United States of America

"Amiri Baraka" from The Dead Lecturer, Copyright © 1964 by LeRoi Jones. From Black Magic: Collected Poetry 1961-1967. Copyright © 1969 by LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka). From Dutchman and the Slave. Copyright © 1964 by LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka). From Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note. Copyright © 1961 by LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka). From In Our Terribleness (Some Elements and Meaning in Black Style). Copyright © 1970 by LeRoi Jones. Lines from "A Poem for Anna Russ and Fanny Jones," "Reprise of One of A.G.'s Best Poems," "Like This Is What I Meant," "Afro-American Lyric," "Pres Spoke in a Language," "Am/Trak," "Spring Song," "Child of the Thirties," "Afrika Revolution," "Dictatorship of the Proletariat," "A Poem for Deep Thinkers," "Race Line," in Selected Poetry of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones. Copyright © 1979 by Amiri Baraka. By permission of William Morrow & Company.

Acknowledgment is gratefully made to those publishers and individuals who have permitted the use of the following materials in copyright. "W. H. Auden" from W. H. Auden's previously unpublished letter to his father, by permission of Edward Mendelson, copyright © 1981 by Edward Mendelson, William Meredith and Monroe K. Spears, Executors of the Estate of W. H. Auden. From William Butler Yeats, "To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing." Reprinted with permission of Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc. from Collected Poems of William Butler Yeats. Copyright 1916 by Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., renewed 1944 by Bertha Georgie Yeats. Also used by permission of A. P. Watt & Sons. Acknowledgment is made to Random House, Inc. for permission to quote from the following copyrighted works of W. H. Auden: W, H. Auden: Collected Poems and The English Auden: Poems, Essays, and Dramatic Writings, 1927-1939, both by W. H. Auden and edited by Edward Mendelson. Selected quotations reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd. from Collected Poems by W. H. Auden.

"R. P. Blackmur" from unpublished material by R. P. Blackmur, by permission of Joseph Frank, Literary Executor of the Estate of R. P. Blackmur. iv

Corinth Books/Totem Press. From "Notes for Howl and Other Poems," in The New American Poetry, edited by Donald Allen. Copyright © 1960 by Donald M. Allen. Reprinted by permission of Grove Press, Inc. From As Ever: Collected Correspondence with Neal Cassady, 1974, copyright by Creative Arts Book Company for Allen Ginsberg and Carolyn Cassady 1977. From Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, 3rd series. Edited by George Plimpton. Copyright © 1967 by The Paris Review, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Viking Penguin Inc. From Howl and Other Poems. Copyright © 1956, 1959 by Allen Ginsberg. Reprinted by permission of City Lights Books. From Kaddish and Other Poems: 19581960. Copyright © 1961 by Allen Ginsberg. Reprinted by permission of City Lights Books. From Reality Sandwiches: 1953-1960. Copyright © 1963, 1966 by Allen Ginsberg. Reprinted by permission of City Lights Books. From Planet News: 1961-1967. Copyright © 1968 by Allen Ginsberg. Reprinted by permission of City Lights Books. From Fall of America: Poems of These States: 1965-1971. Copyright © 1972 by Allen Ginsberg. Reprinted by permission of City Lights Books.

"Malcolm Cowley" "Prayer on All Saints' Day" was first published in the Sewanee Review 86, 4 (Fall 1978), copyright © 1978 by Malcolm Cowley. Reprinted with the permission of Malcolm Cowley. From "Blue Juniata," in Blue Juniata, copyright © 1968 by Malcolm Cowley. From And I Worked at the Writer's Trade by Malcolm Cowley. Copyright © 1978 by Malcolm Cowley. Reprinted by permission of Viking Penguin Inc. "Ralph Ellison" Portions of this essay are used here with the permission of the publishers from The Craft of Ralph Ellison, by Robert G. O'Meally, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Copyright © 1980 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. From The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. Copyright 1952 by Ralph Ellison. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc. Also used by permission of Laurence Pollinger Limited. From Shadow and Act by Ralph Ellison. Copyright © 1964 by Ralph Ellison. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc. From Shadow and Act by Ralph Ellison. Copyright 1953, 1964 by Ralph Ellison. Reprinted by permission of William Morris Agency, Inc.

"Robert Hayden" Selected quotations reprinted from Angle of Ascent, New and Selected Poems, by Robert Hayden, with permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation. Copyright © 1975, 1972, 1970, 1966 by Robert Hayden. From American Journal by Robert Hayden. Copyright © 1978 by Robert Hayden. Copyright © 1980 by Irma Hayden. Used by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation.

"Allen Ginsberg" from Sad Dust Glories, by permission of Allen Ginsberg. From The Gates of Wrath, Rhymed Poems: 1948-1952 by Allen Ginsberg, 1972; by permission of Allen Ginsberg. From Empty Mirror, Early Poems by Allen Ginsberg, copyright © 1961 Allen Ginsberg, published by

V

Introduction

Like the essays in the first Supplement to American Writers (2 vols., 1979), the essays in this second Supplement follow the pattern set in American Writers: A Collection of Literary Biographies (4 vols., 1974). The ninety-seven essays in the original four volumes first appeared as the University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers, a distinguished series published between 1959 and 1972. (For a history of this enterprise the reader should consult the Introduction to the first four volumes.) When the Minnesota series was started, the pamphlets were described as "introductory essays . . . aimed at people (general readers here and abroad, college students, etc.) who are interested in the writers concerned, but not highly familiar with their work," and the present Supplement was edited with the same audience in mind. From the beginning, however, the authors of the American Writers pamphlets managed to combine a balanced account of basic issues with the results of original research and criticism. The essays in Supplement II, all written by recognized experts and published here for the first time, carry on this tradition of writing for the general reader in a way that the specialist will also find interesting and informative. In several instances—most notably the essays on R. P. Blackmur, Malcolm Cowley, and W. E. B. Du Bois—the authors have produced the fullest account to date of the writer's life and work. While the essays in Supplement II embody the original aims of the American Writers series, they have inevitably been affected by the radical changes in literary taste and Critical perspective of the past quarter-century. The first American Writers essays were conceived at a time when a New Critical emphasis on formal literary analysis and the autonomy of the art-work dominated American criticism: as a result, biographical and cultural discussions

were sometimes subordinated to close analyses of individual works. The essays in Supplement II, many written by young scholars, reflect a renewed interest in literary biography and cultural history, although they still provide detailed examinations of major works. The essays in Supplement II also reflect the important changes in the canon of American literature that have occurred since the post-World War II scholarly and critical consensus began to break down in the early 1960's. As in the first Supplement, greater attention has been given to women writers, among them Joyce Carol Oates, Anne Sexton, and Margaret Fuller. Supplement II is especially rich in essays on black writers: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Ralph Ellison, and Robert Hayden. Our enlarged sense of what constitutes a literary text has led to the inclusion of social critics and historians, among them Du Bois, Lewis Mumford, and Francis Parkman. The major critics of the generation that came to maturity between the two world wars are given full treatment as literary artists. Writers from the earlier periods who have recently gained in reputation, such as Cotton Mather and Philip Freneau, are now included; but Supplement II follows its predecessor in placing emphasis on contemporary writers who have attained wide recognition in recent years, such as Allen Ginsberg and Thomas Pynchon. In their chronological range (from Cotton Mather to Joyce Carol Oates) and their variety of critical and scholarly approaches, the essays in Supplement II remind us that our native literary tradition is reviewed by every generation of readers, and that it must be constantly revised and augmented if it is to remain alive. —A. WALTON LITZ

VII

Editorial

Staff

G. MICHAEL McGINLEY, MANAGING EDITOR DAVID WILLIAM VOORHEES, Associate Editor CHRISTIANS L. DESCHAMPS, Assistant Editor MARYLOU G. MANTLO, Editorial Assistant JAMES F. MAURER, Assistant Editor CAROLYN G. PATTON, Administrative Editor ELIZABETH I. WILSON, Associate Editor JOEL HONIG, Associate Editor NORMA FRANKEL, Associate Editor ERIK WENSBERG, Copyeditor EVA GALAN, Proofreader KATHY GUTHMULLER, Proofreader CAROL HOLMES, Proofreader JANET HORNBERGER, Production Manager JUDITH ANDERSON, Indexer MARSHALL DE BRUHL, DIRECTOR, REFERENCE BOOK DIVISION

List of Subjects

Part 1 W. H. AUDEN Edward Mendelson

Part 2

1

ROBINSON JEFFERS R. W. Butterfield

413

29

COTTON MATHER Ormond Seavey

441

JOEL BARLOW Jeffrey Walker

65

LEWIS MUMFORD Peter Firchow

471

R. P. BLACKMUR Russell A. Fraser

87

JOYCE CAROL GATES Diane Tolomeo

503

PEARL S. BUCK Paul A. Doyle

113

CLIFFORD ODETS Frank R. Cunningham

529

MALCOLM COWLEY George Core

135

CHARLES OLSON Maxine Olian Apsel

555

W. E. B. DU BOIS Herbert Aptheker

157

FRANCIS PARKMAN Verlyn Klinkenborg

589

PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR Charles T. Davis

191

617

RALPH ELLISON Robert O'Meally

221

THOMAS PYNCHON Richard Pearce

639

PHILIP FRENEAU Maureen Goldman

253

DELMORE SCHWARTZ Paul Breslin

279

ANNE SEXTON Susan Resneck Parr

669

MARGARET FULLER Bell Gale Chevigny ALLEN GINSBERG James Mersmann

307

KARL SHAPIRO Michael True

701

BRET HARTE Wilton Eckley

335

CARL VAN VECHTEN Bruce Kellner

725

ROBERT HAYDEN Robert M. Greenberg

361

KURT VONNEGUT Peter J. Reed

753

O. HENRY Kent Bales

385

YVOR WINTERS

785

AMIRI BARAKA (LEROI JONES) William C. Fischer

Robert von Hallberg

list of Contributors

Listed below are the contributors to American Writers, Supplement II. Authors* names are followed by institutional affiliations at the time of publication, titles of books written or edited, and titles of essays written for this Supplement.

to the Collected Poems of James Joyce; Liam O'Flaherty: A Critical Introduction; Sean O'Faolain; Pearl S. Buck; Evelyn Waugh: A Checklist of Primary and Secondary Material; Liam O'Flaherty: An Annotated Bibliography; Paul Vincent Carroll: An Introduction; Henry David Thoreau: Studies and Commentaries; Guide to Basic Information Sources in English Literature. Pearl S. Buck.

MAXINE OLIAN APSEL. Instructor of Humanities and Interdisciplinary Studies, Bloomfield College. Author of essays on Charles Olson in boundary 2 and the Markham Review. Charles Olson.

WILTON ECKLEY. Professor of English, Drake University. Author of Harriette Arnow; T. S. Stribling; Guide to e. e. cummings; Herbert Hoover, and numerous articles on short fiction and science fiction. Bret Harte.

HERBERT APTHEKER. Director of the American Institute for Marxist Studies. Author of American Slave Revolts; A History of the People of the United States (3 volumes to date); and The Urgency of Marxist-Christian Dialogue. Compiler of An Annotated Bibliography of the Published Writings of W. E. B. Du Bois. Editor of A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States (3 volumes); The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois; and The Collected Published Writings of W. E. B. Du Bois (23 of the projected 40 volumes have been published). W. E. B. Du Bois.

PETER FIRCHOW. Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of Minnesota. Author of Aldous Huxley. Satirist and Novelist; Friedrich Schlegel's "Lucinde" and the Fragments; The Writer's Place. Co-editor, with E. S. Firchow, of East German Short Stories: An Introductory Anthology. Lewis Mumford. WILLIAM C. FISCHER. Associate Professor of English, State University of New York at Buffalo. Amiri Baraka.

KENT BALES. Associate Professor of English, University of Minnesota. O. Henry.

RUSSELL A. FRASER. Professor of English, University of Michigan. Author of The Court of Venus; The Court of Virtue; Shakespeare's Poetics; The War Against Poetry; An Essential Shakespeare; The Dark Ages and the Age of Gold; and The Language of Adam on the Limits and Systems of Discourse. Editor of Selected Writings of Oscar Wilde; Essays Presented to Frank Livingston Huntley, Michigan Quarterly Review; and, with Norman Rabkin, Drama of the English Renaissance. R. P. Blackmur.

PAUL BRESLIN. Assistant Professor of English, Northwestern University. Delmore Schwartz. R. W. BUTTERFIELD. Reader in Literature, University of Essex. Author of The Broken Arc: A Study of Hart Crane. Robinson Jeffers. BELL GALE CHEVIGNY. Associate Professor of Literature, State University of New York at Purchase. Author of The Woman and the Myth: Margaret Fuller's Life and Writings. Editor of Twentieth Century Interpretations of Endgame. Margaret Fuller.

MAUREEN GOLDMAN. Assistant Professor of English, Bentley College. Author of numerous conference papers on writing and literature. Philip Freneau.

GEORGE CORE. Editor of the Sewanee Review. Author of The Literalists of the Imagination: Southern Letters and the New Criticism; and of various essays and reviews in the Virginia Quarterly, Southern Review, Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere. Editor of Southern Fiction Today. Malcolm Cowlcy.

ROBERT M. GREENBERG. Visiting Assistant Professor of English, Temple University. Robert Hayden. BRUCE KELLNER. Professor of English, Millersville State College. Author of Carl Van Vechten and the Irreverent Decades. Editor of "Keep A-Inchin' Along": Selected Writings of Carl Van Vechten About Black Arts and Letters. Compiler of A Bibliography of the Work of Carl Van Vechten. Carl Van Vechten.

FRANK R. CUNNINGHAM. Associate Professor of English, University of South Dakota. Author of articles and reviews in various journals. Clifford Odets.

VERLYN KLINKENBORG. Assistant, Department of Autograph Manuscripts, The Pierpont Morgan Library. Author of British Literary Manuscripts: 800-1914 (2 volumes). Francis Parkman.

CHARLES T. DAVIS. Musser Professor of English and AfroAmerican Studies, Yale University. Author, with Gay Wilson Allen, of Walt Whitman's Poems. Editor of E. A. Robinson: Selected Early Poems and Letters and Lucy Larcom's A New England Girlhood. Paul Laurence Dunbar.

EDWARD MENDELSON. Visiting Associate Professor of English, Columbia University. Author of Early Auden. Editor of Homer to Brecht; Pynchon: A Collection of Critical Essays; Collected Poems of W. H. Auden; and The English Auden. W. H. Auden.

PAUL A. DOYLE. Professor of English, Nassau Community College, State University of New York. Author of A Concordance

xii

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS / xiii JAMES MERSMANN. Associate Professor of English, University of Alabama. Author of Out of the Vietnam Vortex: A Study of Poets and Poetry Against the War. Allen Ginsberg.

ORMOND SEAVEY. Assistant Professor of English, George Washington University. Managing Editor of the Little Magazine. Cotton Mather.

ROBERT O'MEALLY. Visiting Professor of Afro-American Studies, Yale University. Author of The Craft of Ralph Ellison. Ralph Ellison.

DIANE TOLOMEO. Assistant Professor of English, University of Victoria. Author of articles on James Joyce and Flannery O'Connor. Joyce Carol Gates.

SUSAN RESNECK PARR. Associate Professor of English, Ithaca College. Author of numerous articles and conference papers. Anne Sexton.

MICHAEL TRUE. Professor of English, Assumption College. Author of Worcester Poetst With Notes Toward a Literary History and Poets in the Schools: A Handbook', and various articles in Commonweal, America, and the Progressive. Karl Shapiro.

RICHARD PEARCE. Professor of English, Wheaton College, Massachusetts. Author of Stages of the Clown: Perspectives on Modern Fiction from Dostoyevsky to Beckett; William Styron; and The Novel in Motion: An Approach to Modern Fiction. Editor of Critical Essays on Thomas Pynchon. Thomas Pynchon. PETER J. REED. Professor of English, University of Minnesota. Author of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., and numerous articles. Kurt Vonnegut.

ROBERT VON HALLBERG. Associate Professor of English and Humanities, University of Chicago. Author of Charles Olson: The Scholar's Art and numerous articles. Yvor Winters. JEFFREY WALKER. Assistant Professor of English, Oklahoma State University. Author of various articles and reviews in Early American Literature, Seventeenth-Century News, and Rocky Mountain Review. Joel Barlow.

W. H. Auden 1907-1973

"T

avant-garde audience, and he made no claim that he plumbed depths accessible only to poets. These were democratic attitudes, but he had to teach them to himself, because his poetic predecessors held very different and more aristocratic views. The modernist poetic revolution of the early twentieth century, brought about by W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and D. H. Lawrence, was largely a revolution in poetic language. Its purpose (in the words of Stephane Mallarme translated by Eliot in Four Quartets) was "To purify the dialect of the tribe," to free language from tired conventions and trivialities, to give it clarity, directness, sincerity. But these admirable goals had certain limits. In the view of the modernists, poetry did not refer to a common world of shared experience, accessible to anyone who looked. Poetry and poetic language served as its own authority. What mattered was its intensity and clarity, and it was taken for granted that truthfulness would follow. In fact something very different happened. When Auden began writing in the late 1920's, and began his efforts at truthtelling a few years later, the older generation offered little help in what he was trying to do. Eliot was struggling to break out of the isolation of his inner life; Lawrence was refusing to believe anything he couldn't feel in his solar plexus; Pound was arguing that the books Ezra Pound happened to

.RUE Love," W. H. Auden wrote, "enjoys twenty-twenty vision, but talks like a myopic." As a poet his central task was truthtelling, but he knew that his art obliged him to translate even the most painful and difficult truths into verbal artifacts of great complexity and beauty. The drama of his career grew out of the unresolvable conflict between his craftsman's impulse to construct memorable patterns of sound and feeling, and the ethical impulse to draw attention to the uglier world of fact. An artist who was constantly aware of the dangers of art, he knew that the potential danger of a work was often in direct proportion to its artistic excellence. The most beautiful and compelling works always invited their audience to conclude (he wrote) "that, since all is well in the work of art, all is well in history. But all is not well there." The truth Auden was concerned to tell was neither the autonomous "truth of art" nor the inner psychological truths proclaimed by various poets and painters during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. However moving, however personally authentic these "truths" might be, they could not be of much use to anyone other than the artists who originated them. What Auden was concerned with (after the first few years of his career) were truths that might be communicated and shared. He had no wish to limit access to his work to a sophisticated

I

2 / AMERICAN WRITERS have read constituted the true liberal education on which society must be based; and Yeats was communicating with spirits—or wasn't, depending on how he chose to talk about it that day. In the eyes of most modern critics and teachers of literature there is nothing wrong with any of this. Every literary period devises sets of critical theories and unexamined assumptions that will justify its poetic practice. The literary theory that rose in the wake of the great modernists—a theory that has an ancient and venerable ancestry—held that art was independent of what is ordinarily called truth. A poem was at best a "pseudo-statement," a model of what a true statement might be like. It did not have to be true to experience. Yeats wrote a poem to a friend whose hopes to bring art to the Dublin public had come to nothing, and advised her to find strength and confidence in her own self: Amid a place of stone, Be secret and exult, Because of all things known That is most difficult. No one would question the rhetorical magnificence of these lines, and to anyone who has ever found consolation in the thought that the world fails to recognize one's secret inner merits—a thought that has consoled everyone who ever lived—the lines provide a thrill of self-congratulation. As poetry is taught in most classrooms or discussed by most critics, it doesn't matter at all that the lines are simply untrue, that exulting in secret is not the most difficult of all things known but the easiest, the most banal, and the most universal of self-delusions. To Auden it did matter. Where Vladimir Nabokov, one of the last of the great modernists, wrote that "art is an intricate game of deception and enchantment," Auden disagreed: "In so far as poetry, or any of the other arts,

can be said to have an ulterior purpose, it is, by telling the truth, to disenchant and disintoxicate." Auden found himself in the curious position of taking art more seriously than did those for whom art was the be-all and end-all, an independent realm with laws of its own. Auden saw that art could never be independent, because it persuades its readers to accept the attitudes it presents so beautifully—attitudes about relations and responsibility that are eventually translated into personal and political action, with results far less beautiful than any poem. If the danger for the autonomous artist is the danger of losing touch with the real world, the danger for the truthtelling artist is that he will grow so concerned with the plain fact that he forgets about art, and becomes too boring for anyone to read. Auden survived this danger through his love of (in his words) "Riddles and all other ways of not calling a spade a spade . . . Complicated verse forms of great technical difficulty, such as Englyns, Drott-Kvaetts, Sestinas, even if their content is trivial ... Conscious theatrical exaggeration. ..." He packed his longer poems with as many complex verse forms as he could fit in—fifty-five in The Age of Anxiety alone—and then ended each long poem by, in effect, snapping his fingers to wake his readers from their aesthetic fascination. At the end of For the Time Being the narrator says of the poem's Christmas pageantry: "Well, so that is that. Now we must dismantle the tree, ..." The end of The Sea and the Mirror admits that in this as in all other works of art the "effects" can never entirely succeed in persuading us of art's reality: "no piece of business, however unimportant, came off." The last pages of The Age of Anxiety echo the conclusion of Finnegans Wake, but where Joyce returns his reader to the start of the book in an endless insomniac cycle of reading and rereading, Auden

W. H. AUDEN / 3 restores his reader to "the actual world where time is real" Auden's passion for truthtelling was a commitment to public service—-a commitment not unlike that held generally by artists and writers up to the eighteenth century. It was only with the romantic revolution that artists began taking it for granted that they were necessarily opposed to society in all its forms, that personal integrity required the individual to reject all institutions. It is a law of intellectual history that a condition which one era regards as a rare calamity, a later era will accept as the norm. Thus the anxious isolation of Hamlet in a rotten society—for William Shakespeare a unique tragedy—becomes, a few centuries later, the conventional self-image of every well-to-do adolescent. Like every young writer since the romantic era, Auden began by rebelling against his personal and literary ancestors, and he spent most of his adult life in voluntary exile from his native England. But through all his years of revolt and exile he remained a product of the English professional middle class, and he embodied its values in his poetry. Only in his late adolescence and early twenties did he think of his art in terms similar to those used by his modernist predecessors. If they were isolated, he felt, he would be even more isolated; such was the necessary course of history. But around the age of twenty-five, when his revolt changed character and became less personal than socialist, he made no effort to renounce his bourgeois upbringing. He read Karl Marx, he said later, in order to become a better bourgeois, not to destroy his society but to save it from destroying itself by its own injustice. The great modernists, when they thought politically at all, also held radical politics, but a radically nostalgic politics of the right, which denounced democracy in favor of the secure aristocracy of an idealized

or imaginary past. Auden's whole career, in contrast, was shaped by his sense of continuity between past and present, by his respect for his literary tradition and personal roots. Where the modernists saw all around them fragments and isolation and longed for some distant wholeness, Auden saw a complex and finally coherent present, with responsibilities that could not be deferred for the sake of an artist's beautiful dreams. Wystan Hugh Auden was born on February 21, 1907, in the medieval city of York in the north of England, where his doctor father worked as a general practitioner. The following year the family moved to the industrial city of Birmingham, where Dr. Auden was appointed to the newly established post of school medical officer; later he became professor of public health at Birmingham University. Auden's mother had been among the first women to take an honors degree (in French) at London University. She then studied to be a nurse, intending to serve with missionaries in Africa, but gave up this plan when she met and married Dr. Auden. She and her husband were both children of Anglican clergymen. Dr. Auden held a detached intellectual attitude to religion, while Mrs. Auden held intense religious convictions and raised her children in the rituals of the High Church. From his father, who was widely read in history, archaeology, and the classics, the young Auden learned the elements of science. From his mother he learned music, emotion, and religion. In later years he traced his homosexuality partly to his strong identification with his mother, an identification strengthened when his father was away from England with the Army Medical Corps during World War I. Isolated from other children by his mental precociousness and physical clumsiness, Auden devoted

4 I AMERICAN much of his childhood from the ages of six to twelve to constructing an imaginary private world. His fantasy was, however, made up from very real objects: "a limestone landscape mainly derived from the Pennine Moors in the North of England, and ... an industry—lead mining." The character of his adult poetry was already implicit in the nature of his childhood imaginary world. His concern was not simply with the symbolic depths of the mines or the personal nostalgia of the lonely moors but also with the practical details of mining machinery, with the ways in which real means led to plausible ends. Later, as a poet, he would differ from predecessors like Thomas Hardy, Yeats, and Eliot in caring less for the intensities of solitary vision or the emotional power of rhetoric than for the ethical complexities of the world in which he and everyone else must choose and act. Once, he recalled of his childhood fantasy, "I had to choose between two types of a certain machine. ... One type I found more sacred or 'beautiful,' but the other type was, as I knew from my reading, the more efficient. At this point I realized that it was my moral duty to sacrifice my aesthetic preference for reality or truth." His adolescence brought a conventional adolescent rebellion. He discovered that he had lost the religious faith his mother had taught him and discovered his homosexuality (which his father eventually accepted, although his mother remained baffled and antagonistic). At school he had fewer difficulties than at home. He showed an aptitude for science and mathematics, but no more interest in literature than might be expected of any intelligent pupil. Until he was fifteen, he saw himself moving toward a career as a mining engineer, or something equally technical and scientific. Then a school friend, filling an awkward silence during a country walk, casually asked if he wrote poetry. He had never thought of doing so, but at that moment he recognized his vocation. Three years

WRITERS later, at Oxford, when he introduced himself to Nevill Coghill, his English tutor, he explained that he intended to be a poet. The tutor observed that this would help with his English studies, by giving him insights into the technical side of the subject. "You don't understand at all," Auden replied. "I mean a great poet." Both at school and at Oxford, Auden was an awesome if slightly comic figure to his contemporaries. His father's library had provided him with arcane knowledge of sex and psychoanalysis, and his intellectual assurance completed the effect. The saving comedy emerged in the extravagance with which he advanced his opinions, opinions liable to change at any moment. Poetically, though, he was little more than a highly competent provincial while he was at school and in his first year at Oxford. At fifteen he had pastiched William Wordsworth, then Walter de la Mare and other twentieth-century traditionalists. At sixteen he discovered Hardy and for more than a year read and imitated no one else. At seventeen he added Edward Thomas, then A. E. Housman, Robert Frost, and Emily Dickinson. Then, at nineteen, in 1926, he discovered T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land and discarded everything he had written earlier. For a few heady months he produced nothing but distilled Eliot. In spring, in his verse, "The itching lover weighed himself / At stations on august machines"; sunlight became "Inexorable Rembrandt rays, which stab / Through clouds as through a rotting factory floor." He proclaimed a severely "classical" poetic dogma to his friends: poetry, he said, must be austere, must ignore public issues and shared meanings, must virtually ignore its own subject, because the subject of a poem was merely the peg on which to hang the poetry. It was another year before he began writing poems in a voice that he recognized as his own. In the summer of 1927, after his second year at

W. H. AUDEN I 5 Oxford, when he was twenty, he wrote a poem he later titled "The Watershed." It marked the watershed between his juvenilia and his adult work and was the earliest poem he preserved between hard covers in his published volumes. "Who stands, the crux left of the watershed," it opens, in radical ambiguity. Are the first two words interrogative or declarative? What is the missing word replaced by the comma? Is the crux a crossroads or a dilemma? And which of its two possible and antithetical meanings is expressed by "watershed"—a dividing line on high ground or a field on low ground? The poem makes all these matters clear in the lines that follow, but the obscurity of the opening, the way it seems to exclude the reader from the poem, proves, in effect, to be the subject of the lines that follow. The poem concerns a "stranger" who stands indecisively at a crossroads looking down over a ruined landscape, one who can never enter the land he observes, can never find the satisfaction he vaguely seeks. "Stranger, turn back again, frustrate and vexed:" commands the voice of the poem: This land, cut off, will not communicate, Be no accessory content to one Aimless for faces rather there than here. Beams from your car may cross a bedroom wall, They wake no sleeper.... In "The Watershed" and the poems of the next year or two, Auden entered the extreme psychological isolation Eliot had explored in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and went ever deeper, to the point where the observing mind and the observed world were not merely isolated but antagonistic. Guarded borders cross the landscape of these early poems, as in "No Change of Place," "Where gaitered gamekeeper with dog and gun / Will shout Turn back'." Even the features on a face, the mouth and eyes, seem "Sentries between

inner and outer." Any movement toward erotic satisfaction (in his early twenties Auden had little hope for any deeper love) is the act of a doomed spy or secret agent: Control of the passes was, he saw, the key To this new district, but who would get it? He, the trained spy, had walked into the trap For a bogus guide, seduced by the old tricks. ... They would shoot, of course, Parting easily who were never joined. Auden's style developed rapidly in these early years, but certain basic elements remained constant. A whole repertory of techniques preserved his isolation from his readers. Few poets have made so many threatening noises: "The game is up for you ... It is later than you think"; "Before you reach the frontier you are caught." His obscurity became notorious, but it was only partly deliberate; in a journal entry he blamed it on his own laziness. What was entirely deliberate, however, was the baffling instability of his tone. He would shift within a few lines from lyric intensity to slapstick comedy, from solemn echoes of ancient epics to transient contemporary slang. There were superficial parallels between this style and the modernist styles of Eliot and Pound, but Auden's purposes were entirely different from theirs. Where The Waste Land and The Cantos echoed older forms to make an ironic contrast between a splendid hierarchical past and a depleted chaotic present, Auden emphasized the continuity between the anxiety and violence of ancient times and of today. Auden found in the past, not a better world, but disasters like those of the present: "The pillar dug from the desert recorded only / the sack of a city." Where Eliot and Pound tended to quote ostentatiously from the high style of the European renaissance, Auden moved further back info the past, to the sad dangerous world of Old English poetry and the

6 I AMERICAN Old Icelandic sagas. And where Eliot and Pound always drew attention to their learned quotations, Auden, whose reading was wider than theirs, made no fuss about his use of earlier literature, no show of erudition. For example, a line quoted above, "Parting easily [two] who were never joined," is translated from an Old English poem "Wulf and Eadwacer." A phrase from "1929," another early poem, "love ... gives less than he expects," is from Anton Chekhov's notebooks; a line about the "restlessness of intercepted growth" is from a book on psychology by Trigant Burrow; and there are hundreds of other examples. If a reader recognizes the source, all well and good; but however else Auden's earliest poems exclude their readers, they never do so by implying that the poet who wrote them is a learned sage whose knowledge lesser mortals can never share. For Auden throughout his career, a poet is one who handles words and poetic forms better than others do, never one whose vision and emotions are stronger or better than anyone else's. Auden collected his earliest short poems in a book titled simply Poems (1930; second edition with slightly different contents, 1933; American edition, 1934). His longer works in this period were the brief play Paid on Both Sides: A Charade (printed in the various editions of Poems) and the long poem in prose and verse The Orators (1932; revised edition, 1934; included in the American edition of Poems). These books quickly established Auden as the major poet of his generation. No poet since Lord Byron achieved such wide fame so early in his career, but his work was widely misunderstood. Early reviewers and critics tended to read Auden's first books in light of the political concerns that entered his work only after 1932, concerns almost absent from his earliest poems, whose conserns were almost wholly psychological. Paid on Both Sides is a compressed psychological tragedy, an expressionistic Romeo and

WRITERS Juliet. Two families in the north of England have been feuding for generations. The origins of the feud have long been forgotten, but as each generation transmits its hatreds to its children the cycle of murder and revenge continues. Abruptly, the son of one family breaks out of the cycle. He is cured of his hatred by a selfrevealing dream that makes clear to him his willing complicity in the feud. Now he rides to the house of his enemies and proposes marriage to their daughter. Up to this point the play reflects the teachings of an American psychologist, Homer Lane, whose work Auden learned about during a year in Berlin (1928-1929) after finishing at Oxford. Lane taught the romantic doctrine that man was naturally good and that neurosis and disease could therefore be cured if one would only obey one's inner impulses. (Freud, in sharp contrast, distrusted the violent impulses of the id and welcomed the civilizing effects of sublimation.) The hero of Paid on Both Sides rejects parental repression and obeys his inner impulse to love. But although Auden briefly allowed his friends to believe he had embraced the optimism of Homer Lane, his play presents a darker and lonelier vision. The hero is murdered on his wedding day, to avenge a killing that he himself had committed before his cure, and the feud resumes. The theme of Paid on Both Sides is the persistence of ancient hatreds into the present. Its style and setting evoke a comparable persistence of the past. The language ranges from the laconic manner and alliterative meters of Old English poetry to modern telegraphese and schoolboy slang. The hero's curative dream mixes patriotic speeches from World War I with passages from a psychology textbook and scraps of the traditional Christmas mummers' play of rural England. The title Paid on Both Sides is a scraping from Beowulf, from a line about a hard bargain, paid on both sides with the lives of friends.

W. H AUDEN I 7 The Orators, three years later, uses similar methods on a more elaborate scale. As in Paid, the setting often seems to shift even within a single sentence. As if in an optical illusion, the book's action takes place simultaneously in a boarding school, a primitive tribe, a suburban home, and a military airfield. This strange sui generis work, subtitled "An English Study," amounts to an anthropological survey of English society. As in more straightforward anthropology, Auden treats his subject apolitically, regarding his society not as the product of deliberate moral and practical choices (as its apologists would claim) but as the unconscious product of myth and ritual, a society powerless to understand itself or to change. The book's focus is the world of school, where the ruling bourgeois learn the rites and customs they will follow in later life. In the first of the book's three parts, "The Initiates," different prose voices record the initiation of a group of schoolboys into their tribal codes of behavior and belief; then into adolescent combativeness and sexuality; finally into middle-aged nostalgia for the lost glories of youth. The initiates are followers of a neurotic hero, whose thoughts, recorded in a "Journal of an Airman," make up the book's second part. The airman tries to organize society around hero worship but is destroyed by his own paranoia. What is especially unsettling about his journal is that it mixes Auden's own verses and opinions with passages designed to indicate the madness of its fictitious "author." (Auden later wrote that The Orators reads like the work of "someone talented but near the border of sanity" and guessed that his reason for writing it was partly therapeutic, "to exorcise certain tendencies in myself by allowing them to run riot in phantasy.") The third part of the book is a series of odes on various aspects of group life and hero worship, ending in a confession of frustration and defeat, and a mock prayer for change. A brief epilogue aban-

dons the whole world described in the book for some unspecified other place that Auden can identify only by saying it is somewhere else: "O where are you going" said reader to rider, "Out of this house"—said rider to reader ... Around the time The Orators was published (1932), Auden began to think of this reader's destination in political terms. For a few months he thought he was in the process of what he called a "conversion to communism"—which never in fact took place. He wrote a few poems that adopted the voice of a communist (this was in the deepest phase of the great economic depression of the 1930's), but a communist of a very idiosyncratic kind, more concerned with a visionary community of love than with basic economic change. Auden was now working as a schoolmaster, but he found education, much as he enjoyed the work, a paradoxical task. "You cannot train children to be good citizens of a state which you despise." When he tried to write an epic poem that would portray the communist struggle for a different and better state, he abandoned it before it was half-finished. "No, I am a bourgeois. I shall not join the C[ommunist] P[arty]," he wrote in a letter to a friend. Yet the sense of isolation in which he began his career was growing intolerable, and he urgently needed a way out. The lonely vigil of Auden's early years, his youthful contempt for the public realm, ended on a warm night in June 1933. That evening, he recalled, he was sitting on a lawn after dinner with three colleagues at the Downs School in Colwall, where he taught, when "... something happened. I felt myself invaded by a power which, though I consented to it, was irresistible and certainly not mine. For the first time in my life I knew exactly—because, thanks to the power, I was doing it—what it means to love

8 I AMERICAN one's neighbor as oneself." Thirty years later he identified the event as a "vision of agape," of religious charity and love. At the time, he thought he was finished with Christianity forever, and he said almost nothing about the experience—beyond asking one of his colleagues on that evening if the feeling had been shared, and learning that it was. He was silent on the details or the cause, but for a short time his writings were suffused with a tone of exaltation unlike anything he had done before. In a poem written within days of the event, "A Summer Night" ("Out on the lawn I lie in bed,..."), he evoked the scene of some peaceable kingdom: Equal with colleagues in a ring I sit on each calm evening, Enchanted as the flowers The opening light draws out of hiding From leaves with all its dove-like pleading Its logic and its powers. That later we, though parted then May still recall these evenings when Fear gave his watch no look; The lion griefs loped from the shade And on our knees their muzzles laid, And Death put down his book. As in his first political writings, he felt his class was doomed, that revolution was imminent— Soon through the dykes of our content The crumpling flood will force a rent —but now he hoped that the love he felt on these evenings might survive as one of the strengths of the new order, As through a child's rash happy cries The drowned voices of his parents rise In unlamenting song. What is especially striking about this poem is its use of regular, almost jaunty meters in a

WRITERS tone of celebration and joy. The modernist poets, especially Eliot and Pound, had reserved serious subjects almost exclusively for free verse. Regular meters, if they could be used at all, were strictly for the purpose of satire or nostalgia, standing as a formal rebuke to the disorder of the modern world. Eliot wrote in 1917 that formal rhymed verse could now have only a limited role; it would not lose its place entirely, but "we need the coming of Satirist ... to prove that the heroic couplet has lost none of its edge.... As for the sonnet I am not so sure." In the same 1933 summer when Auden began writing nonsatiric rhymed verse he also began writing not merely sonnets but whole sequences of sonnets. At first these preserved their conventional status as love poetry, but within a few years Auden was using sonnets for historical and mythical subjects on the largest possible scale; the sequence "In Time of War" (1938) extends without implausibility from the creation of the world to the present moment of crisis. The whole character of Auden's work changed drastically after his vision of agape in 1933. Earlier he had assumed that his work must take the next logical step in the modernist revolution, extending the line laid down by Yeats, Pound, and Eliot. This early sense that he must work according to historical necessity, not by personal choice, had been encouraged by modernism itself, which took far more interest in the aesthetic intensity of the unique moment or the large determined cycles of history than it did in personal choice and the consequences of choice. Modernism emphasized formal innovation in art, but determined necessity in human affairs. Auden, in the mid-1930's, broke with modernism by restoring traditional meters in his art and by emphasizing freedom and choice in his vision of mankind. When he wrote a love poem, such as the untitled one that begins "Fish in the unruffled

W. H. AUDEN I 9 lakes," the lover's beauty was important, but not as important as the lover's personal decision to love: ... I must bless, I must praise That you, my swan, who have All gifts that to the swan Impulsive Nature gave, The majesty and pride, Last night should add Your voluntary love. "Swan," "majesty," "pride," and the poetic diction in which Auden sets these words—all derive from the love poetry of Yeats. But in acknowledging Yeats's preeminence as a love poet Auden corrected a crucial fault in Yeats's vision, his failure to take account of the voluntary quality of human relations. Elsewhere in the same poem Auden makes comparable references to "goodness carefully worn" and "Duty's conscious wrong" (italics added). Because modernist poetry took little interest in choice and its consequences, the art to which it was most closely allied was the relatively static art of painting. In Yeats, Lawrence, Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Wallace Stevens, reality is most strikingly evoked by means of visual images. Auden deliberately broke this entangling alliance between poetry and painting, almost to the point of banishing visual images from his poetry entirely and replacing them with terms from the fields of ethics and morals, as in "Lullaby" (italics added): Lay your sleeping head, my love, Human on my faithless arm; Time and fevers burn away Individual beauty from Thoughtful children, and the grave Proves the child ephemeral: But in my arms till break of day Let the living creature lie, Mortal, guilty, but to me The entirely beautiful.

In all his writings from the mid-1930's Auden reiterated that the human world is the product of choices, not necessity. Where Yeats and Eliot dreamed in different ways of escaping from the world of time into the serenity of timelessness, Auden constantly turned back to the immediate problems of love and politics. Almost everything he wrote referred at some point to the difference between the world of nature and that of humanity. Both derived their energies from the life force that Auden called, after Freud's example, Eros. But in nature Eros made all the decisions for its creatures; animals and plants "knew their station and were good for ever." In individual men and women Eros has abdicated its authority to the individual will. Each of us is free to choose whether to "build the Just City" or to seek "the suicide pact, the romantic / Death." The instinctive powers of Eros insisted only on finding expression; in the human world they did not insist on any special kind of expression. If they were denied expression as love or art, they would emerge in distorted forms instead, as psychosomatic disease or the collective hatred of war. So although Auden wrote more love poems during the 1930's than at any other time in his career, they were poems from which the shadow of political or personal disaster was seldom distant. "A Bride in the 30's," which began in the luxuriant erotic rhythms of a line like "Easily, my dear, you move, easily, your head," quickened, only a few stanzas later, to the martial beat of "Ten thousand of the desperate marching by / Five feet, six feet, seven feet high." It was not enough to withdraw from politics to the pleasures of the bed: "Hitler and Mussolini in their wooing poses" made an appeal not unlike the poet's to his love, and the poet knew it. Personal Eros could be as possessive and damaging as the political one. In another poem he recognized "How insufficient is / The endearment and the look" "Before the evil and the good."

10 I AMERICAN The same kinds of choice that set the course of a personal life also set the course of nations. As on one hand the Great Depression exposed the weakness of capitalist society, and on the other the rise of fascism threatened to put an end to democracy, it seemed crucial to Auden and many of his contemporaries to become didactic artists, to educate their audience in the ways of responsible choice. Although Auden's sympathies were clearly socialist, he knew that he would violate his didactic purposes if he tried to dictate the choices others should make: Poetry is not concerned with telling people what to do, but with extending our knowledge of good and evil, perhaps making the necessity for action more urgent and its nature more clear, but only leading us to the point where it is pbssible for us to make a rational and moral choice. This principle was easier, at first, to enunciate than to follow. In the 1930's, too often for his own comfort, his sense of political urgency led him to try to tell people what to do, even when he was by no means certain what he ought to do himself. His most important political works in the 1930's vwere commissioned by the Group Theatre of London. The Group had been founded in 1932 to pioneer modern stage techniques in England, and only later added political purposes to its aesthetic ones. Auden's first work for the Group was the playlet The Dance of Death (1933). On paper this seems a perfunctory trifle, but-on stage, with music and dancing, it had a notable success. Auden had no use for the conventionally realistic theater of his day but did not wish to follow Yeats's withdrawal of poetic drama into the symbolic intensities of drawing-room theater. Instead, arriving independently at many of the techniques used by Bertolt Brecht, he adopted the styles of the cabaret, music hall, and revue in an attempt to establish a popular poetic drama, without the

WRITERS

archaism or pomposity that damaged most of the recent efforts in that form. The ostensible subject of The Dance of Death is the decline of the middle classes, whose death wish and death throes are mimed by a dancer. The dancer and a chorus of singers and actors illustrate various bourgeois evasions of social change—romantic fantasy, mysticism, nationalism, fads in health and sex, with songs appropriate to each—until the dancer collapses. Karl Marx strides on stage to the tune of Mendelssohn's wedding march and pronounces the dancer dead of economic causes; and the play ends. The conclusion is a bit too abrupt and absurd to give much comfort to any committed Marxist, and Auden later called the play "a nihilist leg-pull." Through much of this period, when critics generally regarded Auden as a communist sympathizer, the newspaper of the Communist party, the Daily Worker, kept complaining about his severe lapses from party orthodoxy. His next play, The Dog Beneath the Skin (1935), was the first of three written in collaboration with the novelist Christopher Isherwood. Again using techniques from music hall and cabaret, Auden now adopted a more straightforward didactic purpose. An improbable plot about a naive young hero's search for his village's missing heir (who is in fact disguised as the dog who tags along on the search) serves largely as an excuse for a satiric tour of Europe, modeled loosely on Voltaire's Candide. The play is designed to be an easy lesson in history. The village England of the opening scene is comfortably Edwardian, its characters singing in the rhythms of Gilbert and Sullivan. The hero's travels take him from Europe's tired old monarchies to its new lunatic fascism, introducing him along the way to decadent sexuality, the power of wealth and privilege, and a few hints of socialist revolution offstage. Finally he returns to his village, able at last to see the reactionary viciousness behind its innocent fa-

W. H. AUDEN I 11 cade. As the play ends he and the village heir— now out of the dogskin—leave to join "the army of the other side." A chorus, which from the start has been explaining the action to the audience, now urges us to "Repent... Unite ... Act." This triad of commands derives less from any political sympathy than from the closing exhortations in The Waste Land to give, sympathize, and control. The "army of the other side" and its purposes have never appeared on stage, except for one sympathizer who dies to the tune of a comic Wagnerian pastiche. The future liberator of English society, as Stephen Spender observed, is someone "whom the writers have not put in the picture because they do not know what he looks like, although they thoroughly support him." Despite such ambiguities and cross-purposes, Auden was now generally accepted as a propaganda poet, a spokesman for his literary generation. He did his best to sabotage this impression in the next play that he and Isherwood wrote, but almost no one, possibly not even Isherwood, fully understood what he was doing. The play was The Ascent of F6 (1936), a parable of the self-destructiveness of the pursuit of fame. Now the political satire has diminished to perfunctory gestures. The focus is on the psychology of the hero, superficially based on Lawrence of Arabia but ultimately a metaphoric self-portrait of Auden himself. The hero, Michael Ransom, is a mountaineer (metaphorically, an artist) who climbs mountains for the challenge of it but also partly as a neurotic release. Denied his mother's love in childhood, he is constantly seeking admiration as an adult. When the British government asks him to climb a peak on a colonial border for the sake of a propaganda victory, Ransom, despite his dreams of conquering that very peak, refuses to make his art serve a political cause. But when his mother adds her voice to those who insist he make the climb, his resistance fails. As he as-

cends the peak he is taken for a hero by the masses, who follow his efforts on radio and in newspapers; and he begins to dream of himself as a savior for mankind. But in conquering the mountain he destroys himself. His companions are seized with the nationalistic excitement of the race to the top, and he accedes to their wish to make the last part of the climb in a dangerous blizzard. He dies at the summit. Behind the story is Auden's conviction that the fame he had won for his political writing was a fatal temptation, that his propagandistic work, however much it delighted his audience, betrayed his art. When he wrote the play he was at the height of his fame, but he decided at that moment that he must someday leave England if he were to escape the temptations that he could not resist if he stayed. In the months after finishing F6 Auden kept away from direct political statements. He collected his poems of 1932-1936—toning down some of the politics of the earlier ones—in a volume that his British publishers titled Look, Stranger! (1936). Auden disliked the buttonholing tone of this and had the American edition titled On This Island. (He dedicated the book to Erika Mann, Thomas Mann's daughter, whom he married in 1935 in order to provide her with a British passport when the Nazis took away her German citizenship.) In a long poem written during the summer of 1936, Letter to Lord Byron, he adopted an urbanely ironic tone on politics, poetry, and himself—a comic tone but one entirely unlike the slapstick of The Orators. The poem keeps emphasizing the very real problems of society and art, both of which it discusses in materialist terms derived from Marx, but emphasizes also that artists are not the most likely source for solutions to these problems. Against the romantic and modernist dogma of the artist-hero, inspired by a deeper and sharper vision than his fellowmen, Auden's poem traces the artist's isolation to the rise of

12 I AMERICAN the rentier class in the eighteenth century, which made it possible for artists to devote their lives to writing what they wished, as they lived on their dividends—or starved heroically. Against the heroic stature he himself had begun to achieve among his contemporaries, Auden offers many stanzas of self-deflating autobiography—for example, about his Oxford days under the influence of Eliot and Eliot's quarterly magazine the Criterion: All youth's intolerant certainty was mine as I faced life in a double-breasted suit; I bought and praised but did not read Aquinas, At the Criterion's verdict I was mute, Though Arnold's I was ready to refute; And through the quads dogmatic words rang clear, "Good poetry is classic and austere." So much for Art. Of course Life had its passions too; The student's flesh like his imagination Makes facts fit theories and has fashions too. He wrote much of this poem in Iceland, where he spent a summer, partly as a holiday from European politics, partly to seek out the country of his distant ancestors. Auden's sense of the past tended to focus, not on the renaissance grandeurs or vague arcadias that modernism sought by the Mediterranean, but on the colder clarity and sanity of the North. To visit Iceland was to find a place where historical nostalgia was impossible, where the landscapes of the sagas remained unaltered. It was a cure, he hoped, for the political madness further south. But while he was there he heard the first news of the Spanish Civil War. He had no doubt that Francisco Franco's invasion of Republican Spain was a trial run for a fascist war on the whole of Europe. There could be no es-

WRITERS

cape. Now political themes reentered his work, no longer with the old jokey ambiguities but in a tone of urgency and even despair. The great forces of history seemed to call everyone to action. Early in 1937 he went to Spain. He intended to drive an ambulance for the Republican forces but was instead put to work broadcasting propaganda. After two months he cut his journey short and returned to England. Only later did his friends realize that he had been profoundly disillusioned. Like many others who went to Spain hoping to serve an ideal, he found instead that the Republicans had divided into vindictive factions and the Stalinists were taking charge. He still regarded fascism as an absolute evil, but it was no longer possible to deceive himself that those who opposed one form of evil might not prefer another one instead. When he returned to England he wrote "Spain," a poem with grand rhetorical gestures and a concluding summons to action—one that he felt the urgency of the times demanded but in which he no longer believed: The stars are dead; the animals will not look: We are left alone with our day, and the time is short and History to the defeated May say Alas but cannot help or pardon. These lines are based on Auden's characteristic distinction between nature and man, and on his equally characteristic insistence on choice. But they also affirm that history will not pardon those who lose. If the final phrases are read metaphorically, they seem innocuous enough: history, they seem to argue, gives no second chance; we must act now. But Auden was not writing metaphorically when he used the word "pardon." This word and its fraternal twin "forgiveness" were gradually to become the crucial words in his poetic vocabulary. Both words pointed to that voluntary acceptance of

W. H. AUDEN I 13 another's imperfection, which, in both the personal and political realms, is essential to sympathy and love. To deny pardon to the defeated is, as Auden later charged against his own poem, "to equate goodness with success." In a ballad written about a year after "Spain," "As I Walked Out One Evening," he portrayed lovers who fantasized about their perfect loyalty to each other and their loved one's perfection—a fantasy that denied the need for forgiveness. But in answer to these doomed fantasies, the chiming clocks warn instead: "You shall love your crooked neighbour / With your crooked heart." The addition of the word "crooked" is not a denial of the biblical injunction but an explanation of what it means and how it must be obeyed. Yet in his political writings in the late 1930's what Auden said was still often in conflict with his beliefs. On the Frontier (1938), the last of the Auden-Isherwood plays, is a tragedy of war and separation, ending with dying lovers reciting verses that sound very much like a Christian hymn to a better world, but Auden felt obliged to add some passages of versified propaganda. It scarcely mattered; the whole play was too tired and sketchy to mean much to its authors or audience. But a much finer book, Auden and Isherwood's Journey to a War (1939), a report in prose and verse on their visit to the Sino-Japanese War, is marked by a similar contradiction. Auden devoted all his skills to the sonnet sequence "In Time of War," tracing the whole history of mankind and the moral causes and effects of war but he then tacked on a verse "Commentary" that included propagandistic fantasies of civic unity in the face of a common enemy. The real state of "unity" in China between the Nationalists and the Communists was very different. And when World War II finally began, "September 1, 1939" (a throwback to a manner he

had otherwise abandoned earlier that year) included yet another denial of his convictions about the voluntary aspects of love: Hunger allows no choice To the citizen or the police; We must love one another or die. This, like the conclusion of "Spain," seems perfectly reasonable, and when Auden discarded this stanza and then the whole poem he puzzled his critics. But the point behind the lines is that love is a hunger that must be satisfied, not a voluntary gift of mutual forgiveness. The equation of love with hunger struck Auden as a lie— memorable, stirring, but still a lie. He ended a poem of the 1950's, "First Things First," with the line: "Thousands have lived without love, not one without water." By the start of 1939 Auden no longer found tolerable his public role as court poet to the English Left. He still made political gestures, but more from a wish to support his left-wing friends than from any deep convictions. Since writing The Ascent of ¥6 he had spent much of his time traveling around Europe and then the world, as if searching for someplace other than England in which to live. When he and Isherwood were on the way back from the war in China, in the summer of 1938, they spent two weeks in America. They decided to return there permanently. They sailed for New York in January 1939. In England their departure was widely felt as the end of an era. In America their arrival was hardly noticed—which was precisely what Auden hoped for. He later said that in England he always felt as if he were living among his family, and it was this sense of family obligation that led him to write in ways he considered dishonest and inauthentic. Even his politically charged writing fulfilled the expectations of his

14 I AMERICAN audience that a bright young man must be a rebel; and Auden knew furthermore that his political writings largely served as preaching to the converted and made no practical difference. In America, a nation that has never taken its writers as seriously as England takes its, he would be free from all temptation to please an audience that wanted to hear his familiar formulas. A few weeks before he left for New York he was staying in Brussels, where he saw the Brueghels in the art museum. What he learned from these paintings was a rebuke to his own resonant calls to action. He realized that the most important events never occurred under a historical spotlight, never enjoyed the thrilling benefit of Yeatsian heroicizing rhetoric. The truth was less beautiful, more disturbing. Brueghel, in paintings like The Massacre of the Innocents and The Fall of Icarus, made this point quietly and exactly ("Musee des Beaux Arts"): About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters: how well they understood Its human position; how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along; They never forgot That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot... In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away Quite leisurely from the disaster; the

ploughman may Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, But for him it was not an important failure; ... and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen

WRITERS Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on. Earlier he had written about opposing ideological armies, with their pure causes. In "Spain," in stanzas dropped soon after he reached America, Franco's Nationalists were the manifestations of neurosis and fear, the People's Army the flower of tenderness and love. Now Auden could not be so self-congratulatory. Brueghel showed how we all turn away from suffering. The next step was to understand that we all cause it. In "Herman Melville," one of the first poems he wrote in America, Auden saw that "Evil is unspectacular and always human, / And shares our bed and eats at our own table...." Auden was beginning to immerse himself in American literature and the American language. Within a few months, in the long poem New Year Letter, although he wrote that "England to me is my own tongue," he could present this sweeping survey of American history and landscape as a backdrop for his continuing focus on the problem of choice: A long time since it seems to-day The Saints in Massachusetts Bay Heard theocratic COTTON preach And legal WINTHROFS Little Speech; Since MISTRESS HUTCHINSON was tried By those her Inner Light defied, And WILLIAMS questioned Moses' law Long since inventive JEFFERSON Fought realistic HAMILTON, Pelagian versus Jansenist; But the same heresies exist. Time makes old formulas look strange, Our properties and symbols change, But round the freedom of the Will

W. H. AUDEN I 15 Our disagreements center still, Here, as in Europe, is dissent, This raw untidy continent Where the Commuter can't forget The Pioneer; and even yet A Volkerwanderung occurs: Resourceful manufacturers Trek southward by progressive stages For sites with no floor under wages, No ceiling over hours; and by Artistic souls in towns that lie Out in the weed and pollen belt The need for sympathy is felt, And east to hard New York they come; And self-respect drives Negroes from The one-crop and race-hating delta To northern cities helter-skelter; And in jalopies there migrates A rootless tribe from windblown states To suffer further westward where The tolerant Pacific air Makes logic seem so silly, pain Subjective, what he seeks so vain The wanderer may die; and kids, When their imagination bids, Hitch-hike a thousand miles to find The Hesperides that's on their mind. Auden's early months in America, both in New York and on the travels that produced these lines, seemed filled with exhilarating renewals and also a calm sense of purposeful serenity. He gathered the poems he had written since 1936 in a volume entitled Another Time (1940), as if signaling that he had begun something new. "For the first time," he wrote a friend, "I am leading a life which remotely approximates to the way I think I ought to live." Most important, perhaps, was that he had fallen in love. His earlier affairs had been, he knew, temporary and had done little to break through his personal isolation. In the spring of

1939 he met a college student named Chester Kallman, a young poet who offered the right mixture of personal similarities and differences that seemed to Auden essential for a faithful love. Auden had always disapproved of his own homosexuality on the grounds that it resulted in a species of narcissism, in which the loved object was a version of the lover himself. To counter this he had tried to love people who were different from himself, less intellectual and introspective, more physically confident. Now he recognized in Kallman someone who shared his passion for language, his wit, but who was different enough in class and background (American Jewish petit bourgeois) to prevent narcissism from taking hold. Auden thought of their relationship as a marriage, and the story of a marriage began to emerge in his poetry. In 1940 he wrote "In Sickness and in Health," a meditation on marriage that takes its title from the wedding service. Two years later he wrote "Mundus et Infans," about the birth of a baby, and "Many Happy Returns," about the upbringing of a young child. About twenty-five years later it was time for an "Epithalamium" written in a parental tone for the younger generation as it began its own marriages. He also began, in 1939-1940, a slow return to the religion he thought he had abandoned. In Spain, in 1937, he had been surprised by his own disturbed feelings at the sight of churches closed or destroyed by the Republicans. "The feeling was far too intense to be the result of a mere liberal dislike of intolerance," he wrote later. Soon after his return from Spain he met the writer Charles Williams, who seemed to him, as to many others, an example of saintliness. The liberal tenets that Auden had taken largely for granted as the basis for progress and morals seemed almost overthrown by the rise of Hitler, who had come to power in one of the best-educated and intellectually sophisticated

16 I AMERICAN countries of Europe—despite the liberal assumption that education led directly to right actions. By what standards could he affirm that Hitler was absolutely wrong, that to oppose him was right? The answer seemed inevitably to have something to do with the moral absolutes of religion and the religious sense of original sin that made the lure of fascism comprehensible, not some strange violation of human nature beyond understanding. Religion proposed an ultimate moral truth that was real and absolute even if no human intelligence could fully encompass it. Auden returned to Christianity largely by an intellectual process that involved matters like these, but he was helped along the way by his memories of the emotional beliefs of his childhood and by the personal example of figures like Charles Williams. His religious beliefs had almost nothing of the supernatural to them. Instead he found in religion an intellectual sense of the coherence of things, especially the relation of actions and consequences, a relation that is the basis of ethics. The moral law, he said, was not like a flawed human legal code but like the laws of physics or chemistry. Just as one did not violate the laws of physics by jumping out the window, one did not violate the moral law by committing murder. What the law determined in each case was the necessary consequence of a free action: the jumper lands with a thud, the murderer isolates himself from the human community, from all opportunity for trust and peace. In the midst of his reconversion Auden wrote New Year Letter (published with other poems in The Double Man, 1941), the American passages of which were quoted above. This is a 1,700-line philosophical poem, moving, as Auden did in his conversion, from abstract speculation to personal prayer. By any standards, it is an astonishingly powerful and important poem. That the heir to Eliot's free-verse fragments should have said good-bye to all that

WRITERS

and written a poem in eighteenth-century couplets that included—without Joycean irony— the styles of history, criticism, and philosophy that modern poetry had mostly banished from its pages, and that he made it all work, seemed the most unlikely of all possible literary events. Yet the Augustan style of New Year Letter is consistent with a central aspect of Auden's earliest, most modern-sounding poems. It makes explicit the assumptions hidden in his earlier borrowings from Old English. In both cases he treated the past as something useful to the present, not as something lost or destroyed that now must be mourned. The poem joins romantic energy to Augustan decorum and is, in effect, Auden's Faust. Like Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's enormous drama, Auden's poem begins with a restless search among alternative ways of action and understanding; follows this with the temptations offered by "Poor cheated Mephistopheles"; then moves through vast ranges of history and myth (even versions of Fausfs "die Mutter," the source of all forms, in Auden's "The Terrible, the Merciful, the Mothers"); and ends with a hymn to the eternal feminine in the person of Auden's friend Elizabeth Mayer: Dear friend Elizabeth, dear friend These days have brought me, may the end I bring to the grave's dead-line be More worthy of your sympathy Than the beginning; We fall down in the dance, we make The old ridiculous mistake, But always there are such as you Forgiving, helping what we do. Or, in Goethe's concluding words: "Das EwigWeibliche zieht uns hinan." Auden's politics had changed with his religion. In his first reaction against his 1930's work he briefly espoused pacifism during the summer of 1939. But by early 1940 he wrote in

W. H. AUDEN I 17 a letter that he had "absolutely no patience with Pacifism as a political movement, as if one could do all the things in one's personal life that create wars and then pretend that to refuse to fight is a sacrifice and not a luxury." Although some English writers loudly charged him with fleeing the war by staying in America, Auden quietly went to the British embassy and volunteered to return. (He was told that only technically skilled people were needed.) In New York, with no family to live among, Auden established a household of his own. Around 1940-1941 he lived in a large house in Brooklyn populated by artists and writers—at various times Carson McCullers, Louis MacNeice, Benjamin Britten, Richard Wright, Paul Bowles—where, in the midst of bohemian chaos, he took the role of bourgeois paterfamilias, banning politics from the dinner table, seeing to it that the rent was collected and paid. Much as he enjoyed New York, he decided that it was time to learn more of America and arranged to teach at the University of Michigan during 1941-1942, where the atmosphere might be more quiet. In the summer before he left, the growing difficulties in his relationship with Kallman reached the point of crisis. While Auden had committed himself to sexual loyalty and faithfulness, Kallman was constitutionally unable to accept such domesticity, and in 1941 he began an affair with someone else. Auden was almost certainly alluding to his feelings about this when he wrote some years later that "providentially—for the occupational disease of poets is frivolity—I was forced to know in person what it is like to feel oneself in the prey of demonic powers, in both the Greek and Christian sense, stripped of self-control and self-pity, behaving like a ham actor in a Strindberg play." When the crisis abated he and Kallman agreed to have no further sexual relations with each other but to continue in many respects living as if in a marriage. For most of the rest of their lives they

shared the same household, and in later years they developed the domestic habits of long-married couples, routinely sharing errands, finishing each other's sentences. The crisis left Auden's poetry with a new depth of feeling, less showy than much of his earlier work, more wise and self-aware. In Michigan, in 1941-1942, he wrote a Christmas oratorio, For the Time Being, intended for setting by Benjamin Britten. It was animated by popular styles and contemporary satire, but its Christmas celebration was shadowed by its "apprehension at the thought / Of Lent and Good Friday which cannot, after all, now / Be very far off." Auden once again used his technique of conflating, rather than contrasting, present and past in his version of the Christmas story. He explained the technique in a letter to his father: Sorry you are puzzled by the Oratorio. Perhaps you were expecting a purely historical account as one might give of the battle of Waterloo, whereas I was trying to treat it as a religious event which eternally recurs every time it is accepted. Thus the historical fact that the shepherds were shepherds is religiously accidental—the religious fact is that they were the poor and humble of this world for whom at this moment the historical expression is the city-proletariat, and so on with all the other figures. ... I am not the first to treat the Christian data in this way; until the 18th Cent, it was always done, in the Mystery Plays for instance or any Italian paintings. It is only in the last two centuries that religion has been "humanized," and therefore treated historically as something that happened a long time ago; hence the nursery picture of Jesus in a nightgown and a Parsifal beard. After his year at Michigan Auden expected to join the U.S. Army but was rejected by the draft board for medical reasons in September 1942. He spent the rest of the war teaching at

18 I AMERICAN Swarthmore College, where he wrote another long poem, The Sea and the Mirror: A Commentary on Shakespeare's "The Tempest" (this and his previous long poem were collected in book form as For the Time Being, 1944). The events of the poem occur after the end of Shakespeare's play, as Prospero makes a farewell speech to Ariel while packing to leave the island, and the other characters then report, as they sail home, what they learned there. The poem is Auden's most elaborate study in the range and powers of his art, a rebuke to the romantic idea of the autonomy of poetic imagination. Prospero, in his long opening poem, is the type of artist who cannot see anything except in terms of art (perhaps without intending to, Auden made Prospero into a poet like Wallace Stevens: "On walks through winter woods, a bird's dry carcass / Agitates the retina with novel images, / A stranger's quiet collapse in a noisy street / Is the beginning of much lively speculation"), and when he comments tartly on the other characters in the play he can see in them none of the depths he casually attributes to himself. Prospero sounds persuasive—the portrait is so vivid that more than one critic was trapped into reading it as Auden's self-portrait—but the rest of the poem shows how limited and ignorant his faith in the imagination has left him. In the middle section the other characters make their own speeches, culminating in a triumphantly beautiful villanelle for Miranda. But once we have been persuaded of the depths of this splendid sequence of poems, Auden brushes it aside as it had earlier brushed aside Prospero. In the third section Caliban speaks to the audience, reminding us at the start that the play we have seen, and the poem we have read, was all make-believe, all fiction: "If now," he begins, "having dismissed your hired impersonators with verdicts ranging from the laudatory orchid to the disgusted and disgusting egg, ..." Auden's Caliban is the voice

WRITERS

of nature, of the energy and variety of life, of Eros itself. And since nature—as Auden emphasized in earlier years—has no personal voice of its own, it must speak in a borrowed one; hence Caliban's adoption of the most mannered of all English styles, the prose of the late novels of Henry James. This style allows for the greatest possible range of content and manner, from the vulgarly proverbial to the aristocratically ornate. Caliban uses his all-inclusive voice to record the failures not only of art but of all secular ambition and hope. He pictures us at the end in a moment of existential urgency, when "we do at least see ourselves as we are, neither cosy nor playful, but swaying out on the ultimate wind-whipped cornice that overhangs the unabiding void." Only at this moment (the idea derives from the New Testament via Kierkegaard) can the choice of religious faith be made and solid ground again rest under our feet. Only now can the ultimate order and coherence of the universe be acknowleged—and so "the sounded note is the restored relation." The Sea and the Mirror concludes with a love song spoken by Ariel, the disembodied voice of art, to Caliban, the solid disorder of life, as Ariel reminds Caliban that art has no real wish to be autonomous or self-sufficient, but knows that it depends on the flawed sad variety of mortal life for its very existence. In 1945 Auden's Collected Poetry appeared. Critics had begun to charge that his earliest work was his best, so he arranged the book not chronologically or thematically, but by alphabetical order of first lines. This was an implicit challenge to critics to see whether they could tell by style alone whether one of his poems was early or late. Auden disliked the book's title— "collected" implied finality, which at thirtyeight he hoped was untrue—but the publisher insisted. Among the changes Auden made for this volume were wholesale deletions of political work, the breaking-up of Paid on Both Sides

W. H. AUDEN I 19 and The Orators into disconnected short poems (in later years, feeling less irritated by his younger self, he restored both works to their complete forms), and the addition of ironic, sometimes flippant titles to poems that had been untitled in earlier books. The volume eventually sold more than fifty thousand copies. At the end of the war Auden left his Swarthmore job and worked for a few months with the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, in a unit of civilians and soldiers studying the effect of bombing on civilian morale in Germany. At first Auden thought the work a "statistical boondoggle" ("We asked them if they minded being bombed."). But his unit learned that morale increased as bombing did—a conclusion ignored by the military, who had to relearn it twenty years later in Vietnam. Back from Germany, Auden settled again in New York, in Greenwich Village. There he worked at editing and reviewing, gave occasional lectures and, in the 1960's, went out across America on an annual reading tour. He and Robert Frost were the only poets able to make a living from their writing. Auden came to regard himself as one of a vanishing breed, the Man of Letters, who wrote not because he was devoted to the lonely discipline of his art but because his writing served a public function; Edmund Wilson was the closest parallel. In a late poem he referred to the audience of poets as "our clients"—in the same way doctors or lawyers have clients, who come to them for professional services they are trained to provide. In New York, Auden finished the last of his long poems, The Age of Anxiety (1947). A "baroque eclogue" set in a Third Avenue bar, it records the intersecting thoughts of four characters—loosely embodying the four Jungian faculties of thought, intuition, feeling, and sensation—through an All Souls' Night that ends in varieties of religious negation and affirmation. The verse is Old English alliterative, but with

modern idioms and adapted into a wide range of lyrical, narrative, and epigrammatic forms. This modification of the Old Icelandic drottkvaett is characteristic: Hushed is the lake of hawks Bright with our excitement, And all the sky of skulls Glows with scarlet roses; The melter of men and salt Admires the drinker of iron: Bold banners of meaning Blaze o'er the host of days. As in the Welsh model, this identifies the four traditional elements by way of riddles: the lake of hawks is the air; the sky of skulls, earth; the melter of men, fire; and the drinker of iron, water, which rusts it. Nineteen forty-eight through 1957 were the Mediterranean years of this least Mediterranean of poets. Every spring he closed his apartment in New York and spent about six months on the island of Ischia, near Naples. He deliberately chose a climate and culture with as little as possible in common with the Nordic landscapes he found most congenial. In "Good-Bye to the Mezzogiorno" (1958) he came "Out of a gothic North" In middle-age hoping to twig from What we are not what we might be next. . . . He was too much the product of his English roots ever to settle in: If we try To "go southern,"we spoil in no time, we grow Flabby, dingily lecherous, and Forget to pay bills:...

but his years in Ischia altered the character of his poetry and his beliefs. In his early years in America he had focused virtually all his attention on the solitary choices

20 I AMERICAN of the individual mind. Now he wrote about the world of the flesh and about the world of the citizen, of mankind in landscapes and cities. The great personal questions of faith and doubt he had largely resolved. It was now time to write the poetry needed by an age in which the heroic vision of the romantic artist, alone with his imagination, had grown trivial. It was in which the heroic image is not the nomad wanderer through the desert or over the ocean, but the less exciting figure of the builder, who renews the ruined walls of the city. And to give a local habitation and a name to this solid and rooted figure, he began writing poems about the unheroic body. Poets in the romantic and modernist tradition had always found the body difficult to write about in any plausible way, probably because they were embarrassed by an aspect of themselves that—unlike the works of their imagination—they clearly did not make by themselves and that shared so many qualities with the common run of mankind. Eliot, until the last years of his life, hated the flesh and all it did. Lawrence, dying of consumption, fantasized the body as a repository of sacred energies that no real human body could ever have contained. Yeats found the body interesting only if ideally and impossibly beautiful or grotesquely ugly. Pound, until he was locked up, scarcely noticed the body at all. In contrast to all these, Auden saw that the body had rights of its own, that it was also an object which everyone put to use—"my accomplice now, / My assassin to be"—yet despite the isolating acts of the individual will the body does its best to recover, "restoring / The order we try to destroy, the rhythm / We spoil out of spite." It is "The flesh we die but it is death to pity" (to look down on as inferior to the mind) the one aspect of ourselves that sees through every lie we try to tell and suffers the strain of

WRITERS

our mental disorder. At the close of Auden's long historical meditation "Memorial for the City" (1949), the flesh itself speaks: Without me Adam would have fallen irrevocably with Lucifer; he would never have been able to cry Ofelix culpa. I fell asleep when Diotima spoke of love;... I was the just impediment to the marriage of Faustus with Helen; I know a ghost when I see one. I was innocent of the sin of the Ancient Mariner; time after time I warned Captain Ahab to accept happiness. As for Metropolis, that too-great city; her delusions are not mine. Her speeches impress me little, her statistics less;... At the place of my passion her photographers are gathered together; but I shall rise again to hear her judged. Auden's one article of religious faith that stood beyond the world visible to science was his belief in the resurrection of the body at the end of time, a belief that took the body seriously and on the body's own terms. "In Praise of Limestone" (1948) is Auden's calm hymn to a landscape that "dissolves in water," which in its pliability and change is an image for the body itself. It is a personal landscape as well, the Pennine Hills of his English childhood and the hills of northern Italy. He makes no spectacular claims for this small and local setting, which he knows has neither grandeur nor historical importance to recommend it. (Neither, of course, has the body.) What both limestone landscape and human flesh do, however, is rebuke the romantic poet's celebration

W. H. AUDEN I 21 of his mind and the scientific observer's concern for the inhuman spaces of atoms or galaxies. The scientist is right, his distant places are important. The poem recalls only that there is also a human landscape of responsibility and love. The negative image of the human landscape of "In Praise of Limestone" is the "plain without a feature, bare and brown," of "The Shield of Achilles." This is a place—or a nonplace— where all identity and sympathy are absent, where nameless children grow who ... never heard Of any world where promises were kept, Or one could weep because another wept. Auden's verse form in much of his late work is largely a twentieth-century invention but one that stands outside the mainstream of modernism. He uses lines arranged by the number of syllables, without regular rhymes or regular patterns of stress. The form of "In Praise of Limestone" is alternating lines of thirteen and eleven syllables, with adjacent vowels (and vowels and h) arbitrarily counted as a single vowel, so that the in- or -ly home each count as one syllable only—a practice with a long classical ancestry. Thus: If it form the one landscape that we, the inconstant ones, Are consistently homesick for, this is chiefly Because it dissolves in water. Mark these rounded slopes With their surface fragrance of thyme and, beneath.... Auden learned syllabic verse from Marianne Moore, and it was also used by Robert Bridges and other poets earlier in the century but without Auden's range or depth. What syllables made possible was a form that had all the regularity and order of traditional meters without in any way sounding archaic or anachronistic.

They permitted the formal pleasures of older poetry, but the understatement with which they asserted their formal properties allowed them to accommodate what Auden called the characteristic style of modern poetry, "an intimate tone of voice, the speech of one person addressing another person, not a large audience." When a poem required a relaxed tone of voice, long-lined syllables provided room for expansiveness. When more intensity was needed, Auden tightened the form by using shorter lines and extensive internal rhyming: Simultaneously, as soundlessly, Spontaneously, suddenly As, at the vaunt of the dawn, the kind Gates of the body fly open To its world beyond, the gates of the mind, The horn gate and the ivory gate Swing to, swing shut, instantaneously. ... These lines open a sequence of poems titled Horae Canonicae—canonical hours, the hours of daily prayer. After The Age of Anxiety Auden turned from long poems to connected sequences of shorter poems. The seven Bucolics of 1952-1953 concern different ways of life appropriate to different landscapes. The seven Horae Canonicae poems of 1949-1954 have a larger and more ambitious subject, the relation of individuals and their personal acts to the life of the city, and the necessary connection between civilized order and the violence needed to maintain it. (Auden published these and his other poems from his Mediterranean years in Nones, 1951, and The Shield of Achilles, 1955.) Horae Canonicae is one of the great masterpieces of twentieth-century poetry. It has received little critical attention because it demands to be read in ways very different from those appropriate to the modernist tradition from Yeats to Wallace Stevens. Its concern is not the imposition of imaginative order on a passive world but the discovery of order that

22 / AMERICAN WRITERS already exists in the world. In its disturbing emphasis on the price that must be paid for civilization, on the murderous violence that defends civil order, it is in the direct line of Vergil's Aeneid and Shakespeare's history plays. Aeneas, the hero who makes possible the peace and order of imperial Rome, yields at the end to the violent furor he is dedicated to oppose. In Auden's sequence the great civilizers—those with vocations for the arts and sciences, those who command laws and buildings to come into existence—are also those who provide the instruments and authority for the murder of the scapegoat victim, the banished outsider, without whose exclusion no community has ever constituted itself. Where Auden had earlier emphasized the element of choice that led to acts of love, now he examines the role of choice in murderous acts of will. The sequence extends over an epic range. The first six poems cover the events of a single day—a Good Friday in the present that is simultaneously the day of the historical crucifixion, like the Christmas of For the Time Being— but extend also from the poet's birth to his death, from the rise to the fall of his city, from the evolution of man to the end of the species, and from the creation to the apocalypse. All the beginnings occur in "Prime." This opening poem also establishes the theme of the isolating will. To draw breath—to choose to draw breath on first waking—is ... to wish No matter what, to be wise, To be different, to die and the cost, No matter how, is Paradise Lost of course and myself owing a death.... (The pun on "owing a debt" is originally FalstafTs.) In "Prime" the "I" of the sequence is still solitary. In "Terce" he is in transition between privacy and a public role. At this moment the hangman shakes paws with his dog and sets

out to work; the judge gently closes his wife's bedroom door and descends with a weary sigh. It is a neutral moment when our only wish is to get through the day without being called upon to do or choose anything in particular, to be left alone. But that modest wish has its fatal consequences, because someone always gets in the way, and there will be the wish to move him out of it. The third poem, "Sext," opens with awed praise for those more devoted to vocation than themselves, "the first flaker of flints / who forgot his dinner, / the first collector of sea-shells / to remain celibate." Then it grimly acknowledges the city's need for those in authority, "very great scoundrels," but without whom "how squalid existence would be." It ends in a devastatingly level tone, describing the common crowd who gather at any scene of destruction, the crowd whom everyone can join ("Only because of that can we say / all men are our brothers,") and that worships only the brute fact of force. With all three groups in place, the crucifixion can happen. Those with vocation provide the instruments of murder; those in authority give the command; the crowd assents. The fourth poem, "Nones," shows an emotional range and force, an ethical intelligence and depth, scarcely equaled in modern verse. It deserves more than the brief explication that is possible here. A reader need have no interest at all in religion to feel the power of "Nones." Its emotional focus is the abrupt sinking realization—which occurs at some point in all human relationships—that one has done harm to another, perhaps inadvertently, that cannot now be undone. Whether it is a hurtful word thoughtlessly spoken or an angry act of violence, the act and its consequences are irrevocably there: What we know to be not possible, Though time after time foretold

W. H. AUDEN I 23 By wild hermits, by shaman and sybil Gibbering in their trances, Or revealed to a child in some chance rhyme Like mil and kill, comes to pass Before we realize it. ... The shouting crowd that called for the victim's death has dissolved; each of those in it can blame the crowd, not himself. Nature, the realm of repetition and return, looks on in bewilderment at an act that, unlike the cyclical events of nature, cannot be repeated or reversed. (The modernist emphasis on cyclical history, as in Yeats or Joyce, or on the immediate moment, as in Williams or Stevens, or in a realm outside time, as in Eliot, excludes the whole subject of this poem from the world of modernist literature.) Every willed action seems to lead up to this definitive act of will. Every playful, apparently harmless, game of children or adults reveals its potentially fatal ending. We shall now, . . . under The mock chase and mock capture, The racing and tussling and splashing, The panting and the laughter, Be listening for the cry and stillness To follow after.... Burdened by our own knowledge, we still "have time / To misrepresent, excuse, deny, / Mythify, use this event"; but its historical uniqueness, the real fact of murder, remains. "Its meaning / Waits for our lives." Meanwhile, "It would be best to go home, if we have a home"—all our fixities are in question—"In any case good to rest." And as we sleep "our dreaming wills" move through an ominous dream landscape of symbolic guilt and accusation: Through gates that will not relatch And doors marked Private, pursued by Moors And watched by latent robbers,

To hostile villages at the heads of fjords, To dark chateaux where wind sobs In the pine-trees and telephones ring, Inviting trouble.... And, at the same time, the sleeping body works undisturbed to restore order and wholeness to "our own wronged flesh." The language of the poem, up to this point rich in metaphor, for a moment becomes a language of plain fact as it describes the unpoetical workings of the body: . . . valves close And open exactly, glands secrete, Vessels contract and expand At the right moment.... And the poem ends by rushing cinematically outward to the natural creatures, the unblinking hawk, the "bug whose view is balked by grass," the smug hens and shy deer, all awed by the fact of death, that sign of their own future which they, unlike man, cannot understand. After the intensities of "Nones," the sequence relaxes somewhat. "Vespers," in prose, compares two fantasies of the ideal society, the innocent arcadia and ordered Utopia, between which all real societies are built. "Compline" records the returns and endings of nightfall, of personal death and the end of the city, in a calm elegiac tone. And the sequence ends with the new dawn, in the early morning of "Lauds." After the encyclopedic range and intellectual rigor of the six preceding poems, it offers a simple musical promise of renewal and community: The dripping mill-wheel is again turning; Among the leaves the small birds sing: In solitude, for company. Auden intended to keep his summer house in Ischia at least until 1960, but when he won an Italian literary prize in 1957 his landlord tried to double his rent and Auden decided it was time to leave. He bought an eighteenth-century

24 I AMERICAN farmhouse in Kirchstetten, a small village thirty miles west of Vienna, and moved there the following year. He chose Austria, he said, because he loved the German language, because he wanted to be in a wine-drinking country, and because he wanted to be near an opera house. Opera was a taste he acquired from Chester Kallman, and in 1947 the two wrote the libretto for Igor Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress*, later they wrote further libretti for Hans Werner Henze. Auden's first years in Austria were among the happiest of his life. Once he stood in his garden and wept with joy at owning a home of his own. He wrote in 1958-1964 a sequence of twelve poems in celebration, Thanksgiving for a Habitat, the scale and exuberance of which suggests a house larger and grander than the rural domesticity of the Kirchstetten farmhouse with its low ceilings and dark rooms. Each room received a poem of its own, together with some general poems about the house itself, and each room is characterized, as in his earlier Bucolics, by special kinds of relationships, history, and rhetoric. In the study he recalls a dead friend, the poet Louis MacNeice, one of the many dead whose work survives in their influence on living writers; in the dining room he thinks of friends still very much alive; the cellar and attic evoke childhood memories; and so on through the living room, the guest room, the kitchen, the bath, and—the last and most difficult to write—the toilet. After the urban moralities of Horae Canonicae Auden narrowed his focus to the domestic and personal, but always in a historical and ethical context. Auden called Thanksgiving for a Habitat his first happy poems, the first he was able to write in the first person—that is, with all the quirks and details of his private existence on the visible surface of the poetry. In the 1930's Auden had tried on the role of propagandist, had urged his readers to action. But he knew even then a poet had no more au-

WRITERS

thority to recommend one or another course of action than anyone else did, and he renounced that role as false when he moved to America. In the 1950's and 1960's he again adopted a public role, but without a partisan label. As a poet he was in "loyal opposition," affirming the importance of personal choice in a mass society, but never, unlike his modernist predecessors, condemning his society as irredeemably corrupt or hopelessly inferior to some imagined past. He wrote as a democratic counterpart to the court poet of earlier times. With no pretense of writing as a leader or guide—he preferred to think of himself as a craftsman rather than as a bard—he commented on public events, bringing to light their historical and moral aspects. Much of his later poetry—in Homage to Clio (1960), About the House (1965), City Without Walls (1969), Epistle to a Godson (1972), and the posthumous Thank You, Fog (1974)—is deliberately "occasional," prompted by events ranging in scale from international invasions, political assassinations, and moon landings, to retirements, birthdays, and marriages. Whatever their occasions, all these poems took as their central subject the use and misuse of personal relations and responsibility. What made love and responsibility possible, he suggested, was an awareness of the real outline and nature of things; the means by which love and responsibility were brought into being was personal speech. He distinguished between impersonal "linguistic codes," which may be found among birds and insects as well as man, and "speech," the conscious statement of personal choice, found only among individual people. To use speech is to use the first person, to take responsibility for what one says. Speech is the language of an "I" with a personal name, linguistic codes the language of an anonymous "he" or "she." Since all individuals are at the same time biological organisms with needs and functions common to all mankind, and unique persons

W. H. AUDEN I 25 differing from all others, everyone is capable of using both kinds of language. If I ask you the way to the train station, you will (I hope) answer in a linguistic code, giving me the same answer anyone else would give. But if I ask you what emotional associations the station has for you, you may (if you choose) answer in personal speech, telling me feelings and memories that no one else could possibly tell. So—to return to a poem from the early 1950's—in "The Shield of Achilles," the barren warlike landscape is a place without responsibility or personal names:

smith god walks away from his creation; the goddess finally speaks, but in horror and revulsion; and the hero in whose name the shield was made has already chosen his death:

. . . congregated on its blankness, stood An unintelligible multitude, A million eyes, a million boots in line, Without expression, waiting for a sign.

The ideas of language implicit in "The Shield of Achilles" became explicit in later poems. Writing on the occasion of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in "August 1968," Auden, whose home in Austria was only a few miles away, made a linguistic parable. He responded to the event in the terms that, as a poet, he understood best, and the point he makes is stronger than any direct propaganda:

Out of the air a voice without a face Proved by statistics that some cause was just In tones as dry and level as the place: No one was cheered and nothing was discussed This is a scene on a twentieth-century version of the shield that Hephaestos, in the Iliad, casts at the request of Thetis, mother of the warrior Achilles. But in Auden's poem the names of the god and goddess are replaced by the anonymous "he" and "she" because they do not act, and it is their impersonality that brings about the barren impersonality on the shield's images: She looked over his shoulder For vines and olive trees, But there on the shining metal His hands had put instead An artificial wilderness And a sky like lead. Only in the final stanza do the proper names appear, together with the personal characteristics of their owners; but now it is too late. The

The thin-lipped armorer, Hephaestos, hobbled away; Thetis of the shining breasts Cried out in dismay At what the god had wrought To please her son, the strong Iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles Who would not live long.

The Ogre does what ogres can, Deeds quite impossible for Man, But one prize is beyond his reach, The Ogre cannot master Speech. About a subjugated plain, Among its desperate and slain, The Ogre stalks with hands on hips, While drivel gushes from his lips. The relation of personal speech to impersonal code, the contrast between the scale of the individual body and the inhuman scale of nature's remoter aspects, the importance of unique unrepeatable events in history as contrasted with the cycles of nature—it was this framework of ideas that made possible the special personal tone of Auden's later years. He wrote more and more directly about his personal experience, but unlike the younger confessional poets then emerging in America, he never suggested his experience was important because it was his.

26 I AMERICAN He always made didactic use of it, as an example or warning. And he wrote about it in the deliberately unheroic miniature forms of haiku or haiku-sequences that he learned about by translating similar poems in Dag HammarskjOld's Markings: Money cannot buy The fuel of Love: But is excellent kindling. Our bodies cannot love: But, without one, What works of Love could we do? Thoughts of his own death, like the distant roll of thunder at a picnic. A frequent topic in his later poems was his own aging, which was almost startlingly rapid in his late fifties and early sixties. "River Profile," written when he was fifty-nine, is a terrifying allegory of the growth and decline of the body in terms of a river's progress and an example of the great poetry of which he was still capable. The river's origin is a sexual storm ("head-on collisions of cloud and rock in an / up-thrust, crevasse-and-avalanche"); it first appears as a nameless stream; then it grows larger and stronger, until its middle age: Polluted, bridged by girders, banked by concrete, now it bisects a polyglot metropolis, ticker-tape, taxi, brothel, foot-lights country, d-la-mode always. Broadening or burrowing to the moon's phases, turbid with pulverized wastemantle, on through flatter, duller, hotter, cotton-gin country it scours, approaching the tidal mark where it puts off majesty,

WRITERS

disintegrates, and through swamps of a delta, punting-pole, fowling-piece, oyster-tongs country, wearies to its final act of surrender, effacement, atonement in a huge amorphous aggregate no cuddled attractive child ever dreams of, non-country.... As the world of his poems drew inward from history and the city to the rooms of his house, and then to his aging body, Auden returned to the privacy of his beginnings. In 1972 he left his winter home in New York for a cottage provided by his old Oxford college, where he had been professor of poetry since 1956 (although he taught only three weeks of each year). He seemed to know he was near death: one of his last poems is ambiguously titled "Posthumous Letter to Gilbert White"; he wrote it only a month or two before he died. At the end his work took on a tone of elegiac gratitude as he recalled the culture and family that nurtured him. "A Thanksgiving" listed his debts to his literary ancestors, reviewing the whole course of his career. He named Hardy and Frost as his early masters, until Falling in love altered that, now Someone, at least, was important: Yeats was a help, so was Graves. Then, without warning, the whole Economy suddenly crumbled: there, to instruct me, was Brecht. And onward until the last poet named, Goethe, whose poem "Gegenwart" provided Auden with the meter for his. Auden spent only one winter in Oxford. He found it lonely and provincial after his years in New York. Then, in 1973, he spent his usual summer with Kallman in Austria. When the time came to return to Oxford, he closed up his house and left for a weekend in Vienna before

W. H. AUDEN I 27 his flight. He died there in his sleep in the early hours of September 29, 1973. He was buried in the village cemetery of Kirchstetten. A memorial plaque in the poets' corner at Westminster Abbey is engraved with the lines with which, in 1939, he concluded his elegy for Yeats. Writing less to Yeats than to the living poets of whom he was one, Auden celebrated the didactic powers of his art. In the world of time and of physical necessity, in the world of impersonal language, the poet still preserved the responsible freedom of personal speech. His task was to offer that spoken freedom to others: In the prison of his days Teach the free man how to praise.

Selected Bibliography WORKS OF W. H. AUDEN

two volumes listed immediately above, with some additional poems restored by Auden in later years and with the contents of his later volumes of short poems. Auden's final revised texts, with many early poems omitted.) The English Auden. Poems, Essays, and Dramatic Writings, 1927-1939. London: Faber and Faber, 1977; New York: Random House, 1978. (Reprints the original versions, including all the poems that Auden printed in book form during his lifetime but omitted from his late collections.) Selected Poems, New Edition. New York: Vintage Books, 1979; London: Faber and Faber, 1979. (Reprinted from the original versions, often differing from those in the Collected Poems, and including some omitted from the late collections.) PROSE The Dyer's Hand. New York: Random House, 1962; London: Faber and Faber, 1963. Forewords and Afterwords. New York: Random House, 1973; London: Faber and Faber, 1973.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Bloomfield, Barry C., and Edward Mendelson. W. H. Auden: A Bibliography, 1924-1969. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1972. (A full list of writings by and about Auden.)

COLLECTED EDITIONS

The Collected Poetry of W. H. Auden. New York: Random House, 1945. British edition: Collected Shorter Poems, 1930-1944. London: Faber and Faber, 1950. (Revised versions of most of Auden's earlier poems, with excisions.) W. H. Auden. A Selection by the Author. Harmondsworth: Penguin/ Faber and Faber, 1958. American edition: Selected Poetry ofW. H. Auden. New York: Modern Library, 1959. 2nd ed., New York: Vintage Books, 1971. Collected Shorter Poems 1927-1957. London: Faber and Faber, 1966; New York: Random House, 1967. (Further revisions and excisions of earlier work, arranged chronologically.) Collected Longer Poems. London: Faber and Faber, 1968; New York: Random House, 1969. Collected Poems. London: Faber and Faber, 1976; New York: Random House, 1976. (Includes the

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL STUDIES Blair, John G. The Poetic Art of W. H. Auden. Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1965. Carpenter, Humphrey. W. H. Auden: A Biography. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich (in press). Duchene, Francois. The Case of the Helmeted Airman: A Study of W. H. Auden s Poetry. London: Chatto and Windus, 1972. Fuller, John L. A Reader's Guide to W. H. Auden. London: Thames and Hudson, 1970. Greenberg, Herbert M. Quest for the Necessary: W. H. Auden and the Dilemma of Divided Consciousness. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968.

28 I AMERICAN WRITERS Hynes, Samuel L. The Auden Generation. New York: Viking, 1977. Johnson, Richard. Mans Place: An Essay on Auden. Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1973. Mendelson, Edward. Early Auden. New York: Viking (in press). Spears, Monroe K. The Poetry ofW. H. Auden: The Disenchanted Island. New York: Oxford University Press, 1963.

Spears, Monroe K., ed. Auden: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: PrenticeHall, 1964. Spender, Stephen, ed. W. H. Auden: A Tribute. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1975. Wright, George T. W. H. Auden. New York: Twayne, 1969. —EDWARD MENDELSON

Amiri Baraka 1934-

B,

an effective instrument for defining his personal, cultural, and political goals. His remarkable achievements as a writer and activist—he came to regard the two roles as inseparable— bespeak a temperament marked by uncompromising energy and risk-taking modulated by intellectual and emotional resilience. The son of Coyt LeRoi and Anna Lois Russ Jones, young LeRoi was raised in an urban black family with middle-class aspirations. Passing through the Newark public schools, he briefly attended Rutgers University on a science scholarship and then shifted to the more hospitable, if decidedly assimilationist, atmosphere of Howard University, majoring in English with a minor in philosophy and leaving in 1954 to join the Air Force. After nearly three years in the service, most of that time spent in Puerto Rico, he gravitated to New York City with certain distinct perceptions registered in his consciousness. "The Howard thing," he said in a 1964 interview with Judy Stone, "let me understand the Negro sickness. They teach you how to pretend to be white. But the Air Force made me understand the white sickness. It shocked me into realizing what was happening to me and others. By oppressing Negroes, the whites have become oppressors, . . . convincing themselves they are right, as people have always convinced themselves."

' ORN Everett LeRoi Jones, on October 7, 1934, in Newark, New Jersey, Amiri Baraka is in 1980 a man whose literary and political growth is in midlife. However inaccessible and unpopular his work has been from a conventional standpoint, he has established himself as a writer of significant stature. With the vantage point of the racial outsider, he has passed through a series of painful and searching stages of growth. Strenuously resisting the artistic and cultural ideals of what he has called "mainstream" and "bourgeois" America, he offers in their stead radical social analysis, new cultural values, and a boldly innovative literature. In the process he has experienced a series of simultaneously disruptive and healing transformations—adjustments of major personal, artistic, and political importance. From this perspective his writings can be usefully understood as the record of intense and ongoing changes. They began in the late 1950's with a confused but determined movement away from what he perceived as white-dominated lyric egotism, continued into the 1960's in the form of an emotional and cultural reintegration with the black world, and emerged in the 1970's as a complete ideological dedication to worldwide revolution. Through each phase Baraka has had to question closely his role as a writer and to find ways of making literary art

29

30 I AMERICAN WRITERS Finding the intellectual and artistic atmosphere of the East Village section of the city to his liking, he took graduate courses in comparative literature at Columbia, worked for Record Changer magazine, and was generally absorbed into the Bohemian life-style. At a time when the advanced politics of race was distinctly antibourgeois and integrationist, Jones found the countercultural posture of the predominantly white "beat" community initially supportive. In that congenial atmosphere he began to acknowledge the first impulses leading into his early poetry. In the reachable past were such established older-generation moderns as Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and even T. S. Eliot, whom Jones subsequently dismissed as a "lovely ... rhetorician." At the same time several groups of the new poets, for an interval, furnished a sustaining poetics: the Black Mountain School of Robert Creeley and Charles Olson offered workable poetic theories and techniques while the New York coterie of Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and others fostered useful social attitudes and emotional strategies. He participated in two of the numerous "little magazines" then proliferating in the East Village community, evanescent mimeographed issues with small circulation designed to promulgate the work of his literary friends: Yugen, founded and coedited with Hettie Cohen; and Floating Bear, coedited with Diane DiPrima. Jones married Hettie, a young Jewish coworker at the Record Changer, in October 1958, marking his furthest incursion into the white world. He was on the threshold of an arduous artistic and political struggle. Although Jones needed to pull away from what he soon came to recognize as certain debilitating aspects of his "beat" identity, there were also strands in his early literary experiences that later tied up with his nationalist writings. In a 1960 radio interview with David Ossman he tells how William Carlos Williams

alerted him to the importance of the spoken word: "how to write the way I speak rather than the way I think a poem ought to be written—to write just the way it comes to me, in my own speech, utilizing the rhythms of speech rather than any kind of metrical concept. To talk verse." While he learned about crafting verse from Pound's example, "how a poem should be made, what a poem ought to look like," it was Williams, he said, who showed him "how to get it in my own language." Just as meaningful were Charles Olson's pronouncements in Projective Verse (1959), stressing the efficacy of sound in poetry, letting the poetic line follow the dictates of breath, which, Olson says, "allows all the speech-force of language back in." Jones pointedly entitled his own brief statement on poetics "How You Sound??" (1959). He emphasized the need for a voice that will recreate the sound of his private experience: MY POETRY is whatever I think I am. (Can I be light & weightless as a sail?? Heavy & clunking like 8 black boots.) I CAN BE ANYTHING I CAN. I make a poetry with what I feel is useful & can be saved out of all the garbage of our lives. What I see, am touched by (CAN HEAR) "Who knows what a poem ought to sound like? Until it's thar." Says Charles Olson . . . & I follow closely with that. Such dicta anticipated the extraliterary modes of black music and speech at the center of the nascent black aesthetic that Jones began to delineate in the early 1960's as he wrote Blues People. For the time being, though, his attention to poetic voice was almost entirely self-directed, there being as yet no sense of his singular voice in relation to the collective voice of the black community. Initially inviting, too, must have been the extent to which the "beat" subculture drew unabashedly upon black culture, canonizing bebop

AMIRIBARAKA musicians like Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker and making the socially estranged world of black music a conspicuous image for its own consciously chosen alienation. The black perspective, as understood by the white poets, was an appealing metaphor for disenchantment, as with Ginsberg's typical assertion in Howl that the best minds of his generation were "dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn." As much as Ginsberg and others were touched by images of black culture, they were unable to appropriate black style as a workable model for poetic form. Nor could Jones do so effectively until he freed himself from the influence of the moderns and the "new" poets. His first formulations of himself as a writer did not exclude the pressing awareness that he was black, but they did restrict the manifestation of blackness in his poetry of the late 1950's and early 1960's. When asked why the sense of "being a Negro" one finds in the poetry of Langston Hughes did not occur in his own work, Jones, in his "beat" guise, demurred: "I'm fully conscious all the time that I am an American Negro, because it's part of my life. But I know also that if I want to say, 4I see a bus full of people,' I don't have to say, 'I am a Negro seeing a bus full of people.' " In the poetry of Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note (1961) and The Dead Lecturer (1964), as well as in Blues People (1963), his incisive social-historical interpretation of Afro-American music, Jones began a painstaking reassessment and slow moving out toward black self-identification as Amiri Baraka. Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note includes poems written between 1957 and 1961. The title suggests a posture common to much of the new poetry: that people are pressed to the brink of suicide by the internalization of popular myths and symbols that the poet must exorcise by a determined artistic in-

I 31

dividualism. With his own radio-prone youth much in mind, Jones typically assails the media heroes beamed into the American imagination—the inflated fictions of Tom Mix, Captain Midnight, and the Lone Ranger—along with the irrelevant serious art also produced by the same culture, "Great poets dying / with their strophes on." Such intrusions, damaging enough to acquiescent white perceptions, impinged even more menacingly on the mind of the vulnerable black artist. Jones's predicament was that he found himself beginning to question the efficacy of the new poetry, the vanguard literature of the very culture whose fantasies he was attempting to dissipate. Unlike Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Creeley, he was much less certain that literary statement was an effective assertion of his integrity. So we see Jones at the beginning, laden with a cumbersome literary apparatus—prefaces and volumes bearing down heavily on his fragile "note." "HYMN FOR LANIE POO," the second piece in the collection, satirically cuts into middle-class black pretensions fed by white-imposed stereotypes, fads, and beliefs. The ulterior responsibility, though, is identified in the final lines of the poem by an image that becomes a significant interpretive marker throughout Suicide Note: the huge & loveless white-anglo sun/of benevolent step mother America. Throughout the poem the diffuse motioning toward whiteness is associated with the sun's penetrating light. By inverting this traditional life-giving symbol, Jones practices a strategy common to the black perspective: reversing the destructive meanings and values projected by the white world in order to buffer the besieged black psyche. The poem also implies that the values embodied in literary convention are part

32 I AMERICAN of the malign influence. A soothing aubade invites the poet into a lyrical acceptance of the sun as his ultimate genealogical source: Each morning I go down to Gansevoort St. and stand on the docks. I stare out at the horizon until it gets up and comes to embrace me. I make believe it is my father. This is known as genealogy The permeating image violates the poet's deepest privacies, seducing his sister ("Lanie Poo" was the nickname of Sandra Elaine, Jones's sister) into a "generation of fictitious / Ofays." The ironic hymn sets the general tone for the recurring condemnation of the insinuating American sun culture. In "ONE NIGHT STAND," dedicated to Allen Ginsberg, the poets are "foreign seeming persons" visiting the decaying city with their "Hats flopped so the sun / can't scald our beards...." Jones toys with other clever inversions to undermine popular sentimentalism, as in demonstrating that love can be "an evil word ..." by turning it backward: "see, see what I mean? / An evol word " Two poems about his wife Hettie, which Baraka now understandably withholds from republication, propose a more painful romantic inversion by commenting wryly on the poet's interracial marriage. "FOR HETTIE" describes not only a woman who happens to be left-handed but one who has reversed the prevailing social order by taking a black husband and carrying a child whose paternity the poet questions. He impatiently mocks Hettie's left-handedness by accusing her of seeming to write backward, a style ironically

WRITERS

suggestive of his own literary countertactics. But the most telling reversal is genealogical, the poet's uneasy anticipation of their mixed-blood child. In "FOR HETTIE IN HER FIFTH MONTH" he observes his pregnant wife basking her womb in the sun's fading rays, foreseeing in the birth his complicity in the emergence of an absurd Hebrew-"beat" legacy. Beyond the interracial quandary is an even more deeply felt emotional displacement in "THE BRIDGE." Under the inscription "(# for wieners and mcclure)," this lyric of disorientation and suicide is structured by musical metaphors into a sharp message for two of Jones's fellow poets, John Wieners and Michael McClure. Unable to return to his and their familiar melodies, the beginning or "head" of his song, he finds himself in disruptive motion along the bridging phrase where harmonic "changes" are unfamiliar: you find yourself in its length strung out along its breadth, waiting for the cold sun to tear out your eyes. Enamoured of its blues, spread out in the silk clubs of this autumn tune. The changes are difficult, when you hear them, & know they are all in you, the chords of your disorder meddle with your would be disguises. The old poetic values, Jones seems to assert to his friends, no longer apply: "& I have forgotten, / all the things, you told me to love, to try to understand,..." With the bridge leading only to the unknown and the song running out, he jumps into the "unmentionable black"—the territory to be charted in subsequent writings. A crucial turning point for Jones was his 1960 visit to Cuba with a group of black writers, to attend a commemoration of the revolutionary attack by Fidel Castro against President

AMIRIBARAKA / 33 Fulgencio Batista in 1953. It was Jones's first direct contact with Marxism—his own conversion would not occur for a decade. The political nature of the event awakened Jones to a new social and artistic sense of himself, an awareness recorded in the poem "BETANCOURT," dated July 30, 1960. In the 1960 essay "Cuba Libre," reprinted in Home (1966), Jones describes his encounter with Senora Betancourt, a Mexican delegate to the celebration. An ardent Communist, she had attacked Jones as a "cowardly bourgeois individualist" when he defended his political neutrality on artistic grounds: "I'm a poet.... I'm not even interested in politics." The encounter deeply affected him, pointing up the inadequacy of his old poetic ways in the context of newly perceived Third World politics. The result is "BETANCOURT," his first politically informed self-criticism as a poet. The poem repudiates his former work as the buffered perceptions of "some old man's poems" rotting in the "heavy sun, pure / distance " Using an image of poetic abnegation often repeated in Suicide Note and later in The Dead Lecturer, he dismisses the old poetic conventions: "Our gestures / are silence." Implicit is the sense that the new avant-garde poetry is now old and useless, leading Jones to conclude with a tenuous poetics of rejection: ... (I mean I think I know now what a poem is) A turning away . . . from what it was had moved us ... Not yet perceiving aesthetic or political alternatives, Jones closes "Cuba Libre" by indicting himself and the "beats" as impotent old rebels:

"Even the vitality of our art is like bright flowers growing up through a rotting carcass." The last two poems in Suicide Note affirm this rejection of the old self while tentatively pointing to new but unrealized directions. The title "DON JUAN IN HELL" suggests that the poet's genealogy is still inclusive, a Europeanized man under an "unfamiliar sun." He is without a progenitor, "like / some son / lost his old dead father" and unable to actualize the "new man" trapped in his "old self." The poet concludes with notes not quite so suicidal that leave open the possibility of rebirth and future utterance. While "NOTES FOR A SPEECH" posits alienation—" . . . You are / as any other sad man here / american."—it is alienation from a new native land: "African blues / does not know me / Does / not feel / what I am." Blues People and The Dead Lecturer were written in the early 1960's during approximately the same period of time, the toughminded prose and expostulating poetry each representing in its own way Jones's thrusting past ineffectual suicide and mere rejection. Blues People, a lucid retrieval of Afro-American and African culture, traces through black music "the path the slave took to 'citizenship,'" delineating a usable heritage distinct from the European-American mainstream. Generally speaking, Jones was working within a well-established posture in black letters. Early writers like W. E. B. Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) and James Weldon Johnson in The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912) had made concerted attempts to bring to light the particulars of Afro-American history and culture. Closer to Jones's time, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ralph Ellison had consciously sought ways to shape their writings in accordance with stylistic modes and symbols particular to the black tradition. In a more contemporary sense, though, Jones's strict commitment to the integrity of an

34 I AMERICAN African genealogy linked him with the surge of cultural nationalism in the 1960's. Blues People established Jones's seminal presence among such writers of the Black Arts Movement as Haki R. Madhubuti (Don L. Lee), Ed Bullins, Sonia Sanchez, and Ishmael Reed. Introducing the study as a "strictly theoretical endeavor/' Jones fervently argues the premise of a sharp dichotomy between the African/ Afro-American and Western/European-American culture families. Within this dialectic he pursues the thesis that music, if properly interpreted, is central to an accurate understanding of black American reality: ... I am saying that if the music of the Negro in America, in all its permutations, is subjected to a socio-anthropological as well as musical scrutiny, something about the essential nature of the Negro's existence in this country ought to be revealed, as well as something about the essential nature of this country, i.e., society as a whole. Jones goes on to show how Afro-American modes of communication have been nurtured within a fluent non-Western tradition of improvised music, one markedly different from the prevailing scores and scripts of the media-oriented culture discredited in Suicide Note. The important contribution of Blues People lies not only in its insistence on a clarifying cultural dialectic but also in the detailed presentation of African cultural values and musical styles transformed by the particular pressures of Afro-American experience. One concept articulated by Jones became a chief criterion of the new black aesthetics: African music, like all stylized African expression, is "functional." Because it grows out of commonplace social and religious circumstances in which all members of the community participate, music exists to fulfill a specific secular or spiritual function. Jones claimed that when viewed comparatively, the

WRITERS tradition of Western fine arts, especially since the humanist Renaissance, is basically one of individual achievement—the inactive majority passively appreciating the artifacts created by a select few. If, as in Suicide Note, art and life had become disjunct, Jones had found the rationale for a restorative: If we think of African music as regards its intent, we must see that it differed from Western music in that it was a purely functional music.... : songs used by young men to influence young women (courtship, challenge, scorn); songs used by workers to make their tasks easier; songs used by older men to prepare the adolescent boys for manhood, and so on. "Serious" Western music, except for early religious music, has been strictly an "art" music. One would not think of any particular use for Haydn's symphonies, except perhaps the "cultivation of the soul." . . . It was, and is, inconceivable in the African culture to make a separation between music, dancing, song, the artifact, and a man's life or his worship of his gods. This was the beginning of a serviceable aesthetic that went beyond the nearly dysfunctional statement in "BETANCOURT" of what a poem was not, a "turning away . . . / from what / it was." If art comes directly from the experience of a people, and if, as Blues People clearly shows, that experience has obvious social implication, then the expression issuing from that experience will by definition have social—indeed, political—content. Thus armed with an intellectual basis for freeing himself from his apolitical "beat" pose, Jones in subsequent writings increasingly embodied the politics of cultural nationalism. Blues People also identifies the important elements in African music and speech from which blues and jazz derive. Jones gives special emphasis to such stylistic features of vocal in-

AMIRIBARAKA / 35 terpretation as polyrhythms, complex alterations in pitch and tone quality, improvisational rather than written expressions, and communal antiphony or call and response. These Africanisms survive in Afro-American music and speech, providing a particular expressive interpretation of the experience of the African being tested in the New World that was as valid for the black artist of the 1960's as for the slave three hundred years earlier. From these African beginnings Blues People goes on to identify the generic forms and social meanings of Afro-American music as it has evolved to the present—shouts, field hollers, work songs, spirituals, blues, early jazz, swing, bebop, and rhythm and blues. These musical responses each represent "definite stages in the Negro's transmutation from African to American," and lead Jones to understand that "change," both social and stylistic, was a constant in both the historical fact of black reality and the expression of it: "there are certain very apparent changes in the Negro's reactions to America ... and again, I insist that these changes are most graphic in music." After Blues People the concept of change became central to Jones's life and art. In accordance with the stages of growth and change in his personal consciousness, the personae in his poetry and drama shifted in posture from rage and victimization to the willful enactment of change. The challenge for Jones was to find modes of expression as responsive to the representation of change as he understood black music to be. As a writer initially using the forms of written English, he must have felt at a distinct disadvantage in comparison with the fluent musicians and their music-related uses of AfroAmerican speech. In a chapter entitled "Enter the Middle Class," he deprecates the black literary tradition as not being informed with the same "legitimacy of emotional concern" one finds in coon shouts, the blues of Bessie Smith,

or bebop. With his own middle-class origins and recent literary allegiances no doubt weighing heavily, he sees the main function of literature as that of having eased the black writer into the bourgeois aspects of Western culture. Jones the poet was in the process of discovering that music was the primary black mode of expression, while the literature of black America was "essentially undistinguished." Although Blues People does not directly investigate the inadequacies of literary form, it validates in historical and aesthetic terms Jones's rejection of himself as a traditional poet. The implications of Blues People were apparent in The Dead Lecturer mostly through the poet's continuing struggle to escape Western literary formalism. Although there are no sudden ideological or stylistic changes, the poems in The Dead Lecturer, written for the most part while Blues People was in the making, do represent forceful emotional siftings. As the title suggests, the poet, suffering the consequences of his attempted suicide, retains in many of the poems the degenerative images of sun, old age, and silence from Suicide Note. But from the vantage point of Blues People he can at least begin to acknowledge the potent artists—the makers of sound pictured in "SHORT SPEECH TO MY FRIENDS": . . . these others, saxophones whining through the wooden doors of their less than gracious homes. The poor have become our creators. The black. . . . Not yet able to incorporate flexible musical stylings into the contained print of his verse, Jones presented the old, fixed tradition as a parody of the very ideas and attitudes it embodies: . . . the proper placement of verbs and nouns. To freeze the spit in mid-air, as it aims itself at some valiant intellectual's face.

36 I AMERICAN This defiant frustration is evident in a number of poems in The Dead Lecturer. From this equivocal stance Jones began to challenge more directly the prevailing notion of the poem as a sanctuary of self-expression. Having tested the possibilities for isolated confession in such pieces as "THE BRIDGE," he now disclaimed such personalism even as he continued to indulge the lyric. Confronting the issue squarely in "Green Lantern's Solo," Jones broadly equates lyric egocentrism with a dangerously insular individualism. His intellectual acquaintances, he charges, are disconnected from the world of the living: "My friend, the lyric poet, / who has never had an orgasm. My friend, / the social critic, who has never known society...." Launching into their puerile solo performances, the Bohemian poets and liberal thinkers represent for Jones the real evil, pursuing a convoluted sense of the truth that is indistinguishable from the lie: What we have created, is ourselves as heroes, as lovers, as disgustingly evil. As Dialogues with the soul, with the self, Selves, screaming furiously to each other. As the same fingers touch the same faces, as the same mouths close on each other. The killed is the killer, the loved the lover and the islands of mankind have grown huge to include all life, all lust, all commerce and beauty. Each idea a reflection of itself and all the ideas men have ever had. Truth, Lie, so close they defy inspection, and are built into autonomy by naive fools, who have no wish for wholeness or strength Writing in this unwholesome mode, the selfconscious poet is "The Liar," as Jones indicates in the title of the last poem in The Dead Lec-

WRITERS turer: " . . . Publically redefining / each change in my soul, as if I had predicted / them." In the final sardonic lines, the dead lecturer serves notice that his poetry has merely falsified his character: "When they say, 'It is Roi / who is dead?' I wonder / who will they mean?" Lacking a cohesive ideology and aesthetic, one of the tentative strategies of The Dead Lecturer is to discredit the tradition of Western art. Jones's only "political" recourse is to strike directly against the pernicious individualism of the lyric, to use the form against itself because it serves no positive social function. In "A Guerilla Handbook," egocentric poets "Convinced / of the lyric" are reflexively trapped within the form, "knowing no way out / except description " In "Political Poem," near the end of the collection, Jones sees the poem as "undone" by its own irrelevance. Enshrouded in the lyric, he is left with only a "polite truth" and his illfated title role: "... like my dead lecturer / lamenting thru gipsies his fast suicide." If The Dead Lecturer winds down in a series of politicized rejections of lyric individualism, there are several poems, conspicuous for their intensity, that move well beyond isolated selfaccusations, toward a determined identification with the collective feelings of Afro-America. Taken together, they represent an important shift in focus that anticipates the eruptive dramatizations and terse explanatory preachings of the emerging nationalism in the plays soon to come. This engaged sensibility first emerges in "A Poem For Willie Best," a substantial piece in eight sections. By ascribing a mythic stature to the suppressed feelings of the black victim, Jones breathes a drama of large dimension into the Hollywood character actor Sleep'n'Eat, who, along with Mantan Moreland in the 1930's, inherited the comic mantle of Stepin Fetchit. He sees in Best nothing less than the extreme racial distortion of all black men as de-

AMIRIBARAKA / 37 plorably fantasized and crucified by the "obscene invention" of the white imagination: "... The top / of a head, seen from Christ's / heaven, stripped of history / or desire." Restoring to Best an emotional and fleshly reality, Jones in effect proposes him as one of the valorous Blues People, seeking intimacy with his plight rather than stepping back to the safe satiric distance of such earlier poems as "HYMN FOR LANIE POO." The last two sections of the poem widen the scope of emotional possibilities even further, dignifying the victim's pain by revealing him as a "renegade / behind the mask." The tormented actor, "tired of losing," finally forces his vernacular anger through the habitual dialect:" 'I got ta cut'cha.'" This is the germ of a new poetic voice, one already flexed in the play script for The Toilet (1967), that was intermittently tested in The Dead Lecturer. The voice is strengthened by the mythic intensification of black music in "Rhythm & Blues," a poem that taps a deeper and more aggressive collective feeling. Although dedicated to Robert Williams, a Marine veteran who had been suspended as president of the Monroe, North Carolina, NAACP in 1959 for espousing militant self-defense (Jones had met him during the 1960 trip to Cuba), the poem addresses the response of a community rather than the predicament of an individual. At the center of that response is the percussive sound of rhythm and blues that forcefully expresses "a legitimacy of emotional concern," as he says in Blues People, not to be found in the silent passivity of written verse. Jones imagines that the immediacy of musical statement not only gives form to feeling but also has the potential to heighten social awareness, perhaps even to the extent of moving people actively to resist their oppression, as Williams had done. As he makes this point through the poem itself, he questions the power of his own poetic art to have a similar effect:

... If I see past what I feel, and call music simply "Art" and will not take it to its logical end. For the death by hanging, for the death by the hooded political murderer, for the old man dead in his tired factory;... Unlike the retrospective, page-bound verses of the poet, the improvised formulations of the musician are a projection of emotions as they occur, an unflinching, expressive reaction tantalizingly close to active retaliation: ... There is no "melody." Only the foot stomped, the roaring harmonies of need. The hand banged on the table, waved in the air. The teeth pushed against the lip. The face and fingers sweating. "Let me alone," is praise enough for these musicians. By comparison, the poet feels his impotence: "I am deaf and blind and lost and will not again sing your quiet / verse. I have lost / even the act of poetry. ..." In the throes of this inadequacy, Jones begins to vent his suppressed energies through the penetrating image of the scream, an imposing sound he increasingly associated with the emotional and expressive fluency at the core of black life: " . . . our screams. / Of the dozens, the razor, the cloth, the sheen, all speed adventure locked / in my eyes." As amply illustrated in Blues People, it is a stylistic element central to the musical tradition (in shouts, hollers, work songs). It was especially developed by postwar rhythm and blues performers who "literally had to shout to be heard above the ... electrified instruments." As a matter of survival, "the human voice itself had to struggle, to scream, to be heard."

38 I AMERICAN In "The Screamers," a 1963 sketch reprinted in Tales (1967), Jones portrays "the screamed riff" of rhythm and blues saxophonist Lynn Hope—heroicized by Jones as an ethnic historian and priest of the unconscious—pushing his listeners to the verge of active protest in the Newark streets. The scream is proposed as a fantastic mode of self-realization that anticipates political change: "We screamed and screamed at the clear image of ourselves as we should always be.... It would be the form of the sweetest revolution, to hucklebuck into the fallen capital, and let the oppressors lindy hop out." Music takes on the same generative power in "Rhythm & Blues," but the ineffectual poetry is seen as distinctly subordinate to the amplified sounds: The shake and chant, bulled electric motion, figure of what there will be as it sits beside me waiting to live past my own meekness

The ideal poetic voice, the poem implies, would be the impossible re-creation of music itself in printed form. Two other poems address the broad issue of the creative force behind the security of black expression toward which Jones is working. Both are couched in strongly anti-white terms and both culminate in an appeal to Damballah, the loa of fertility—the first positive evocations in Jones's poetry of a revitalizing African genealogy. "Crow Jane," in part an inverted parody of William Butler Yeats's "Crazy Jane," is the more traditional of the two. It is an all-out attack on what had become for Jones a pernicious social and racial presence—the white woman. The contained anxiety expressed toward the pregnancy of his white wife in "FOR HETTIE

WRITERS IN HER FIFTH MONTH" has grown here to the repudiation of an entire culture. Crow Jane is nothing less than the seductive force of white sexual and artistic supremacy that deflects the procreative and creative power of the black artist. Her capacity for destruction is fully realized in the character of Lula in the play Dutchman (1964). The poem is a terse statement of liberation from "Mama Death," whose romantic allure no longer deceives Jones: " . . . Cold stuff / to tempt a lover. Old Lady / of flaking eyes. Moon lady / of useless thighs." Her patronizing reverse racism, the female counterpart of an attitude known as Jim Crow, is merely a ploy to flatter his intellectual vanity on "... some pilgrimage / to thought. Where she goes, in fairness, / 'nobody knows' " He is now sufficiently possessed of his black emotive power to define, and thereby control, her emasculating character: "Now / I am her teller." In a closing ceremony entitled "The dead lady canonized," the poet celebrates in grim fleshly terms the passing of Crow Jane's influence. To ensure that her womb will no longer incubate "dead nouns" and "rotted faces," the stillborn progeny of his past, he calls upon Damballah to administer the healing benediction: ... The lady is dead, may the Gods, (those others beg our forgiveness. And Damballah, kind father, sew up her bleeding hole. A precarious balance of controlled nuance and roiling emotion, "Crow Jane" bristles with ironic interplay between the Western poetic style that Jones is trying to shuck off and the motif of Afro-American separatism that he is in the process of embracing.

AMIRIBARAKA / 39 A second poem, "BLACK DADA NIHILISMUS," although not following in exact sequence, can be read as a counter piece to "Crow Jane." Released from its self-destructive fantasy of the white woman, the poetic voice now concentrates the psychosexual distortions of whites into an aggregate black male antagonist who converts these lurid stereotypes into a frontal assault on the "grey hideous space" that is the West. In what is perhaps Jones's most pungent cultural inversion, the absurd artistic and philosophical legacy of the white culture is conjured into a threatening black weaponry. In a later essay entitled "Philistinism and the Negro Writer" (1966) he contended that one way black people might confront "the denial of reality ... institutionalized in America" would be to "turn crazy, to bring out a little American Dada, Ornette Coleman style, and chase those perverts into the ocean where they belong." Accordingly, Jones forgoes the mincing intricacy one finds in the structure of "Crow Jane" and speaks in the hammering post-bebop voice of the musician-priest, challenging a collective black manhood to shake off its lethargy and enact into reality the preposterous racial mythicizing of whites. If still somewhat formal, the voice is flagrant, exerting through Afro-American tones a pressure that transcends conventional usage and literal meaning: . . . why you stay, where they can reach? Why you sit, or stand, or walk in this place,... . . . Come up, black dada nihilismus. Rape the white girls. Rape their fathers. Cut the mothers' throats. Black dada nihilismus, choke my friends And then, as if invoking the very style he cannot yet adequately express, he starkly incants the enriching aural images that will give black

definition and coherence to the destruction: "Black scream / and chant, scream, / and dull, un / earthly / hollering...." Jones resolves the poem stylistically and culturally in a chanted appeal to Damballah, reaching for the still-distant but now retrievable African past through a ritual naming of victims and heroes of color (including his grandfather Tom Russ) who struggled in the New World: For tambo, willie best, dubois, patrice, mantan, the

bronze buckaroos. For Jack Johnson, asbestos, tonto, buckwheat, billie holiday. For torn russ, 1'overture, vesey, beau jack, (may a lost god damballah, rest or save us against the murders we intend against his lost white children black dada nihilismus "BLACK DADA NIHILISMUS" best encapsulates the racial anger welling up through the lyric self-confusion of the early poetry, an emotional force that Jones's sense of restricted poetic form could no longer adequately contain. The lyric would not be totally abandoned; rather, it would appear in later nationalist poetry in a more sparing and emotionally positive form. Although Jones's next significant body of work was in the drama, where the impulses of his expanding racial consciousness could be given scope in proportion to their intensity, some of the emotional current was diverted into the less restricted space of the prose narrative. The quasi-autobiographical fiction of the early stories in Tales, and especially of the novel The System of Dante's Hell (1965), can in part be seen as a transition to the more cohesive devel-

40 I AMERICAN WRITERS opment of black character in the plays. In fact, some of the figures briefly glimpsed in the novel—Ora, Skippy, Knowles, Love, and James Karolis ("He died in a bathroom of old age & segregation")—spurted to fuller growth in The Toilet. The first portion of the novel, published as "The System of Dante's Inferno" in the magazine The Trembling Lamb (1959), not surprisingly reflects many of the stylistic and emotional contours of the early poetry. In a first-person voice cluttered with images of decay, silence, and death reminiscent of Ginsberg's cityscapes in Howl, Jones strings together fragmentary impressions of his youth in Newark: "The breakup of my sensibility Vegetables rotting in the neighbors' minds Drowning city of silence All dead." In a brief afterword he says he intended to create "association complexes" of sound and image that would interpret the "Hell in the head" of his growing up. With its underground allegory, Dante's inferno provides a classic Christian veneer for the organization of Jones's version of Hell into various circles, ditches, and transgressors (heathen, wrathful, seducers) that lend ready identity to the chapter headings. The emotional impulses veer away from Dante's mythic intentions, though, to draw upon the particular AfroAmerican sense of the underground as the psychic hell of invisibility. A condition imposed by white myopia and dangerously internalized by the black victim, it is the "torture of being the unseen object," as Jones puts it, "and, the constantly observed subject." In this sense the novelist's vision is largely determined by symbolic perceptions long established in the black writing tradition: from the veil of the color line in Du Bois' The Souls of Black Folk to Richard Wright's subterranean guilt in The Man Who Lived Underground, Ralph Ellison's ambivalent anger in Invisible Man (with its own Dantean

descent into rhythmic emotional depths), and James Baldwin's relentlessly exposed psychosexual afflictions in Another Country. These works all deal with the anguish of native sons having to balance precariously the tensions of the "lower frequencies," as Ellison put it, and as Jones himself masterfully dramatized through the hurtling subway setting of Dutchman. The portion of Dante's Hell written after 1959 takes on greater narrative continuity, pulling the expansive yet difficult prose into more coherent interludes of experience. Language intensity, sexual motifs, and the probing into feelings specifically black all predict important elements in Jones's early drama. "The Eighth Ditch" is in effect a self-contained play, an episode of homosexual seduction in which the protagonist in his naive Boy Scout guise is stimulated by a streetwise companion into an indiscriminate desire for the blues. Ambivalent representations of homosexuality (a sexual and emotional alternative widely accepted in the "beat" culture) briefly occurred in The Toilet and The Baptism before emergent black nationhood and manhood rhetorically equated the "faggot" with feckless white impotence. In the last two sections the prose resolves into what Jones terms "fast narrative," quick-moving fusions of violent action and troubled selfconsciousness. Appearing in roles Jones knew all too well, the protagonist is presented successively as a college boy and a young Air Force man whose enfeebled middle-class psyche is assailed and finally impregnated by surges of blackness that he uneasily begins to comprehend as his birthright. In "The Rape" he coolly leads on his buddies to attempt the rape of a drunken prostitute, only to have his puerile bravado shattered by her powerful curses: "She screamed, and screamed, her voice almost shearing off our tender heads. The scream of an actual damned soul."

AMIRIBARAKA / 41 In the final section, sporting his uniform with "bright wings" and secretly harboring his pretentious literary elegance ("I'm beautiful. Stephen Dedalus"), he visits The Bottom—the poor black outskirts of a southern town where he expects easy women and a good time. Instead, he finds himself descending into the deepest region of the black underground, into a "culture of violence and foodsmells" where the drinking, dancing, screaming denizens abuse him as an "imitation white boy." The Bottom is the Purgatory where the redemption of his blackness will begin in earnest. After an initiation of vivid cursing and sexual humiliation at the hands of a challenging young prostitute, he can slip out into the night and begin to recognize The Bottom as his own legacy: "The place was so still, so black and full of violence. I felt myself." But he soon finds that he has made only partial expiation. On his ascent he is accosted by three "tall strong black boys" in the menacing spirit of "BLACK DADA NIHILISMUS." To them he is still "Mr. Half-white muthafucka," an interloper in their world, and they proceed to beat him into a limbo of unconsciousness. In this condition he has a mixed vision of reading books and weeping followed by "negroes" dancing around his body, leaving him to continue the struggle for the blackness revealed in him in The Bottom. Jones told Kimberly Benston in a 197.7 interview that in Dante's Hell he was "writing defensively," trying to escape the white literary influences of Creeley, Olson, and Ginsberg through a consciously improvisational prose impelled by both stream-of-consciousness and jazz techniques, but that the content, in Marxist retrospect, was now to be criticized "for celebrating the subjective and the idealistic." Celebration of black feelings and black values, though, was precisely what the confluence of cultural and political forces required and brought about in the 1960's. Not only were

Third World nations of color in the process of radical change—the Cultural Revolution in China, the struggles for national independence in Africa, and, closer to home, the examples of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara—but black liberation was being irresistibly preached in the United States itself, first by Malcolm X on behalf of Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam, and subsequently through the open paramilitary posture of the Black Panthers. In this turbulent atmosphere Jones came of age as a strikingly innovative dramatist, discovering the voice of the play as far more appropriate, at least at the time, than the poetry for his burgeoning sense of cultural and political need. The play, after all, was itself a public and social occasion of sorts, offering up a usually willing audience for immediate interaction with the instructive ideas and feelings of the playwright—potentially an instrument of political influence. Furthermore, in accordance with the aesthetics defined in Blues People, the play was far more hospitable than the silence of poetry to the extraliterary modes of black expression. As Jones progressed from the somewhat conventional strategies of his first plays into the more ritual and communal theater of his nationalist period, he increasingly integrated vocal strategies, performed music, and the motions of dance into the representation of black experience. Jones's first one-act efforts, The Toilet and The Baptism (both produced in 1964), were tentative gropings away from the concerns of the poetry, The Toilet being more provocative and successful for its concentrated speech force and realistic setting. The action is structured through energetic vernacular dialogue and assertive physical gestures exchanged by nine black youths who, in the aggregate, constitute the voice of the play. They are preparing to beat up a white boy, James Karolis, in the high school bathroom because they suspect him of

42 / AMERICAN WRITERS making homosexual overtures to their leader, Ray Foots. The combination of racial animosity and aggressive speech vigorously dramatizes the black dada strain, causing some viewers to resent the language as overly obscene, the action as excessively stark. Ed Bullins, on the other hand, saw the play's "radical . . . depiction of Black people" as fitting and precise "in a deep and profoundly revolutionary sense," affirming his own first uncompromising efforts to dramatize the intensities of black life in Clara's Ole Man (1965). If the style of The Toilet is exemplary, the presentation of Ray's confused feelings—he returns to cradle Karolis' bloodied head after his buddies have left—does not, in Jones's opinion, sufficiently clarify the black youth's entrapment by white sentimentality. The Baptism, although set in a pretentious Baptist church, with the action taking place around an altar rather than a urinal, proposes similar themes and ambivalences in the form of a somewhat attenuated allegory. Both plays, for all their differences, are about the precarious struggles of black youth toward manhood in white America. Percy, a sincere young boy, naively tries to assert values of "humanity" and "charity" in the face of tangled sexual motivations and religious ideals as represented by the Minister and his deluded flock. Ironically, the presence of the Homosexual, whose cynical insights constitute the sanest voice in the play, at times threatens to overshadow the parable of Percy's thwarted manhood. Even though the knightly young protagonist is able to slay the Minister and congregation with his "silver sword," thereby signifying the promise of wholesome manhood, he is summarily whisked away by the laconic Messenger from the white world (on whose jacket is stenciled "The Man"). At the play's end, Jones pointedly resurrects the black Homosexual from Percy's carnage, leaving him casually to drift off to "cruise Bickford's," the sole emasculated survivor of

Christian hypocrisy and "The Man's" destruction. Dutchman and The Slave (both produced in 1964) are more extensive dramas that crystallize the confused boyhood feelings of Ray and Percy into the full-blown rage of Clay and Walker, adult men conscious of the nature of their victimization. With these two plays Jones in effect broke from the tyranny of individualism implicit in white cultural values and began to place his art in the service of a collective black freedom. From an artistic standpoint this is nowhere more clearly noted than in a 1964 essay entitled "The Revolutionary Theatre" (reprinted in Home), in which the African-derived aesthetic of Blues People is catalyzed by the mounting pressure of political necessity. Change, as a social and stylistic process reflected in the development of black music, is now transformed into a conception to be willfully embodied and actively asserted by the black playwright: "The Revolutionary Theatre," Jones begins, "should force change; it should be change." The first phase, the essay makes clear, will necessarily involve alterations of consciousness in white, but especially in black, audiences, exposing the hatred inside "black skulls" so that "White men will cower," while at the same time moving the black victims "to look at the strength in their minds and their bodies." If Clay in Dutchman, along with Walker in The Slave, and Ray in The Toilet, "are all victims," as Jones rightfully contends, they are portrayed at different stages of self-realization. Clay, the malleable college boy and would-be "black Baudelaire," hardens into a fiery preacher who reveals the relationship of sane black truths to absurd white illusions—a condition that the manic and fearful Ray can only intuit, or that the dazed initiate of The Bottom can only begin to grasp.

Dutchman, like Dante's Hell, melds Western

AMIRIBARAKA / 43 myth and legend into a usable black logic, creating a psychodrama that is unquestionably the most lucid and powerful of Jones's early plays. The portentous overtones are established before the dialogue begins, Jones introducing the nether-world setting as an ironic contemporary inversion of the Flying Dutchman: "In the flying underbelly of the city Underground. The subway heaped in modern myth." Well-dressed and bookish, Clay is the doomed passenger on the rushing underground railroad, guilty of no crime but his blackness. He is destined, despite his respectable appearance, to be the repeated victim of America's most infamous social ritual—the lynching. Lula, the keeper of the ritual, is his white seductress and executioner, a perverse Eve who boards the train "eating an apple, very daintily." At heart she is the dramatic realization of Crow Jane, the tawdry purveyor of a hip Western rationalism calculated to prevent the suppressed rage of black manhood from bursting into insurrection. Having dispatched Clay and ordered his body thrown off the car, she makes an appropriate notation in her "notebook" and prepares to begin the ritual anew with another unsuspecting victim. Resonant with the psychosexual tension that motivates racial fear, she is a far more effective agent of white destruction than the Messenger in The Baptism. While the deterministic ritual frame gives the play a solemn weight, the process of Clay's emotional awakening and climactic self-possession creates the dominant impression. Throughout the first scene Lula is clearly in charge, characterizing Clay to his face as "a wellknown type" and easily manipulating him into feeling both flattered by her sexual attention and vaguely uncomfortable at taunts about his spurious middle-class aspirations. He is surprised when, at the end of the scene, she knowingly jokes that beneath his three-button suit and striped tie there lurks a murderer.

At the beginning of scene 2, as Lula becomes graphically suggestive about a rendezvous at her apartment ("I lead you in, holding your wet hand gently in my hand ..."), it is revealed that her central concern—and Jones's—has all along been the question of Clay's "manhood." Impatient with his self-control, she finally draws his latent aggressions into the open by viciously insulting him with racial slurs and stereotypes. His response, a tirade addressed to both Lula and the whites in the audience, is a classic example of the "theatre of assault" Jones calls for in the essay. Clay's rage and capacity for retaliation are no longer deflected into subregions of feeling or coded into lies and devices, but consciously savored and directly expressed. Slapping Lula twice, he reveals himself to be the murderer she predicted: I could murder you now. Such a tiny ugly throat. I could squeeze it flat, and watch you turn blue, on a humble. For dull kicks. And all those weak-faced ofays squatting around here, staring over their papers at me. Murder them too. Even if they expected it. That man there . . . (POINTS TO WELL-DRESSED MAN) I COuld rip

that Times right out of his hand, as skinny and middle-classed as I am, I could rip that paper out of his hand and just as easily rip out his throat. It takes no great effort You don't know anything except what's there for you to see. An act. Lies. Device. Not the pure heart, the pumping black heart. You don't even know that. And I sit here, in this buttoned-up suit, to keep myself from cutting all your throats.... But in the final analysis he cannot murder, it seems—and, ironically, because his pretensions as a poet make him vulnerable to the seduction of language. Through Clay, Jones states the predicament of the artist-activist, presenting in its most reductive form the conflict between the ineffective rhetorical gesture and the extreme revolutionary act. If the Charlie Parkers and

44 I AMERICAN the Bessie Smiths could have "killed some white people," Clay asserts, they "wouldn't have needed that music." At the same time he dismisses his own poetry as "Some kind of bastard literature ... all it needs is a simple knife thrust. Just let me bleed you, you loud whore, and one poem vanished." Here Jones has found, in substance, a representative black voice that the early poetry could not authenticate, a voice convincing by its intentions and intensities more than by its manner. (Clay's middle-American speech has only intermittent Afro-American nuances, as in the opening "hi're you?" to Lula, his class status setting him considerably apart from the collective voice in The Toilet.) And here, also, the voice suddenly wearies. Unable to assume the full responsibility for action that his explosion into consciousness dictates, Clay fatally lapses into his false intellectual security: "Ahhh. Shit. But who needs it? I'd rather be a fool. Insane. Safe with my words, and no deaths, and clean, hard thoughts, urging me to new conquests." The visceral dramatization of racial conflict did not prevent Dutchman from being widely acclaimed or from winning the 1964 Obie Award for best off-Broadway play. It is undeniably good theater in the best conventional sense, with fast-paced dialogue, superb emotional timing, and compelling interaction between the two antagonists. The Slave, although less engaging, as theater, marks a transition from the intense but indecisive aggression of Clay to a more explicit radical consciousness in the character of Walker Vessels, one-time poet turned insurrectionary. As the black antagonist confronts his white exwife, Grace, in her tastefully furnished living room, he is a leader of the black revolution already in progress. His credentials are established at the very start: He is Lula's fantasy realized, having already killed whites and now appearing to Grace simply as a "nigger mur-

WRITERS derer"; and he has adopted a militant pragmatism of "use," akin to the functionalism described in Blues People, in place of the safe words of Yeatsian poetry and romantic idealism. Essentially, even though Walker admits the possibility "that we might not win," the political act has triumphed over the aesthetic statement, symbolizing his freedom from enslavement to Western civilization. The longish first act is mostly an ironic exchange of revolutionary ideology and liberal platitudes between Walker and his white adversaries, projecting more the sense of a play of ideas rather than of characters. Although Walker's basic function seems to be the clear articulation of political freedom, his visit to Grace is motivated by the additional and unresolved question of what to do about the children of their interracial marriage. The end of the short second act focuses almost entirely on the destiny of his two half-white daughters, to whom he is tied emotionally and biologically. Amid the explosions and rubble of the race war he tells the dying Grace that he has killed them, even keeps shouting it after she dies, as if to convince himself it is so; yet the play ends ambivalently as the wounded rebel stumbles offstage to the sounds of a child "crying and screaming as loud as it can." Even as a dedicated revolutionary Walker is still a victim, still bearing the legacy of Crow Jane through the painful reminder of his and her mixed-blood ctyldren. Walker's appearance in the prologue "dressed as an old field slave," and his return to that identity when the play closes, suggest that the forces of racial determinism are very much at work and that slavery is still claiming its victims. Indeed Walker is the epitome of Jones's belief, as stated in "Philistinism and the Negro Writer," that his works ought to "identify and delineate the slave, the black man—the man who remains separate from the mainstream." Jones had for some time been on the verge of

AMIRIBARAKA / 45 leaving Hettie and their two daughters, the inevitable divorce coming in August 1965 after a period of mounting pressure and change of the sort autobiographically reflected in Dutchman and The Slave. The separation was also cultural. Jones cut all ties with the East Village by moving to Harlem (where he briefly took charge of the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/ School) and then back to New Ark—as he renamed it—in late 1965. He had indeed come home, as the title of his 1966 social essays attests, completing his transformation from literary assimilationist to black separatist. Including pieces written between 1961 and 1966, Home is a graphic exposition of Jones's changing perspective, what he calls "the sense of movement—the struggle, in myself, to understand where and who I am, and to move with that understanding." The final essay, "The Legacy of Malcolm X" (1965), perhaps best summarizes his arrival at a nationalist sense of politics and art: ... we know for certain that the solution of the Black Man's problems will come only through Black National Consciousness. We also know that the focus of change will be racial. (If we feel differently, we have different ideas. Race is feeling. Where the body, and the organs come in. Culture is the preservation of these feelings in superrational to rational form. Art is one method of expressing these feelings and identifying the form, as an emotional phenomenon.) In order for the Black Man in the West to absolutely know himself it is necessary for him to see himself first as culturally separate from the white man. Jones completed his personal reintegration into the black world by marrying a black woman, Sylvia Robinson, in August 1966 and subsequently taking the name Imamu Amiri Baraka—meaning spiritual leader, prince, and blessed one—an affirmation of his religious

dedication to black nationhood. He founded Spirit House, a community center for political and educational activities, and launched himself vigorously into the political destiny of black Newark, including experiences as varied as his trumped-up arrest and conviction (overturned in a retrial) during the 1967 Newark insurrections and his later extensive assistance in the 1970 election of Kenneth Gibson as the city's first black mayor. Baraka remained artistically productive despite the increased demands of his political and community activities. The plays collected in Four Black Revolutionary Plays (1969) and the late poems in Black Magic (1969) represent the major thematic and stylistic changes brought about by nationalism. Baraka's most succinct statement of the radical aesthetic embodied in these works is in a 1964 essay entitled "Hunting Is Not Those Heads on the Wall" (reprinted in Home). It crystallizes for literary use many of the stylistic implications of music suggested in Blues People. In contrast with the static art product of the Western tradition (the artifact, musical score, book), black art prizes the "lightning awareness of the art process" (any given instance or interval of creating), for which he coins the term "Art-ing." The hunter-artist is fulfilled by the experience of hunting-creating, not by the mounted trophy or the completed poem. To capture the immediacy and motion implied in Art-ing, the writer must favor the participle, as opposed to the nouns and object images of Western literature: "The clearest description of now is the present participle, . . . Walking is not past or future. Be-ing, the most complex, since it goes on as itself, as adjectiveverb, and at the moment of." This predicate concept is consistent with both the politics of revolutionary change and the improvisational flow of Afro-American music: "I speak of the verb process, the doing, the coming into being, the at-the-time-of. Which is why we

46 I AMERICAN think there is particular value in live music, contemplating the artifact as it arrives, listening to it emerge." As an instance of spoken language in process, the play itself was the closest literary approximation of Art-ing, while ritual structure—the sense of mythic inevitability and ceremonial ongoingness as conveyed in Dutchman—was one of the effective Art-ing strategies within the play. Experimental Death Unit #1 (1964), in Four Black Revolutionary Plays, aptly reflects the head-hunting metaphor through the ritual appearance of black soldiers marching in cadence to drums. The play closes as they sever the heads of Duff and Loco, two perverted white artists in the "beat" mold who lust after blackness, and mount them on pikes. They do not covet the bloody members as trophies but display them as symbols of the execution that must be ceremonially repeated until all whiteness is destroyed. Unlike Clay and Walker, the disciplined soldiers firmly control their own fate as we see them in the process of collectively defining their history. The significant work in Four. . . Plays, though, is A Black Mass. Written in 1965 and first performed in Newark in 1966, it is addressed to black audiences, as all his subsequent nationalist drama would be. It is, in effect, a play about Art-ing and is appropriately dedicated to "the brothers and sisters of the Black Arts." Unlike Dutchman its mythic structure is exclusively black, taking for its source Yacub's History, the demonology of the Nation of Islam (fully narrated in The Autobiography of Malcolm X), which openly attributes black suffering to the white Beast. Jacoub, a somewhat altered version of the original Yacub, is the type of the black artist, and his error is in misunderstanding the nature and function of creativity. The first half of the one-act play expostulates the basic conflict between the humane and spiritual tenets of black art through the black magicians Nasafi and Tanzil, as opposed to the de-

WRITERS

humanizing aesthetics of the West practiced by the thoughtless renegade Jacoub. He compulsively channels his creative powers into the production of what he egotistically perceives as original form rather than honoring the inherent value of the creative process itself; the end product is a beast he falsely believes can be educated to serve black mankind. Through the questionings of his fellow magicians, Jacoub is revealed to favor the principles of fixed time instead of prediction and ongoingness, of rational abstractions rather than emotional and spiritual energy, and of personal aggrandizement rather than a concern for the collective welfare of the black world. He is, for all intents and purposes, a black artist brought down by the self-serving values of Western individualism. With the appearance of the inarticulate and soulless white Beast itself, the play shifts abruptly from a forum of aesthetic ideas to a vivid theatrical. Though sexless and sterile, the Beast paradoxically unleashes its destructiveness through a kind of rape by contamination, perpetuating itself by transforming black victims into white Beasts through mere touch. True to the tradition of the lustful incursions of white slave masters, the first victim is a woman, Tiila, whose metamorphosis into a "deadly cross between black and white" strongly suggests the biological-sexual quality of the Beast's violation. Just before he is himself assaulted, Jacoub acknowledges his hideous error and consigns the Beast and its cohorts to "the evil diseased caves of the cold," as they are in Yacub's History. The narrator concludes the play by asserting that the beasts "are still loose in the world" and instructing that they must be exterminated by the Jihad, a holy war to be waged against the white world. As the title implies, the play itself partakes of ritual, opening as the three magicians conclude a mass celebrating the black arts. The action then unfolds to expose the betrayal of this rit-

AMIRIBARAKA / 47 ual, the revolutionary message being that black art has been, and is, vulnerable to destructive white influences. The artistic integrity of the play itself is preserved, though, by an infusion of music throughout the entire production. The stage directions particularly call for a performance by Sun-Ra, whose music is the essence of predicate motion, "the flow of w," says Baraka in "The Changing Same," a 1966 essay in Black Music (1967). At first the soothing "Music of eternal concentration and wisdom" as the mass is in progress, the sounds modulate to the more familiar rhythmic tensions of contemporary black music as Jacoub's treachery begins, "swelling, making sudden downward swoops, screeching." The ongoing music is powerfully present, not as mere background but as an integral part of the play's ritual quality. Music and language are fused, the formal intonations of speech enriched by Afro-American tonalities as the musicians punctuate the spoken lines in call-and-response fashion with their improvised phrasings. Upon the entry of the Beast, the script calls for "Sun-Ra music of shattering dimension," the screeching instruments and screams of the victims eliding into an amalgam of sound. This responsive interweaving of music and language splendidly epitomizes the predicate quality of Art-ing that the bare play script could not by itself achieve, an aesthetic strategy Baraka applied with even greater effect in Slave Ship two years later. Two other plays, Great Goodness of Life (1966) and Madheart (1966), are instructional allegories without the informing musical cotext, although background music fades intermittently in and out of the dialogue in Madheart. Subtitled A Coon Show, Great Goodness of Life is a convoluted psychodrama about a bourgeois black father, Court Royal, who acquiesces in the execution of his insurrectionary son. The play confronts the audience's racial integrity with the emotional impact of this be-

trayal. More and more the plays took on this sort of didactic purpose, not simply showing victims but teaching black audiences the precise and often painful nature of their condition. "Art must serve to illuminate and educate," Baraka says in "Work Notes—'66," in Raise Race Rays Raze: Essays Since 1965 (1971). The anatomy of Court Royal's buffered consciousness and the harsh exposure of the flawed Mother and Sister in Madheart typify Baraka's educational intentions, however disturbing to the playgoer: "Each aspect of black life must have light shed on it, must be analyzed must make the pain of recognizing the exact place of our crucifixion, the exact sloth and cowardliness, the precise ugliness and ignorance." J-E-L-L-O (written in 1965), a ribald satire of the Jack Benny show in which Rochester instructively comes into possession of his blackness, was to have been a fifth play in the collection but was suppressed by the publisher as potentially libelous. In other plays of the late 1960's Baraka heeds his own call, stated in "What the Arts Need Now" (1967), in Raise Race, for "plays of all instance. Filling in and extending so-called 'reality.' . . . a post-American form. An afterwhiteness . . . where history is absolutely meaningful and contemporary." The plays have moved away almost entirely from any focus on palpable character, as witnessed in the figures of Clay and Walker, to key in on conditions and issues dramatically reified as Jacoub and Court Royal. Police (1968), Home on the Range (1968), and The Death of Malcolm X (1969) all deal with specific local and national black circumstances, unequivocally drawing racial-emotional lines in their explanation and interpretation of black reality. Baraka's quintessential nationalist play, though, is Slave Ship, first published in Negro Digest in 1967, then separately in 1969, and reprinted in The Motion of History and Other Plays (1978). It is a powerful instance of what

48 I AMERICAN he defines in a 1967 essay entitled "The Need for a Cultural Base to Civil Rites & Bpower Mooments," published in Raise Race, as the prime function of black art: "... to get people into a consciousness of black power, what it is, by emotional example" rather than by "dialectical lecture." This is achieved in the play by an almost complete subordination of individual character and spoken dialogue to an irresistible vocal-musical rendering of the collective black presence. Subtitled A Historical Pageant, Slave Ship has as its ritual basis the intensity of expression and feeling born of the horrifying Middle Passage. African drum rhythms are combined with the screams of people torturously pressed into the hold of a ship, an experience of pure sound conveyed in total darkness during the first third of the pageant—the portentous historical beginnings of the Afro-American underworld vision. The audience is prepared at the onset to feel the pressing reality by hearing it, not by seeing it. Baraka orchestrates the sounds of Africa's abduction and bondage in the elaborate stage directions: African Drums like the worship of some Orisha. Obatala. Mbwanga rattles of the priests. BamBam BamBamBoom BoomBoom BamBam. Rocking of the slave ship, in darkness, without sound. But smells. Then sound. Now slowly, out of blackness with smells and drums staccato, the hideous screams. All the women together, scream. AAAAAIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEE. The fragmentary expressions of fear, cursing, and appeals to African deities are bonded into emotional coherence by the ritualized screaming that marks the emergence of the black voice in the New World. The screaming then gives way to a "deathly patient" humming followed by strains of spirituals as the play shifts to its second phase, depicting slavery in America.

WRITERS

Here, lighting and dialogue are more pronounced, revealing the split consciousness of slave victims, some of whom shuffle and dance for their masters while others, like Nat Turner, plot uncompromising revolt against the white "Beast." In the final and contemporary phase of the pageant, the predominant sound is the aggressively clear screaming of a "new-sound" saxophone overriding the garbled nonsense speech of an integrationist preacher. Throughout, the African screams and voicings, especially through the recurrent motif of a mother calling for her lost child, Moshake, intersect the shifting sounds and historical changes as a persistent reminder of the enduring African spirit. The pageant, in essence a processional of emotions, closes by celebrating the power of a unified black consciousness. All the members of the cast come together in a triumphant communion of Afro-American singing ("When We Gonna Rise") and dancing ("a new-old dance, Boogalooyoruba line") in a prelude to the eradication of whiteness. As a community in the fullest command of its expressive powers, they converge upon and kill the integrationist preacher and his white "boss," as if the political act could be accomplished by the very sounds and motions of Art-ing itself. In a final gesture of communal instruction, Baraka plays to the participatory expectations of his black audience by having them join with the cast in a continuation of the dance. When "the party reaches some loose improvisation," he jars the relaxed consciousness by throwing the severed head of the preacher onto the dance floor and dousing the lights. The final interruption and abrupt immersion in blackness force the playgoer to be aware that the struggle continues beyond the bounds of the play. In its fusion of terse speech fragments and vocal-musical improvisation into a unified play script, Slave Ship is significantly advanced in conception over the interacting dialogue text and musical performance of A Black

AMIRIBARAKA / 49 Mass. With the added dimensions of dance and audience participation, it stands as Baraka's most sustained and effective work of Art-ing. "Sabotage," "Target Study," and "Black Art," the three books that make up Black Magic (1969), represent Baraka's continuing poetic activity between 1961 and 1967, while he was writing plays and flexing into nationalism. These poems begin (thematically if not chronologically) where The Dead Lecturer leaves off, developing toward predicate formulations of black spiritual integrity of the sort symbolized by the magicians Nasafi and Tanzil in A Black Mass. In the introduction Baraka dismisses his early poetry as preoccupied with suicide and death, "a cloud of abstraction and disjointedness, that was just whiteness." In contrast the poems of Black Magic, especially in the third book, strive for the "willpower to build" beyond whiteness in order to "force this issue," as he puts it, of transcendent black spirituality. "Sabotage" (1961-1963), the first book, is a slow recovery from the old moribund misperceptions, the poet gathering his energies for the final breaking of all ties to the "superstructure of filth Americans call their way of life." In the third poem, "A POEM SOME PEOPLE WILL HAVE TO UNDERSTAND," the necessity for blotting out his "Watercolor ego" and "All the pitifully intelligent citizens / I've forced myself to love" is crisply stated: "Will the machinegunners please step forward?" His poetry still feels inert, though, and the actual breaking away is not easy. In "Citizen Cain" Baraka must prod himself: "Roi, finish this p o e m , . . . / . . . Your time is up / in this particular feeling. In this particular throb of meaning. / Roi, baby, you blew the whole thing." Although in "Letter to E. Franklin Frazier" he is isolated in a room "... where memory / stifles the present," he nevertheless sees himself, as he says in "THE PEOPLE BURNING," at a decisive and energizing turning point: " . . . It is

choice, now, and / the weight is specific and personal." He must turn the old death fixations into new life motions, the whiteness into blackness. The decadent white world and its hapless literature are virulently focused in "Sabotage" through metaphors of sexuality, tastelessness, and increasing anti-Semitic innuendo—"poets imagining / they are Shakespeare's hardon, . . . / . . . eating / into the strophe yard huge like empty Dachau...." There are indexes of wholesome change, though, the signs of personal and artistic rebirth parallel to the insights gleaned from Blues People. In "LEADBELLY GIVES AN AUTOGRAPH," music is exact and nurturing, opening up avenues of poetic expression. The poet is now assured by "The possibilities of music.... / . . . that scripture of rhythms," his voice no longer meek as it was in "Rhythm & Blues": A strength to be handled by giants. The possibilities of statement. I am saying, now, what my father could not remember to say. What my grandfather was killed for believing. Foremost among the possibilities of poetic statement would be the bridging of personal feeling and broader social understanding. In a white-dominated world where everything is owned and objectified—God, people, time, language, as Baraka says in "Square Business"— his function would be to seek wholeness through subjectivity, through the expression of black feelings and spirit. In "The Bronze Buckaroo," at the end of "Sabotage," he is one of the "mutineers" in motion toward a more complete blackness, "Half way up the hill . . . / . . . and standing." "Target Study" (1963-1965), Baraka says in the introduction, is in a more active mode,

50 I AMERICAN "trying to really study, like bomber crews do the soon to be destroyed cities. Less passive now, less uselessly 'literary.'" A twelve-line poem entitled "Ration" succinctly captures the spirit: "Banks must be robbed, / ... / The money must be taken / and used to buy weapons." As in "Sabotage," much energy is spent perverting shopworn symbols of American whiteness. The response here is more specifically keyed to avenge Jim Crowism, as opposed to the earlier exclusive repudiations of Crow Jane. Homosexual epithets abound (art is a "hairy" phallus, old artist friends "white drifting fairies," Uncle Sam "a queer," God "the baldhead faggot"), blatantly offensive sexual missiles aimed by the bombardier-poet to obliterate the presumption of white male omnipotence, establishing in its place a vision of manhood in accordance with the masculine dynamics of Black Power in the 1960's. Baraka's attitude reflects nothing more or less than the narrow sexual politics of the time, a racial rivalry perceived largely as a crisis of manhood. The opening poem, "Numbers, Letters," features the lean voice of a new man no longer " . . . freakin' off / with white women, hangin' out / with Queens,..." Unencumbered, he can speak straightforwardly, " . . . Say what you mean, . . . / . . . and be strong / about it." The hesitations of "Sabotage" are all but gone: I'm Everett LeRoi Jones, 30 yrs old. A black nigger in the universe. A long breath singer, wouldbe dancer, strong from years of fantasy and study. All this time then, for what's happening now.. With this renewed sense of self, the poet urges the underground feelings of black manhood into visible realization. In "Ready Or Not," the bold print screams "BLACK MAN DREAMING OF MURDER / GET THE

WRITERS

SHIT AND MEET ME / SOMEPLACE," as though addressing the Clays and Walkers of the 1964 plays. More and more reading his poems before receptive black audiences, Baraka had scant concern for the survival of "Ready Or Not" as a printed artifact. He implies in the final lines that the poem's chief function is the creation of consciousness at the moment of utterance: "This poem now has said / what it means, left off / life gone seconds ago". Some of the poems near the end of "Target Study" carp against the limits of written form. "Blank" states the ideal alternative of "live sound and image," formulations more readily embodied in the voices and gestures of the play. "THREE MOVEMENTS AND A CODA" exhorts open insurrection, the final lines defining the poem as an incomplete word-song awaiting its consummate formation through the extraliterary participation of the reader-listener: "These are the words of lovers. / Of dancers, of dynamite singers / These are songs if you have the / music"—no end punctuation but, rather, the expectation of the poem merging into whatever action might be induced in the responsive listener. Such appeals to the essence of black manner and feeling culminate in "A Poem for Black Hearts." The poet elevates black self-identification and potential for action to mythic proportions in the name of Malcolm X, a contemporary black hero already a legend: "For Great Malcolm a prince of the earth, let nothing in us rest / until we avenge ourselves for his death...." In "Black Art" (1965-1966), the final and most substantial book in Black Magic, the reach toward a black spiritual essence is even more pronounced—the white madness almost fully displaced by the new black magic. The opening poem, "SOS," sets the prescriptive tone for collective integrity: "calling all black people, come in, black people, come / on in." Having

AMIRIBARAKA / 51 summoned his audience, the poet-teacher firmly establishes in "Black Art"—one of Baraka's most often quoted poem-manifestos—the principle of what one might call the living poem, the poem indistinguishable from the natural world and, especially, from the live gesture of black assertion: "Poems are bullshit unless they are / teeth or trees or lemons piled / on a step.... / words of the hip world live flesh & / coursing blood...." Clay's imprecation to Lula, that drawing her blood would cause one poem to vanish, is now the imperative aesthetic: u ... We want 'poems that kill.' / Assassin poems, Poems that shoot / guns...." In this terroristic manner, the poem represents the height of Baraka's anti-Semitism (" . . . dagger poems in the slimey bellies / of the owner-jews ..."), with ethnocentric scattershot aimed at "wops," Irish cops, and non-black Negroes (" ... girdlemamma mulatto bitches") as well. These are to be poems of exorcism, the purging of whiteness stated in literal terms in order to restructure black consciousness. Ideally, the people themselves are the self-affirming artists, their lives the Art-ing: . . . Let Black People understand that they are the lovers and the sons of lovers and warriors and sons of warriors Are poems & poets & all the loveliness here in the world Black statement is not to be an arty, individuated fact, but a collective participatory expression of poet and audience alike: "And Let All Black People Speak This Poem / Silently / or LOUD," he concludes. The power Baraka wants to draw upon is perhaps best characterized in the essay "The Changing Same," in Black Music. As always, music is the exemplary medium, evidencing what the poet calls "the will of the expression." The musician-artist is in effect a priest whose sacred duty is to evoke spirituality: "This phe-

nomenon is always at the root in Black Art, the worship of spirit—or at least the summoning of or by such force." In "Little Brown Jug" Baraka expresses the absolute equation of black selfhood, the song, and divinity—himself and all black people as the instrument (the little brown jug), the song, and the spirit force: " . . . Companion, of melody / rhythm / turned around heart runs / climbed & jumped screaming / WE ARE GODS, ..." Several of the poems in "Black Art" are conceived as chants, invocations of spiritual energy—for example, "Sacred Chant for the Return of Black Spirit and Power." Where once "White evil" had prevailed (like the love once intellectually conceived as twisted to "evol" in Suicide Note), now the poet conjures positive spiritual inversions through the magical word power of the chant: "To turn their evil backwards / is to / live." So too has the once-evil Anglo-sun been restored and deified in the new righteous way of life, the poet proclaiming to his wife in "Stirling Street September" that " . . . for the sake of, at the lust of / pure life, WE WORSHIP THE SUN." Some poems, like the aptly titled "Form Is Emptiness," press poetic convention to the limit in attempting to force the issue of spirituality. After a monotonous printed extension of chanted vowel sounds to evoke the gods of color (Rah, Damballah, Allah), the poet can only affirm the total inadequacy of the fixed poem to represent infinite deity: "is not word / is no lines / no meanings." In "Vowels 2," though, the extended chant is invigorated with images of motion and sound that simulate the ecstatic freedom of spiritual consummation, "the energy / the force" of godhead percussively summoned into emotional and bodily sensation by the preacher-poet. Difficult to read silently, the lines can be effectively sung out to project the rhythmic spell of a sermon whose text is black freedom. The poem that perhaps most

52 / AMERICAN WRITERS gracefully captures the predicate principles of "Hunting Is Not Those Heads on the Wall" is "Death is the beginning of a new form." Black selfhood is offered in the ultimate form—the "new form"—of infinite motion working timelessly toward complete self-possession and spiritual freedom. Participial forms combine with music images to create a flowing predicate style: of doing thinking feeling being forever endless in the instant we lean transformed into energy transformed into blurrd motion all that is transformed specks of fire resolved in the silent beating of forever divinity you are a portion of this you are the total jazzman a note on the horn the universe is close to your lips blow it out The poem collections following Black Magic show an intensification of spiritual concern and an emphasis on African origins rather than any further evolution in style. Baraka had come under the influence of Maulana Karanga's Kawaida doctrine in 1967, the full effects of which can be seen in the poetry of In Our Terribleness (1970) and It's Nation Time (1970). Carefully outlined in Raise Race, Kawaida is a program for black nationhood rooted in a seven-point African value system (unity, self-determination, collective work and responsibility, cooperative economics, purpose, creativity, and faith) that constitutes for Baraka a "religious creed." Although he soon abandoned Kawaida for Marxism, he saw its organizational features then as a distinct advance over the inspirational but unstructured teachings of Malcolm X. In Our Terribleness acknowledges Karanga as

"the master teacher" and at one point specifically directs that the "change" to nationhood take place by adhering to the seven principles. The main thrust of the poetry is toward a prophetic black future, sweeping the reader along in surges of black talk and preachment that make only occasional pro forma references to the white Beast—a romantic fusion of secular style and holy revelation extolling blackness. The physical characteristics of In Our Terribleness as a book-artifact are in curious static tension with Baraka's predicate aesthetics. The title page is a hard, reflective silver, the 145 glossy leaves conspicuously unpaginated and black-bordered, the text in large, bold print and generously spaced. The poetry is combined with forty-three photographs by Fundi (Billy Abernathy), sometimes to caption the pictures but mostly unfolding as a dominant and independent sermon on Some elements and meaning in black style, as the book is subtitled. Baraka strains a bit to introduce the fixed images as Art-ing—"PAPERMOTION / PITCHAS ..." he calls them—perhaps a tentative expression of his interest in cinematic techniques that influenced the plays of his Marxist period. The title itself symbolizes in poetic black language the integrity of style and culture that distinguishes black life for Baraka, an expansion of the Afro-American sense of the word "bad" as meaning good in the tested tradition of inverting white values: "Since there is a 'good' we know is bullshit, . . . / . . . We will be, / definitely, bad, bad, as a mother-fucker." Terribleness, then, is the ultimate goodness: "Our terribleness is our survival as beautiful beings." It is the essence of black life-style as expressed in the poem "LECTURE PAST DEAD CATS," the people exalted as a "... nation of super hip swift motional creation / . . . tone carriers of glowing magic" and the poet himself honored to be "one of the priests." In "PRAYER FOR SAVING" Baraka ex-

AMIRIBARAKA / 53 horts the people to "Survive and Defend" the entire black tradition, evoking heroes and artists from Ray Robinson and Huey Newton to Claude McKay and John Coltrane, images to be immortalized in the collective black consciousness as "the together revelation of humanhood." He is most self-consciously Imamu (the title of Muslim priest or imam conferred upon him by Karanga) in the visionary poem "ALL IN THE STREET," where Allah speaks through the agency of the poet: " . . . I am a / vessel, a black priest interpreting / the present and future for my people." The same role is more confidently fulfilled in It's Nation Time, a compact, three-part service proclaiming the path to black nationhood. The first part, "The Nation Is Like Ourselves," is a litany urging unconverted "assimilados" to return to their blackness, preparatory to the inspirational message in "Sermon for Our Maturity." His congregation is now "the suns children / Black creatures of grace-" growing and expanding into an "Afro" space of "angelic definition." Baraka closes in the title poem, "It's Nation Time," by pressing the people to translate their newfound spiritual maturity into the necessary actions for building the black nation in the here and now. This was the literary culmination of Baraka's nationalism, the final measure of the distance traveled from insurgent son to spiritual father—from Clay and Walker to the impassioned collective voice of Slave Ship and In Our Terribleness. As one of the prophet-teachers, Baraka also had a major hand in preparing the book that has become the primer of the Black Arts Movement, coediting Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing (1968) with Larry Neal. A selection of essays, poetry, short fiction, and drama, it is a chronicle of 1960's nationalism comparable in importance with Alain Locke's documentation of the Harlem Renaissance in The New Negro (1925).

Abrupt as it might seem, Baraka's move to Marxism in the early 1970's was by no means a sudden turnabout. It was, rather, a continuation as well as an abandonment of certain facets of black ideology consistent with his sense of art and life as "The Changing Same." He is the same Amiri Baraka, but changed in discarding the religious pretense of the title Imamu; still a fervent spokesman for black people, but now with a worldwide revolutionary vision for all oppressed people; still an insurrectionary, but organizing against the international evils of capitalism and imperialism rather than the national tyranny of racism; still an artist of intensity, but keyed to structured gestures of political fact rather than the spiraling imagination of spirituality; still deeply committed, but to the discipline demanded by the "science of MarxismLeninism-Mao Tse-tung Thought" rather than the program of Kawaida. Although in the poem "HEGEL," from "Sabotage," he belittled the tedium of " . . . trying to understand / the nightmare of economics," he subsequently described (in a published chapter from his unpublished 1973 autobiography "Six Persons") his own political conversion in hip Afro-Hegelian-Marxist terms: "But the class struggle yeh, then suddenly in 1971, and 2, and 3, fat gibber lip skunky funky declare the opening of the nigro pseudobourgeois hot foots Yeh its called, a 'qualitative leap.'" Although as late as 1969, Baraka was rejecting Marxist-Leninist "white ideology" as merely a violent form of integration, by 1973, under the influence of such African Marxists as Amilcar Cabral and Sekou Toure, we see his first distinctly postnationalist poem in "Afrika Revolution." The mother culture is no longer mythologized—made a "static absolute," as he would say self-critically of Blues People. Instead he enjoins African people all over the world "to make Revolution" against capitalism and imperialism. He sees change in political

54 I AMERICAN rather than metaphysical or aesthetic terms, the poetic voice frequently spare and didactically earnest: "The world must be changed, split open & changed / Transformed, turned upside down." Baraka had altered his role from that of priest to the Leninist concept of the advanced worker, the socialist poet-instructor dedicated to "the education and organization of the proletariat." His literary subject is henceforth to be Hard Facts, as the poetry written during 19731975 is titled, not the ritual celebration of black magic. Instead of the former concern with "how you sound," he now stresses content, what you say. "Poetry," the introduction to Hard Facts begins, "is saying something about reality. It reflects the sayer's place in the production process, his or her material life and values." Following fundamental Marxism, Baraka conceives of himself as an artist-worker raising his audience's political and historical understanding of material reality. Moving from the concentrated if narrow sense of responsibility to black nationalism, he now accepts the broad premise of "a dynamic coalition of forces" against all forms of oppression. The keynote struck in most of his socialist poetry and drama is the pressing need to organize "a new revolutionary Marxist-Leninist party." In the aggregate, Hard Facts—along with most of Baraka's subsequent Marxist poetry— addresses a black audience more than a multinational proletariat, his main concern continuing to be the political readjustment of black sensibilities. "WHEN WE'LL WORSHIP JESUS" speaks in a distinctly black voice charged with the energy of a preacher's rhetorical emphasis. It is a simple call to replace the anodyne of religion with a belief in science, knowledge, and revolution. Some poems isolate singular instances of black political regression, the prostitution of black integrity to bourgeois materialism and power by progressive people who in fact only represent the illusion of

WRITERS

change. These "attack pieces," as Baraka calls them in the introduction, are reminiscent of the corrosive voice in "Target Study." The satirical obscenities directed at poet Nikki Giovanni in "NIGGY THE HO" (transparently "Nikki the Whore") and the flaying of the mayor of Newark in "GIBSON" are exemplary. Even the hero of Dutchman, "Killed / by a white woman / on a subway / in 1964," is not allowed to rest in martyred peace. In "CLAY," that hero is derisively revived and then dispatched as "the first negro congressman" from Missouri: "we're not saying / that being dead / is the pre / requisite / for this honor / but it certainly helped make him / what he is / today"—an allusion to Congressman William Clay from St. Louis as well as a wry comment, no doubt, on the bourgeois acclaim accorded the play. The most inventive piece of political instruction, one focused more on ideology than attitude, is "THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT." The poem is structured to desensitize the capitalist worker to the negative propaganda associated with the title phrase: "you hear that, the dictatorship / of the proletariat, and be scared / think somebody gonna hold you back / hold you down,..." The poem then encourages a correct resensitizing through clarification and gentle but firm repetition— " . . . Speak / of / the dictatorship until you understand it..."—concluding: This is the dictatorship of the proletariat the total domination of society by the working class you need to hear that you need to talk about that you gonna have to fight for that the dictatorship of the proletariat think about that the dictatorship of the proletariat A lengthy explanatory passage near the end of the poem perhaps best exemplifies what Bar-

AMIRIBARAKA / 55 aka called (in the 1977 interview with Benston) the "struggle form" he was attempting to realize in his poetry. An arhythmic discourse on proletariat rule, the unadorned lines in effect constitute a prose commentary patterned after the "short essay form" of the Chinese revolutionary democrat Lu Hstin—a form Baraka describes as a combination of "poetry and revolutionary observation." Already a prolific essayist, as Home and Raise Race attest, Baraka feels more strongly than ever that the latitude of the essay and its emphasis on content are particularly suited, as he says, "to the kind of daily struggle I'm engaged in." And he is fully aware that this preference implies a relinquishing of at least some predicate quality in the rhythms of his poetry: "—I think the essay form could correspond to music in places, at a given moment. But I think it's less interested in the overall sound of words and more interested in what it's saying." This conscious tendency toward what might be called selected moments of expository poetry, however repressive it might seem to some of Baraka's more aesthetic-minded critics, is in some ways but a reversal of an earlier stylistic current one can observe in the infusion of poetry into the prose of Dante's Hell, Tales, and Raise Race. Other poems have ideologically suggestive titles like "DAS KAPITAL" and "CLASS STRUGGLE," but concentrate on satiric description or poetic narrative to convey impressions of political reality rather than the clarification of doctrine. Instances of struggle form are limited to brief rhetorical calls for a revolutionary consciousness, as in "TODAY" and "RED AUTUMN." A central image is transformed yet again in "A POEM FOR DEEP THINKERS," the sun spiritualized in "Black Art" now but a symbol of romantic dissociation. Depicted as "Skymen," the nationalists are "... blinded by / sun, and their own images of things / . . . a buncha skies bought the loop-

dieloop program from the elegant babble of / the ancient minorities"—a sharp reassessment of his own Afro-American elegance. Baraka wants instead to write a "song of the skytribe walking the earth." The poem closes with a political revision of the salutation "hey my man, what's happening," the correct rejoinder hereafter to be: "meet you on the battlefield / ... meet you on the battlefield." Hard Facts ends with a predicate call "FOR THE REVOLUTIONARY OUTBURST BY BLACK PEOPLE." Here the energies of black style and political expression converge in revolutionary climax: " . . . a spectrum of motion, ... / We are poised in gradual ascendence to that rising" which is to be, as the poem concludes, "The violent birth process / of Socialism!" Baraka's main dramatic work of the 1970's, a full-length play called The Motion of History (1975-1976), also conceptualizes motion as the political process leading inevitably to revolution. The play appears in The Motion of History and Other Plays (1978) with a shorter piece entitled S-l (1976)—after the abbreviated designation for the Criminal Justification, Revision and Reform Act, legislation Baraka interprets as dangerously repressive—and the previously published Slave Ship. In the introduction to the collection he mentions two earlier and still unpublished plays important to his development as a dramatist: A Recent Killing (1964), "about the U.S. Air Force," and The Sidnee Poet Heroical (subsequently published in 1979), which he says is "characterized by much petty bourgeois cultural nationalism." The two postnationalist plays in the volume, like the new poetry, "are vehicles for a simple message" aimed at the worker audience: "viz., the only solution to our problems . . . is revolution! And that revolution, socialist revolution, is inevitable." Baraka is now concerned, as he told Benston, with a "theatre of ideas" that emphasizes an understanding of history rather than the "ahis-

56 I AMERICAN torical worldview" fostered by his ritual drama, although in varying degrees such plays as Dutchman and, especially, The Slave and A Black Mass show an earlier need to deal with ideas as well. He acknowledges the influence of Bertolt Brecht, whose concept of "epic theatre" as a narrative social process arousing recognition and action is hospitable to both the nationalist plays and Baraka's present Marxist theater. Baraka sees the major change, as he says in the introduction, to be one from "the perceptual to the rational," from "the feeling and rage against oppression to the beginnings of actual scientific analysis of this oppression...." The Motion of History presents an analysis of two issues: the deliberate fostering of hostility between black and white workers by capitalism (an issue explored at length in the socialist writings of W. E. B. Du Bois) and the "recurrent rebellion" endemic to the history of the United States. Both the title and the action reflect Baraka's renewed sense of historical change through his engagement with dialectical materialism. "I began to understand very clearly," he explains to Benston, "that change is constant... that ultimately the motion of society and humanity is always onward and upward, from ignorance to knowledge, from the superficial to the in-depth and the detailed." This is precisely dramatized in the play by the transformation of two apolitical emblematic characters, blandly designated Black and White, whose hedonism and ignorance buffer them from social injustice. In a quick montage of opening scenes (incorporating a movie screen and cinematic images, a technique used throughout the play), they suddenly merge into the stream of history by becoming James E. Chaney and Andrew Goodman, two of the three civil rights workers lynched in Mississippi in 1964. Act II moves back in time to the HayesTilden compromise of 1876 that ended the Reconstruction, and from there to Bacon's Re-

WRITERS

bellion of 1676 in Jamestown, Virginia (represented as a spontaneous coalition of white indentured servants and black slaves rising up against the colonial ruling class). Curving forward toward the present in a kaleidoscope of episodes portraying black rebels in the 1800's (Nat Turner, Gabriel Prosser, Denmark Vesey, Harriett Tubman), Act III culminates in John Brown's insurrection at Harper's Ferry. In the final and lengthy fourth act, the characters Black and White resurface to undergo their final changes in the strife-torn motions of the twentieth century. Their former bourgeois indifference is now a confused but earnest concern as they retrieve their different yet related heritages as Afro-American slave and IrishAmerican immigrant. The ultimate motion is their qualitative leap, embracing Marxism and fully clarifying the meaning of their common history of oppression under capitalism. Thus they assume a completely formed identity and naming as Lenny Nichols and Richie Moriarty, socialist factory workers united in the organization of a revolutionary Marxist party. Baraka has moved from historical pageantry in Slave Ship to historical interpretation in The Motion of History, stressing that destiny is to be controlled by actions based on disciplined understanding rather than by confrontive rage. He now displaces separatism with a call for political unity among workers who understand that racism, black or white, is a capitalist strategy of control—not an acceptable rationale for determining human values. There is much explanatory monologue mixed with the dialogue, a play text more important for its content than for its style. The ultimate purpose is to clarify, through the example of Lenny and Richie, the need for a socialist revolution. To this didactic end Baraka intercedes with the audience during the intermission after Act III to ask what they have learned from the play so far. His firm political hand always in evi-

AMIRIBARAKA / 57 dence now, the stage directions call for "at least one plant in the audience" to guarantee the "correct" answers—that is, that the ruling class attempts "to keep the working-class people divided along national and racial lines," and that change will only come from "violent revolution" by the people. More structured than the participation improvised at the end of Slave Ship, this exchange is designed to raise consciousness through intellectual pressure rather than emotional shock. In the final scene, a meeting of the Red Congress, Baraka wants the audience to distinguish between the work of the artist and the work of the party activist, between the simulated reality of the play and the material reality in which they actually live: RICHIE. . . . you know there's people like we was ... looking at this like it was on a screen or on a stage. Got reality draped around them and won't step down into it and grab it up whole. LENNY. That's what the party's for, to mobilize the great masses of people, to be a guide, a mobilizer, a leader, a clarifier, a fighter . . . The strong voice of a woman concludes The Motion of History, anticipating an increasingly significant female dimension in Baraka's plays. The opening address to the Red Congress, delivered by Juanita Martinez, delegate from Puerto Rico (who otherwise has no role in the play), is the closing summons to the play viewer. In the struggle form of a short essay, her speech is Baraka's unabashed call for a "revolutionary party" based on "the correct political line" of "Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tse-tung Thought." While The Motion of History interprets American rebellion as a precedent for accepting revolution, S-l (1976) is a more compact and somewhat slow one-act play that presents characters with a fully realized historical consciousness. Lil and Red Hall, black members of the

Revolutionary People's Union (RPU), pick up where Lenny and Richie leave off, analyzing and actively resisting capitalist oppression in 1976. Numerous scenes take the form of partyline speeches, formal political debates, informal discussions, media interviews, and news broadcasts—a kind of running theatrical struggle form, a dialectic whose main purpose is to interpret the Criminal Justification, Revision and Reform Act as a fascist instrument of repression. The play ends with Red in jail (charged with treason under the deliberately vague provisions of the bill), proselytizing his fellow prisoners to accept "the formation of the party," while Lil and the RPU cadre attend a secret meeting of Marxist-Leninists preparing to unite as one central "Revolutionary Marxist-Leninist Communist Party." The pro forma presence of Juanita Martinez in The Motion of History is extended into the characterization of Lil Hall, who is equal with her husband as party strategist and political interpreter of events throughout S-l. She also provides the political theme song "America" that opens and threads through S-l (subtitled A Play with Music in 26 Scenes). In a theater of ideas, music must supplement the play script "as background, to heighten the emotions . . . which is old, classic theater," Baraka now believes. It can no longer predominate as the direct expression of feeling inextricably linked to the text, as in A Black Mass or Slave Ship. The Liberation Singers in S-l who perform Lil's song are no doubt patterned after the Advanced Workers, a Newark group Baraka had recently been providing with political lyrics. The protagonists of Baraka's Marxist plays are advanced workers like Lenny and Richie or Lil and Red. They function not as singular personalities but as representative commentators to enlighten the audience according to the discipline of Marxist-Leninist thought. Donna, the featured advanced worker of What Was the Re-

58 / AMERICAN WRITERS lationship of the Lone Ranger to the Means of Production? (1978), first printed in Selected Plays and Prose of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones (1979), represents in part Baraka's acknowledgment of the issue of women's oppression in the larger context of the struggle against capitalism. A short satire set in a factory, the play is built around a continuous one-scene dialectical exchange between Donna, the no-nonsense voice of clarity, and the Masked Man and his chauvinist underling Tuffy, burlesques of the capitalist factory owner and his conspiratorial ally, the union bureaucrat. This theatrical Lone Ranger is a culmination of the cowboy satirized throughout Baraka's works, the western hero who represents the extreme distortion of American values—"a butcher in a cowboy suit," as one poem puts it. While Donna serves mainly to interpret the madness of cowboy capitalism into sane political fact, she also directly confronts its offensive sexism. Resisting the masked owner's slick, wheedling efforts to co-opt the workers' political sensibility, she succeeds, like Lula in Dutchman but with a constructive motive, in drawing out her antagonist's real malevolence: the quick and easy readiness of the owner to murder in order to maintain control over the assembly line. The play ends with the striking workers going off to organize the party that will eventually put them in charge of the means of production. Baraka's most recent poems are collected under the title "Poetry for the Advanced," poems written between 1976 and 1978 and published for the first time in Selected Poetry of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones (1979). The poet begins by momentarily yielding his own voice, the entire introduction consisting of a quoted passage from Lenin that defines the advanced worker as the vanguard of the proletariat—as a representative of the "working-class intelligentsia." The voice of the worker-artist in the poetry, though, is confidently Baraka's own.

The elements of struggle form are inevitably there, but crafted so that on the whole they blend into a poetry that is stylistically, if not politically, advanced beyond Hard Facts (1976). There is more expressive power and less ideological self-consciousness—not less ideological intensity—as if some of the pressure of extended political exposition had been released into the plays. Predicate phrasings and musical motifs are much in evidence, and there is a firmer sense of the poet's personal place in the larger politicized scheme of reality. The opening piece, "A POEM FOR ANNA RUSS AND FANNY JONES," equates his grandmothers' belief in a heavenly afterlife with the respectful concurrence that " . . . all society will / be raised to higher ground, a more advanced life" in this world. Their most natural humanity—and his—is lyrically shared by the masses of people:"... Your skin scraped off so the moonlight stings, so the swish of bird's wings / brings a message to the brain / . . . A link with the billions " Yet the "clear message" of crushing the "rule of the rich" by violent means " . . . cannot be hidden with lyricality / and mysticism " And so he concludes by gently and insistently implicating the traditional pacifism of his kinfolk in the people's revolution against the ruling class: . . . They huddle and plot our repression and pain. But just like the old stories grandmama, that ain't no big thing, we learned how evil wd act in Sunday School, and how the people, the righteous, wd always win! Baraka is less than gentle in alluding to Allen Ginsberg as a "blind & crazy / metaphysical" prophet. Yet he acknowledges that his old "petty bourgeois" friend (himself no stranger to Marxism) had made a point back in 1956, when in the poem "America" Ginsberg said, "Go

AMIRIBARAKA / 59 fuck yourself with your atom bomb." Baraka rejuvenates the protest, composing around the quoted line his own poem about America entitled "REPRISE OF ONE OF A. G.'S BEST POEMS," with Marxist variations on the repeated theme word "America." Rendered somewhat in the manner of a popular song lyric, one imagines parts of the poem as suitable for performance by the Liberation Singers who in S-l sing Lil's socialist song "America." Baraka offers "REPRISE" as a "Hymn-poem," a thrust at the patriotic hymn "America" brightly animated at the end by Latin-accented snatches from the "America" of Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story. Where Ginsberg mainly gestures with lyric confusion and ironic nostalgia—"America I used to be a communist when I was a kid I'm not sorry"— Baraka flings out struggle taunts: "I'm a red pinko Commie / . . . a Marxist-Leninist / Whose ideology is / Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tse-tung Thought!" The repetitions and assertive refrains are similar to the song style of several other poems in the collection, making "REPRISE" more effective as a popular piece of music directed at worker audiences than as a fixed-print poem suitable for aesthetic analysis. Baraka's musical intention in this regard is most evident in "LIKE, THIS IS WHAT I MEANT!," a song-manifesto defining the function of the poem for Marxist political purposes just as "Black Art" had earlier demarcated the poem from a strict nationalist view. The refrain "So that even in our verse" is used to unfold a series of short struggle quotations from Mao enlivened by a surge of interpolation and clarification from Baraka. Not only must poetry " . . . sing, laugh & fight," but, as with the message of the plays, "Poetry must see as its central task / building / a Marxist-Leninist / Communist Party / in the USA." Carried along in the musical flow, the diction of political advance ("raging mass," "struggle

erupts," "sweep forward," "human explosion") resolves in proposing the poem as a revolutionary song. Baraka parenthetically instructs the reader to "repeat as song" the final rallying refrain: "So that even / in our / verse / even in / our dancing / even in / our song / yeh / in our pure lover song / REVOLUTION!!!" Song refrain and the back-up style of vocal groups typify "ALL REACTION IS DOOMED!!!," a poem weakened by hackneyed political invective (Nikita Khrushchev a "Fat bald head traitor," Trotskyites "those bedbugs made of vomit"), intrusions that would not stir all advanced readers. "AFRO-AMERICAN LYRIC" is the most stylized song-poem, utilizing refrains that encourage the listeners to "think" about and "study" revolution. Unlike the other song lyrics, it conspicuously features the manipulation of vowel sounds as rhythmically stretched and fondled by an urban soul singer. Pithy denunciation is wrapped in AfroAmerican predicate sound: society's ugly is the graspingclass its simple shit uh see-imm-pull see-im-pull Seeeeeeeeeeee-immmmmmmmmm pull Some See im pull shit As the sounds are turned over and given intense vocal inflection, the stylistic process presumably will crystallize political meaning for the singer-listener: that understanding material reality and the need for revolution is basically simple. As with some of the chant poems in "Black Art," these worker songs—political heirs to the earliest Afro-American work songs—are for the ear, not the eye. They suggest Baraka's increased willingness to accommodate the impulses of Art-ing to Marxist con-

60 I AMERICAN tent, the augmenting of a spare poetic lyricism by the song lyric. A number of poems work in more conventional ways to focus the expected political themes. "MALCOLM REMEMBERED (FEB. 77)" eulogizes Malcolm X in a montage of recent black nationalist history, presenting him as the "comrade" who was killed before his "final motion" into socialist revolution. In the short poem "PRES SPOKE IN A LANGUAGE," Baraka withholds direct ideological statement, poetizing the collective black sounds of saxophonist Lester Young—" . . . in the teeming whole of us he lived"—as an exemplary history of survival: "translating frankie trumbauer into / Bird's feathers / Tranes sinewy tracks / the slickster walking through the crowd / surviving on a terrifying wit." The poem fulfills its revolutionary obligation, and then only by implication, in the final line: "Save all that comrades, we need it." If nationalism has been discarded, the pertinence of black culture has not. John Coltrane's "sinewy tracks" become "AM/TRAK," an ambitious poem whose rush of Art-ing almost overtakes the political conclusion. The poem is probably a subjective offshoot of "John Coltrane: Where Does Art Come From?," an unpublished Marxist analysis of black music that Baraka was writing in the late 1970's (a chapter of which appears in Selected Plays and Prose). The poetic expression of Coltrane's history and art is reminiscent of verse from "Black Art": "nigger absolute super-sane screams against reality / course through him / . . . / . . . the precise saying / all of it in it afire aflame talking saying being doing meaning." The political harnessing of this energy comes at the end, the music of Coltrane's "Meditations" touching the poet as a metaphor of struggle and study: "& it told me what to do /... / Live! / & organize / yr shit / as rightly / burning!" This forceful emergence of Coltrane, a major

WRITERS inspiration for black poets in the 1960's, indicates that Marxism had not significantly displaced black culture in Baraka's art. It had only altered his interpretation of that culture. In "SPRING SONG," a recurrent symbol is once^ again changed in accord with Baraka's shifting perception of reality—the nationalist " . . . sun behind us, the day turned red,"—with musical pulsations reinforcing the political conceit at the end of the poem. The athletic "strides" of the advancing "black comrade" toward "the next hurdle," the qualitative leap, are likened to Coltrane's improvisations in the music of "Giant Steps": . . . the mass of people surging forward too, remind him of Trane—yeh Trane—you know that solo—Bee Dooo Bee Dooo Dooooo Dooo dooo (Giant Steps) The leap is completed in the autobiographical gesture of the last poem, "CHILD OF THE THIRTIES." Baraka stretches the child's game Red Rover into the same political image of the hurdle figured in "Spring Song," a motion that flows smoothly from the blues-blowing horn of the black musician: Red Rover, Red Rover, can you understand class struggle like the way your hand would reach your toe with the wood hurdle passing an 8th of an inch under your outstretched leg pass swift comrade, pass swift the way the everything do the way the all the things do the way the world is blew blue bluessssss The musical note is ultimately political, the poem closing in a balance of metaphor and clas-

AMIRIBARAKA / 61 sic struggle statement: "Long Live Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao Tse-tung / Red Rover / Red Rover / You're over". This may or may not be LeRoi Jones's final motion. As he said many poems ago in Suicide Note, "the changes are difficult, when / you hear them, & know they are all in you." But as Amiri Baraka's subsequent experience has clearly shown, change is inevitable—indeed, is everything, as he says in "THE 'RACE LINE' IS A PRODUCT OF CAPITALISM": "all is, the only constant / is, / yeh yeh yeh, change!" With Baraka's career as yet incomplete, summary is difficult. Comparable with Langston Hughes in stylistic finesse and with W. E. B. Du Bois in historical vision, Baraka is incomparably himself in creative scope and intellectual intensity. Always a hard critic of Western culture and the American way, he has wrenched from the bourgeois fine arts tradition—in the very process of rejecting much of its manner and many of its values—a commitment to the written word as a means of recording the personal and political struggles of one man: first speaking for himself, then for black people, and now for the proletariat. Most of all as a poet and playwright, but also as a writer of fiction and essays, his literary efforts have in common the quality of piercing inquiry—Whether directed at himself or the world at large. His questionable reputation with the critics is of little concern to Baraka. He measures his own achievement by the changes his writings have brought about in others. One reviewer has typically commented that in the Marxist poetry Baraka has "sacrificed artistic vitality on the altar of his political faith." Nothing could be further from the truth. In all the phases of his writing—whether "beat," nationalist, or Marxist—Baraka has shown a deep concern not only for attitudes and ideas but also for the effective adjustment of his aesthetics to the changing realities he tirelessly inscribes. Indeed, he is one

of the important literary innovators working in the United States.

Selected Bibliography WORKS OF

AMIRI BARAKA (LEROI JONES) BOOKS, PLAYS, PAMPHLETS

Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note.... New York: Totem Press, 1961. Blues People: Negro Music in White America. New York: William Morrow, 1963. The Dead Lecturer. New York: Grove Press, 1964. Dutchman and The Slave. New York: William Morrow, 1964. The System of Dante's Hell. New York: Grove Press, 1965. Home: Social Essays. New York: William Morrow, 1966. The Baptism and The Toilet. New York: Grove Press, 1967. Arm Yrself or Harm Yrself. Newark, N. J.: Jihad Productions, 1967. Black Music. New York: William Morrow, 1967. Slave Ship: A Historical Pageant. Negro Digest, 16, no. 6: 62-74 (April 1967). Reprinted Newark, N. J.: Jihad Productions, 1969. Tales. New York: Grove Press, 1967. Home on the Range. Drama Review, 12:106-11 (Summer 1968). Police. Drama Review, 12:112-15 (Summer 1968). Black Magic: Collected Poetry 1961-1967. Indianapolis-New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969. (Includes "Sabotage," "Target Study," and "Black Art.") The Death of Malcolm X. In New Plays from the Black Theatre, edited by Ed Bullins. New York: Bantam Books, 1969. Pp. 1-20. Four Black Revolutionary Plays. Indianapolis-New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969. (Includes Experimental Death Unit #1, A Black Mass, Great Goodness of Life, and Madheart.) A Black Value System. Newark, N. J.: Jihad Productions, 1970.

62 I AMERICAN WRITERS In Our Terribleness (Some elements and meaning in black style). Indianapolis-New York: BobbsMerrill, 1970. (With Fundi/Billy Abernathy.) It's Nation Time. Chicago: Third World Press, 1970. J-E-L-L-O. Chicago: Third World Press, 1970. Junkies Are Full of(SHHH ...). In Black Drama Anthology, edited by Woodie King and Ron Milner. New York: New American Library, 1971. Pp. 11-23. Bloodrites. In Black Drama Anthology (see immediately above). Pp. 25-31. Raise Race Rays Raze: Essays Since 1965. New York: Random House, 1971. Kawaida Studies: The New Nationalism. Chicago: Third World Press, 1972. Spirit Reach. Newark, N. J.: Jihad Productions, 1972. Hard Facts. Newark, N. J.: People's War, 1975. The Motion of History. In The Motion of History and Other Plays. New York: William Morrow, 1978. Pp. 19-127. The Motion of History and Other Plays. New York: William Morrow, 1978. (Includes The Motion of History, Slave Ship, and S-l.) S-l. In The Motion of History and Other Plays. New York: William Morrow, 1978. Pp. 151-225. "Poetry for the Advanced." In Selected Poetry of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones. New York: William Morrow, 1979. Pp. 275-340. Selected Plays and Prose of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones. New York: William Morrow, 1979. (Includes the following previously unpublished prose: "I" [1973]; "National Liberation Movements" [1977]; "War/Philly Blues/Deeper Bop" [1978]; "The Revolutionary Tradition in Afro-American Literature" [1978].) Selected Poetry of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones. New York: William Morrow, 1979. The Sidnee Poet Heroical. Berkeley, Calif.: Reed and Cannon, 1979. What Was the Relationship of the Lone Ranger to the Means of Production? In Selected Plays and Prose of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones. New York: William Morrow, 1979. Pp. 252-76. WORKS EDITED BY BARAKA

Four Young Lady Poets. New York: Totem Press, 1962. The Moderns: An Anthology of New Writing in America. New York: Corinth Books, 1963.

Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing. New York: William Morrow, 1968. (With Larry Neal.) UNCOLLECTED ESSAYS

"How You Sound??" In The New American Poetry: 1945-1960, edited by Donald M. Allen. New York: Grove Press, 1960. Pp. 424-25. "Philistinism and the Negro Writer." In Anger, and Beyond: The Negro Writer in the United States, edited by Herbert Hill. New York: Harper and Row, 1966. Pp. 51-61.

BIBLIOGRAPHIES There is no single completely up-to-date bibliography of Baraka's works or of criticism about Baraka. The best available sources are listed below. Benston, Kimberly W. Baraka: The Renegade and the Mask. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976. Pp. 278-83. , ed. Imamu Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones): A Collection of Critical Essays. Twentieth Century Views. Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1978. Pp. 191-95. Dace, Letitia. LeRoi Jones: A Checklist of Works by and About Him. London: Nether Press, 1971. Hudson, Theodore. From LeRoi Jones to Amiri Baraka: The Literary Works. Durham, N. C: Duke University Press, 1973. Pp. 198-209. Sollors, Werner. Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones: The Quest for a ''Populist Modernism." New York: Columbia University Press, 1978. Pp. 301-28.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL STUDIES Baker, Houston A., Jr. "These Are Songs if You Have The/Music': An Essay on Imamu Baraka." Minority Voices, 1:1-18 (1977). Benston, Kimberly W. Baraka: The Renegade and the Mask. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976. . "Amiri Baraka: An Interview." Boundary 2, 6:303-16 (Winter 1978). -, ed. Imamu Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones): A Collection of Critical Essays. Twentieth Century Views. Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1978.

AMIRI BARAKA / 63 Brady, Owen E. "Great Goodness of Life: Baraka's Black Bourgeoisie Blues." In Imamu Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), edited by Kimberly W. Benston. Pp. 157-66. Brecht, Stefan. "LeRoi Jones' Slave Ship" Drama Review, 14:212-19 (Winter 1970). Brown, Cecil M. "Black Literature and LeRoi Jones." Black World, 19, no. 8:24-31 (June 1970). Brown, Lloyd W. "Comic-Strip Heroes: LeRoi Jones and the Myth of American Innocence." Journal of Popular Culture, 3:191-204 (Fall 1969). . "Jones (Baraka) and His Literary Heritage in The System of Dante's Hell" Obsidian, 1:5-17 (Spring 1975). Coleman, Larry G. "LeRoi Jones' Tales: Sketches of the Artist as a Young Man Moving Toward a Blacker Art." Black Lines, 1:17-26 (Winter 1970). Costello, Donald P. "Black Man as Victim." Commonweal, 88:436-40 (June 28, 1968). Cruse, Harold. The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual. New York: William Morrow, 1967. Pp. 355-68. Dennison, George. "The Demagogy of LeRoi Jones." Commentary, 39:67-70 (February 1965). Ellison, Ralph. Shadow and Act. New York: Random House, 1964. Pp. 247-58. Fischer, William C. "The Pre-Revolutionary Writings of Imamu Amiri Baraka." Massachusetts Review, 14:259-305 (Spring 1973). Hudson, Theodore R. From LeRoi Jones to Amiri Baraka: The Literary Works. Durham, N. C.: Duke University Press, 1973. Hughes, Langston. "That Boy LeRoi." Chicago Defender, January 11, 1965, p. 38. Jackson, Esther M. "LeRoi Jones (Imamu Amiri Baraka): Form and the Progression of Consciousness." CLA Journal, 17:33-56 (September 1973). Jacobus, Lee A. "Imamu Amiri Baraka: The Quest for Moral Order." In Modern Black Poets, edited by Donald B. Gibson. Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1973. Pp. 112-26. Jeffers, Lance. "Bullins, Baraka, and Elder: The Dawn of Grandeur in Black Drama." CLA Journal, 16:32-48 (September 1972). Lederer, Richard. "The Language of LeRoi Jones'

The Slave" Studies in Black Literature, 4:14-16 (Spring 1973). Llorens, Davis. "Ameer (LeRoi Jones) Baraka." Ebony, 24:75-78, 80-83 (August 1969). Mackey, Nathaniel. "The Changing Same: Black Music in the Poetry of Amiri Baraka." boundary 2, 6:355-86 (Winter 1978). Margolies, Edward. Native Sons: A Critical Study of Twentieth-Century Negro American Authors. Philadelphia: J. P. Lippincott, 1968. Pp. 190-99. Munro, C. Lynn. "LeRoi Jones: A Man in Transition." CLA Journal, 17:57-78 (September 1973). Neal, Larry. "The Development of LeRoi Jones." Liberator, 6:4-5 (January 1966) and 18-19 (February 1966). Ossman, David. The Sullen Art. New York: Corinth Books, 1963. Pp. 77-81. Otten, Charlotte. "LeRoi Jones: Napalm Poet." Concerning Poetry, 3:5-11 (1970). Phillips, Louis. "LeRoi Jones and Contemporary Black Drama." In The Black American Writer, vol. II, edited by C. W. E. Bigsby. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1971. Pp. 204-19. Pickney, Darryl. "The Changes of Amiri Baraka." New York Times Book Review, December 16, 1979, p. 9. Schneck, Stephen. "LeRoi Jones, or, Poetics & Policemen, or, Trying Heart, Bleeding Heart." Ramparts, 6:14-19 (June 29, 1968). Sollors, Werner. Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones: The Quest for a "Populist Modernism/' New York: Columbia University Press, 1978. Stone, Judy. "If It's Anger . . . Maybe That's Good." San Francisco Chronicle, August 23, 1964, pp. 39, 42. Taylor, Clyde. "Baraka as Poet." In Modern Black Poets, edited by Donald B. Gibson. Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice Hall, 1973. Pp. 127-34. Tener, Robert L. "The Corrupted Warrior Heroes: Amiri Baraka's The Toilet." Modern Drama, 17:207-15 (June 1974). Williams, Sherley A. "The Search for Identity in Baraka's Dutchman" In Imamu Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), edited by Kimberly W. Benston. Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1978. Pp. 135-40.

—WILLIAM C. FISCHER

Joel Barlow 1JS4-1812

IN December

a near-perfect society. In "Advice to a Raven in Russia," though, his advice was not directed to the savior of mankind, but to the agent of its destruction. On the eve of his death, as he viewed the shambles Napoleon had made of his dream, Barlow was justifiably disillusioned. Despite his anguish, caused more, it seems, by his frustrating and fruitless ambassadorial adventures than by a radical and permanent change in his outlook, Barlow remains, on the basis of his early work, the most articulate spokesman for the development of a national literature and the progress of America. In the tradition of a generation of writers like Philip Freneau, Hugh Henry Brackenridge, Charles Brockden Brown, and his fellow "Hartford Wits," John Trumbull, David Humphreys, and Timothy Dwight, who in their nationalistic zeal spoke out for a native American literature and for the future greatness of America, Barlow responded to the challenge of a new age and devoted his work to the declaration of American promises and ideals. Born on March 24, 1754, in a farmhouse at Redding, Connecticut, Barlow was the son of Samuel and Esther Hull Barlow. Farm life seemed to agree with him, and he spent his first nineteen years in Redding, attending the village school and helping his father on the farm. During these early years Barlow showed great

1812, after a year of chasing Napoleon across the plains of Europe as special envoy from President James Madison, Joel Barlow found time to compose "Advice to a Raven in Russia," a bitter invective against the emperor's destructive and wasteful campaign. In this, Barlow's last and probably best poem, the poet asks his fabled bird, "Black fool, why winter here?" Observing that "These frozen skies, / Worn by your wings and deafen'd by your cries, / Should warn you hence, where milder suns invite" Barlow notes that Napoleon's "human carnage, that delicious fare, / That lured you hither" is as frozen as the Russian frontier. The poet's advice to the raven paints a bleak picture of the European landscape: Go back and winter in the wilds of Spain; Feast there awhile, and in the next campaign Rejoin your master; for you'll find him then, With his new million of the race of men, Clothed in his thunders, all his flags unfurl'd, Raging and storming o'er the prostrate world! Barlow's anger bristles in this poem, and his satire is probably the bitterest condemnation of mankind written by an American at that time. And that condemnation is ironic, for Barlow, in most of his prose and poetry, gave advice that he felt would help mankind realize its vision of

65

66 I AMERICAN promise as a student and especially as a poet. In his free time he had composed several poems that his minister, the Reverend Nathaniel Bartlett, recognized for their promise. Bartlett showed Joel's poems to the boy's father and suggested that the young man prepare for college. Barlow's father agreed, and soon Joel was mastering both Greek and Latin. As his interest and skill increased, his teacher decided that young Barlow should be surrounded by a more academic environment. In 1773, consequently, he entered Moor's School in Hanover, New Hampshire, then a preparatory school for Dartmouth, and the following year he enrolled at Dartmouth. Three months later his father died, leaving Barlow not only a small inheritance but also a decision to make: Should he continue at Dartmouth or take advantage of an opportunity to study at Yale? At the death of his father, his finances, despite the inheritance, were strained. For Barlow his education was of great importance, and Yale would provide him not only with a broader educational base but also with the financial advantages of being nearer home. So, in November 1774, he left the rural atmosphere of Hanover and traveled to the sophisticated world of New Haven. Founded in 1701 by Harvard alumni disturbed by Harvard's liberal curriculum, Yale was at that time very conservative, especially in its religion. Jonathan Edwards' Inquiry into the Freedom of the Will, for example, was the standard text for religious studies at Yale. A typical New Englander, Barlow rebelled at some of these restrictions. For example, every morning he and his classmates were required to listen to the president or one of the tutors read a portion of the Bible in the college chapel. He also learned that he was not permitted to roam the grounds of the campus freely, and that such indiscretions as blasphemy, insubordination, profanity, and playing cards were grounds for im-

WRITERS

mediate expulsion. For him, liberal thinking and intellectual exercise were important, though these practices were discouraged by a college that insisted upon order and regulation. Yet it was at Yale that Barlow met Joseph Buckminster, the new tutor to the freshman class, who convinced him that he might become a good poet. Buckminster became Barlow's closest friend and followed his career for many years. Those early Yale years, though, were soon to lose that unwanted sense of order and regulation. During Barlow's first year of studies, the sounds of war were heard throughout the colonies. Students broke out of their lethargy and organized a militia company of their own; and when George Washington passed through New Haven, Barlow and his fellow students turned out to greet him. This excitement continued to increase, eventually forcing President Naphtali Daggett to dismiss the college two weeks earlier than usual. During the summer of 1775, as news of the bloody battle of Bunker Hill reverberated across the colonies, Barlow and his classmates were once again immersed in their studies. But Barlow's second year was interrupted when word of his mother's death reached him. After going home to serve as executor of her estate, Barlow returned to Yale to complete his sophomore year. During this time he began to write poetry that he hoped might establish his reputation. Meanwhile, still more important events were occurring in the colonies. Thomas Paine's Common Sense had been published and applauded, and the Declaration of Independence had been adopted. Despite the growing revolutionary fervor, the British were making advances into the colonies, and a call for men was issued. Among the Connecticut men who responded to that call was Barlow. But illness made his participation in the fighting brief: he enlisted in August 1776,

JOEL BARLOW I 67 and by autumn he was again enrolled at Yale and studying with Joseph Buckminster. No doubt his experiences in the New York campaign prompted his later praise of Revolutionary soldiers in both The Vision of Columbus (1787) and The Columbiad (1807). In spite of the war Barlow finished his program at Yale and graduated on September 9, 1778. On graduation day Barlow, as class president, read his first ambitious poem, The Prospect of Peace. Written in heroic couplets, the poem begins with a hymn to the American struggle for independence:

losophy ("Here, rap't in tho't, the philosophic soul / Shall look thro' Nature's parts and grasp the whole"); and the beginning of an American religious poetry ("Unnumber'd bards shall string the heavenly lyre, / To those blest strains which heavenly themes inspire"). Like Freneau and Brackenridge's The Rising Glory of America, read at their commencement exercises at Princeton in 1771, Barlow's verse announced what appeared to be a great opportunity for men of all talents in the new American republic. With the prospect of peace very possible in 1778, he concludes:

The closing scenes of Tyrants' fruitless rage, The opening prospects of a golden age, The dread events that crown th' important year, Wake the glad song, and claim th' attentive ear. Long has Columbia rung with dire alarms, While Freedom calFd her injur'd sons to arms; While various fortune fir'd th' embattled field, Conquest delay'd, and victory stood conceal'd; While closing legions mark'd their dreadful way, And Millions trembled for the dubious day.

THEN Love shall rule, and Innocence adore, Discord shall cease, and Tyrants be no more; Till yon bright orb, and those celestial spheres, In radiant circles, mark a thousand years; Till the grand fiat burst th' etherial frames; Worlds crush on worlds, and Nature sink in flames! The Church elect, from smouldering ruins, rise, And sail triumphant thro' the yielding skies, Hail'd by the Bridegroom! to the Father given, The Joy of Angels, and the Queen of Heaven!

Like others of its genre, The Prospect of Peace was a patriotic poem, singing forth the future greatness of America. Its emphasis on the need for a reformed American landscape was a theme that would be a constant in Barlow's career. Throughout the poem Barlow prophesies the achievement of American scientists ("Fair Science then her laurel'd beauty rears, / And soars with Genius to the radiant stars"); the creation of a great American phi-

Barlow's Calvinist sentiments, coupled with the revolutionary ardor he raised, made the poem a great success, one that mirrored the rise of optimism and progress in America. In fact, the poem was so popular that a New Haven printer published it in pamphlet form. Three years later, as a speaker at the first public commencement at Yale in seven years, Barlow repeated the performance. In his preface to A Poem, Spoken at the Public Com-

68 I AMERICAN mencement at Yale College, in New-Haven; September 1,1781, Barlow states that the "following performance" is taken from a "larger work [The Vision of Columbus]" and that his newest commencement poem reflects the "affairs of America at large, and the future progress of Society." Like The Prospect of Peace, A Poem is a prophecy of the march of the young republic toward the millennium. Barlow begins with a lament over the war years and the threat that war poses to education in America: Thro' seven long years hath war's terrific power Rang'd every town and crimson'd every shore, Pursu'd fair Science from each happy seat, Rav'd in her domes and forc'd her last retreat, And oft, Yalensia, doom'd thy final fall, While thy sad Genius trembled for thy wall. After this opening section the poet sees a strange form take shape: Now a calm splendor burst the saddening gloom, And gales etherial breath'd a glad perfume, Mild in the midst a form celestial shone, Rob'd in the vestments of the rising sun; Tall rose his stature, dignity and grace Mov'd in his limbs and wanton'd in his face, His folding mantle flow'd in easy pride, His harp divine lay useless by his side, His locks in curls from myrtle chaplets hung And sounds melodious melted from his tongue. This celestial vision imparts to Barlow some advice for the graduates: Tell them the wild commotions soon shall cease, And blest Columbia hail the charms of peace, Where rest the future deeds on earth design'd To raise, to dignify and bless mankind.

WRITERS

In A Poem Barlow's vision is an optimistic one, and he suggests throughout much of it that young America will develop into a society superior to any yet seen on earth. This superiority will be a product of the progress of mankind, a progress aided in large measure by the abundance of natural resources, resources by "nature's hand o'er all bestow'd, / The last pure polish of the forming God." Numbered among those future glories will be the development of a great American poetry, the appearance of sculpture and painting, architecture, landscape gardening, and music. Of these the poet will contribute most significantly to the progress of America: His soul awakes the peace inspiring song, And life and happiness the strain prolong. To moral beauties bids the wbrld attend, And jarring realms in social compact blend; Bids laws extend and commerce stretch the wing, Far distant shores then barter'd tributes bring; He sees the nations join, their bliss increase, (League'd in his lays) and sings them into peace. Like The Prospect of Peace, A Poem was very successful, for it not only blended references to the expected victory for independence in the Revolution with typical allusions to Yale College but also, and most important, sang of the future greatness of America. Barlow's effectiveness in continuing the tradition of singing the American path to glory is due to his ability 4o sum up the meaning of American experience. Brimming with optimism, overflowing with the prevailing attitude of progress in America, Barlow's patriotic effusions were characteristic of the poetry being written in the new republic.

JOEL BARLOW / 69 Yet Barlow, more than any other of his fellow "Hartford Wits," had the knack of orchestrating his poetry in such an effective way as to capture his audience's fancy. For Barlow, the vision described in his commencement poems was just the beginning of the philosophy he would develop in his future epics. At the time of his graduation in 1778, Barlow's independent and inquiring mind began to assert itself in ways that went against established thinking. After a brief and unsuccessful stint of teaching school in New Haven, he returned to his alma mater to work on his master's degree. It was then that he began to conceive his great epic poem. Casting aside such ideas as a poem about Cyrus the Great or one dealing with biblical heroes, Barlow finally chose Columbus and the discovery of America as his subject. He felt that the discovery of the New World was a subject especially well suited to his plan,.and his friends agreed. But as for the means to support himself and his epic poem, Barlow found little help. No one—businessman or politician— would agree to serve as patron for the bold venture. Finally, after having little success, Barlow in 1779 considered the ministry, on the advice of his old tutor and friend, Joseph Buckminster. But this plan was unsuitable, for Barlow could not see himself as a preacher. He was convinced he could better serve mankind in some other capacity. In 1780, with no other alternative in sight, he compromised and accepted an appointment as chaplain of the Fourth Massachusetts Brigade. The choice proved to be a good one. As an army chaplain Barlow was required to do little except deliver the Sunday sermon and conduct an occasional funeral or wedding. Most important, the post offered him time to write. Three weeks after his appointment, Barlow and his brigade were stunned by the discovery pf Benedict Arnold's treason. The act raised Bar-

low's ire, and the result was a sermon. His sermon was so successful that he was invited to dinner by General George Washington. At the dinner he met Colonel David Humphreys, a future "Hartford Wit" and champion of Barlow's verse. His decision to accept the chaplaincy had already begun to promise rewards. During those three years Barlow also found time, despite his continuing work on The Vision of Columbus and his duties as army chaplain, to marry Ruth Baldwin, sister of Barlow's former roommate and friend, Abraham Baldwin. They were married on January 26, 1781, amid a cloud of secrecy—her father did not learn of the union until nearly a year afterward. Barlow continued his duties with the army until the end of 1782, when he left the soldier's life and established his residence in Hartford. Hartford was an ideal site for Barlow to continue his work. Many of his friends lived there, including Dwight, Trumbull, and Humphreys. Though those early years in Hartford were filled with the excitement of close friendships and the satisfaction that Barlow must have felt with his work on The Vision of Columbus, they were financially lean. With most of The Vision completed, his plan was to find a publisher for his long poem. All efforts failed until 1784, when Barlow agreed to go into partnership with Elisha Babcock, a Springfield, Massachusetts, printer, to publish the American Mercury, a weekly newspaper. He hoped that this venture would provide him with the funds necessary to publish The Vision. Barlow did most of the writing, and as the paper flourished, the money provided the partners a chance to start a small publishing house. They were successful, but the income was not nearly enough to support Barlow's plans. Thus, in 1785 the partnership was dissolved and Barlow looked for another way to help finance his poem. The law seemed to promise a career in which he could not only shine but also support himself

70 I AMERICAN quite handsomely. In 1786, Barlow passed the law examination and was admitted to the bar. Although his early law career was undistinguished, in two years it paid dividends by enabling him to travel to Europe, a trip that was a turning point in Barlow's career. Before that trip, one significant publication enhanced Barlow's reputation as a writer. Starting on October 26, 1786, and continuing through September 13, 1787, The Anarchiad, A Poem on the Restoration of Chaos and Substantial Night, in Twenty Four Books, appeared in the New Haven Gazette. The Anarchiad appeared under the heading "American Antiquities," which created a context for the satire. According to the headnote, the manuscript had been discovered among the ruins of a buried civilization on the banks of the Muskingum River in Ohio. Its discoverers announced that certain portions of the epic would appear as regular installments in the Gazette. The ruse worked well, for The Anarchiad soon became the topic of conversation as readers eagerly awaited each new number with much the same fervor that American readers less than a century later awaited the next chapters of Charles Dickens' story of Little Nell. The satire was truly a model of its time. In fact, at the end of the first number, the authors paid tribute to their inspiration: "I know not whether it is necessary to remark, in this place, what the critical reader will probably have already observed, that the celebrated poet, Mr. Pope, has proven himself a noted plagiarist, by copying the preceding ideas, and even couplets almost entire into the famous poem called The Dunciad.'" Penned by Barlow and his friends Humphreys, Trumbull, and Lemuel Hopkins, The Anarchiad establishes a familiar theme in book 8: In visions fair the scenes of fate unroll. And Massachusetts opens on my soul.

WRITERS There Chaos, Anarch old, asserts his sway, And mobs in myriads blacken all the way: See Day's stern port, behold the martial frame, Of Shays' and Shattuck's mob-compelling name.

Initiated at the same time as Shays's Rebellion—an insurrection of Massachusetts farmers to prevent imprisonment for debts incurred from high land taxes and foreclosures of mortgages, led by Daniel Shays, a Revolutionary War captain—The Anarchiad announced that chaos was the order of the day and predicted a gloomy picture for Americans: "Thy hand unbars th' unfathom'd gulph of fate, / And deep in darkness whelms the new-born state." Despite the public interest, the poem achieved little reform, although it produced great fury. But it did lay the path for political satire as the predominant form for verse in the 1790's, and it established the reputation of the "Hartford Wits." While readers were still buzzing over the barbs thrown at them in The Anarchiad, Barlow finally realized his goal: The Vision of Columbus appeared. Advertised in the January 8, 1787, edition of the Connecticut Courant as a poem in nine books, "Dedicated, by permission, to the KING OF FRANCE," Barlow's Vision was to be finished in six weeks, "bound, gilt and lettered by an Artist equal to any in America, and perhaps not inferior to any workman in London." The price was announced as "ONE DOLLAR and a THIRD: A Price not higher than imported Books, of this size have commonly borne in 'America." Eight years had passed since Barlow had begun the plan for his epic poem, but the response to The Vision of Columbus was astonishing and undoubtedly gratifying. Within a short time a second edition was printed. Subscribers to the book included the famous and soon-to-be-

JOEL BARLOW / 71 famous: Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, and George Washington were among the more noteworthy, though the general public bought a generous number of copies. Barlow's Vision was a best-seller in its day and provided the tonic needed in the colonies to establish a sense of national pride and unity. The plan for The Vision of Columbus was ambitious but simple: to present the history of America—past, present, and future—and to inculcate, as the preface states, "the love of national liberty, and to discountenance the deleterious passion for violence and war; to show that on the basis of republican principle all good morals, as well as good government and hopes of permanent peace, must be founded." The Vision begins with Columbus, an old man dying in prison, traveling to the Mount of Vision with a "radiant seraph" who hopes to assuage his fears with a prospect of the future glories of America. Barlow traces their voyage across the ocean and provides the reader with a bird's-eye view of the geography of North and South America. His description of his own bailiwick, for instance, is typical of the scenery he paints: Now round the coast, where other floods invite, He fondly turn'd; they fill'd his eager sight: Here Del'ware's waves the yielding shores invade, And here bold Hudson oped a glassy glade; Thy parent stream, fair Hartford, met his eye, Far lessening upward to the northern sky. After cataloging the flora and fauna of the American landscape in book 1, Barlow turns in book 2 to a dissertation on the early settlers of America. After discussing "from what dire sons of earth / The brutal people drew their ancient

birth," and the reasons for the dissimilarities of nations, he discusses in book 3 the history of the Inca empire and its legendary ruler, Manco Capac. Barlow's attempt to trace the roots of civilization is a fascinating approach Jb the creation of an epic poem, but the result is terribly bland and tedious. His turgid style and monotonous couplets lull the reader to sleep. Little of Alexander Pope's skill and deftness in handling the intricacies of the heroic couplet surfaces, here or elsewhere, in his description: When o'er the mountain flamed the sun's broad ray, He call'd the host his sacred rites t' essay; Then took the loaves of maize, the bounties brake, Gave to the chief and bade them all partake; The hallowed relics on the pile he placed, With tufts of flowers the simple offering graced, Held to the sun the image from his breast, Whose glowing concave all the God exprest; O'er the dry'd leaves, the trembling lustre flies, And thus his voice ascends the listening skies. Here, Barlow's mechanical use of the couplet reveals his too often plodding style. Unlike Pope, Barlow was not a master of the rhythms and nuances of sound often present in the heroic couplet. His lines tend to roll along without the startling effects that could be produced by careful attention to the use of caesura and the balanced phrase. In short, Barlow possessed an epic vision but lacked a poetic vision. Throughout these early books Barlow's angel tries to show Columbus that much good has resulted from his discovery of America. His principal evidence—the colonization of America— originates in book 4, where Barlow argues that

72 / AMERICAN WRITERS the new American state will be greater than any other: A new creation waits the western shore, And reason triumphs o'er the pride of power, As the glad coast, by Heaven's supreme command, Won from the wave, presents a new-form'd land; Yields richer fruits and spreads a kinder soil, And pays with greater stores the hand of toil;... Finally, Barlow catalogs the early Americans: "the noble Baltimore"; "heaven-taught Penn"; and others whom "tyrants press and waves oppose in vain" and who "from their different shores, their sails unfurl'd, / Point their glad streamers to the western world." These are the men who will not only settle the New World, but will also make from that new land a world more ideal than any other seen on earth. Books 5 and 6 trace the colonization from the French and Indian War through the American Revolution, while book 7 points to the accomplishments of Americans in the arts and sciences. Benjamin Franklin, for instance, is characterized as "bold Franklin," whose lightning rod "Curbs the fierce blaze and holds the imprison'd fire"; John Singleton Copley, as one who "Fair in his tints unfold [s] the scenes of state"; Benjamin West, as a man who "boldly bursts the former bounds of Art"; and Timothy Dwight, as an "Epic Muse sublime" who, like the others Barlow catalogs, "Hails her new empire on the western clime." Certainly Columbus' view is of the "promised land." In book 8, Barlow prepares his readers for book 9—the final vision of the country America can become—by discussing such philosophical questions as the relationship between man and God, the excesses of passion and reason, and the

discovery of truth from an understanding and careful recognition of the two. He concludes thus: Here the last flights of science shall ascend, To look thro' heaven, and sense with reason blend; View the great source of love, that flows abroad, Spreads to all creatures, centres still in God, Lives thro' the whole, from nature's compact springs, Orders, reverses, fills the sum of things; In law constrains, in gospel reconciles, In judgment frowns, in gentle mercy smiles, Commands all sense to feel, all life to prove The attracting force of universal love. For Barlow "universal love" will solve problems and provide a better world. The final book becomes Barlow's self-styled pulpit. If mankind responds to his charge in book 8 that "universal love" is the key to a great nation, then science, technology, government, and the arts can flourish. Barlow continues the seraph's narrative and describes the panorama as one that extends "over the whole earth." Through commercial, scientific, political, philosophical, and technological reform, the assimilation and final harmony of all languages, the "harmony of mankind" can be realized: Bid one great empire, with extensive sway, Spread with the sun and bound the walks of day, One centred system, one all-ruling soul, Live thro' the parts, and regulate the whole. Although Barlow develops this theme in more detail and in more articulate fashion in The Columbiad, his emphasis in The Vision of

JOEL BARLOW / 73 Columbus on technological and environmental reform is unmistakable. Because he sees the progress of America as depending on a society that is commercially and spiritually united, Barlow emphasizes the technological advances necessary to achieve such reform. Since his college days he had been interested in mechanical gadgetry. During his first trip to Europe in 1788, for example, he had been amazed by such devices as the steam engine, in which he saw great possibilities for unifying the young nation. His observations on these inventions appear in his notebooks and letters, and they reappear in his later work, especially in The Columbiad. In fact, Barlow had met and become friends with Robert Fulton. Together they decided to write a poem—Barlow would provide the philosophy; Fulton, the technology—on the feasibility of canal travel. Although the poem was never completed—only 290 lines of the projected first book were written before the plan was abandoned—"The Canal: A Poem on the Application of Physical Science to Political Economy," as it was to be titled, was epic in scope. Like The Vision of Columbus, "The Canal" emphasizes the importance of science and technology. In a hymn to science early in the poem, Barlow suggests: Science, celestial Priestess from thy birth, Thy Charms are slighted by the Powers of earth, Since proud Saturnalia, queen of Power, survey'd Thy form burst forth from Jove's prolific head. A form so pure, conceived without her love, The unmingled essence of the mind of Jove. Later, Barlow hopes to prove that "The Powers of State, that 'tis no harm to know; / And prove

how Science with these Powers combined, / May raise, improve, & harmonize mankind." In "The Canal" Barlow demonstrates how science can "raise, improve, & harmonize mankind" by using as his metaphor for this projected unity the canal system carved out of the American waterways. To Barlow "Canals careering" across the "sunburnt hills" will "plant new ports in every midland mound." Seeing the Mississippi as the American Nile, Barlow charts the results of such a harnessing of water resources: "Labor's land" will be "repaired"; "fruitful soil" will be spread over the land; "signs of fecundity" will fast appear. In all, "The Canal" presents a picture not unlike The Vision of Columbus or the later Columbiad. Technology, Barlow's "machine in the garden," holds the key to the future glory and greatness of America. The Vision of Columbus, then, was important in continuing Barlow's theme of a materially reformed landscape. Although the unfinished "Canal" and the later Columbiad more clearly represent his mature prospect for America, The Vision represents his first ambitious undertaking along those lines. But this first edition, although revealing the power of the later Barlow—especially in portions of book 9—fails as a poetic endeavor. Lacking the power of a John Milton, Barlow failed because his epic was simply too ambitious an undertaking for him. His Vision demanded both a narrative base to trace the history of America and a philosophical argument to explain its glories. To combine philosophy and narrative was beyond Barlow's skills at this stage of his literary development. The narrative sections in the poem are better than the philosophical portions, if only because they more closely align themselves with Barlow's talent at the time and enable him to show off his knowledge of the great literary epics and standard histories he had read at Yale. But they also lack

74 I AMERICAN WRITERS originality and vitality. The philosophical portions, on the other hand, are colorful. These passages mirror Barlow's energy, but they often suffer from an excess of enthusiasm and a naivete characteristic of the early Barlow. Despite these problems the critical reception in America was largely favorable, and the sales of the book were quite surprising for the time. Few brave souls probably read The Vision of Columbus from cover to cover, but its influence and presence were felt. Notwithstanding the relatively unsophisticated nature of the American reading public in 1787, the opinion of the average reader was positive and the poem was much discussed and well known. In one of America's earliest novels, William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy (1789), for example, Barlow's epic is mentioned: "WHAT books do you read my dear? We are now finishing Barlow's Vision of Columbus, and shall begin upon Dwight's Conquest of Canaan in a few days." But Barlow and his work were also the object of scorn. Peter Markoe, for example, penned in The Times, A Poem, published in Philadelphia in 1788, the following critique: That laurel'd Homer nodded, some avow; Let poppies grace our dreaming poet's brow, Who drowsily pursues his drowsy theme, And to a gallant chief ascribes his dream. Thick mists of dulness on his readers fall, Who sleep so soundly—they ne'er dream at all. Despite this somewhat lukewarm and uncharacteristic reception, Barlow's Vision was important in establishing the beginning of a national literature; and that, at least in part, softens the blow of his "drowsy theme." It was not

until his later work, especially The Hasty-Pudding and "Advice to a Raven in Russia," that the power of Barlow's verse established his talents. In his early work, best exemplified by The Vision of Columbus, the poetry is derivative, like most verse in eighteenth-century America. Barlow recognized the polished wit of Pope and his circle, but he was never quite able to capture the skill inherent in that verse. Barlow's changes in later editions of The Vision of Columbus, especially the fifth edition in 1793, represent his steadily growing sense of poetic development, although most of these changes are in philosophy rather than in form. In the fifth edition, printed in Paris, Barlow demonstrates his embrace of deistic doctrine by suggesting that man, and not God, as he had stated in the first edition, is largely responsible for the development of man and society. There is little emphasis on the "last pure polish of the forming God," found in A Poem, in this later version of The Vision: God is distinctly relegated to a secondary role. Barlow suggests that man, not God, will promote the greatness of America. In other changes Barlow charges that the French were less responsible than earlier thought for the success of the colonies in the war (a sign of his increasing disenchantment with the ideals of the French Revolution), and that French motives for entering the war were far less noble than he had originally conceived them to be. Most of these changes resulted from Barlow's growing maturity in matters of politics and theology, and they reflect the further changes that he would make in The Columbiad. In The Columbiad, published in 1807, Barlow strikes out to write his final version of the American epic poem. Seeing himself in the role of poet as social reformer, he rewrites The Vision of Columbus as an epic, complete with the introduction of standard epic machinery, and including many of the ideas and motifs from

JOEL BARLOW / 75 The Prospect of Peace and A Poem. Hesper replaces the "radiant seraph," and Potowmac, the river god, emerges as a new character. Barlow also adds a completely new book on the American Revolution, chronicling the noble adventures of the heroes of that war, and a section on Lucinda and Heartly, a melodramatic rendering of the eternal conflict between honor and love. The seriousness that marks The Columbiad is evident in the preface: My object is altogether of a moral and political nature. I wish to encourage and strengthen, in the rising generation, a sense of the importance of republican institutions; as being the great foundation of public and private happiness, the necessary aliment of future and permanent meliorations in the condition of human nature. This is the moment in America to give such direction to poetry, painting and the other fine arts, that true and useful ideas of glory may be implanted in the minds of men here, to take place of the false and destructive ones that have degraded the species in other countries; impressions which have become so wrought into their most sacred institutions, that it is there thought impious to detect them and dangerous to root them out, tho acknowledged to be false. Wo be to the republican principle and to all the institutions it supports, when once the pernicious doctrine of the holiness of error shall creep into the creed of our schools and distort the intellect of our citizens. Clearly, Barlow's didactic charge in the preface echoes his glorification of America in the final version of The Vision of Columbus. For not only did he wish to continue his poetic description of the American past, present, and future, but he also sought to update that earlier vision with political reality. If readers felt The Vision of Columbus to be

didactic and pretentious, then The Columbiad was even more so. Epic in both scope and length (the poem is over 7,400 lines), the poem opens appropriately: I SING the Mariner who first unfurl'd An eastern banner o'er the western world, And taught mankind where future empires lay In these fair confines of descending day. Mirroring the initial sections of The Vision of Columbus, the opening books of The Columbiad detail the history of the West from the Inca empire to the present and describe the "wide regions" of America. Like the "radiant seraph" in The Vision, in The Columbiad, Hesper, the spirit of the Western world, transports Columbus from his prison at Valladolid to a mountaintop to view the broad panorama of history: "Land after land his passing notice claim, / And hills and mountains rise without a name." But what Columbus sees in these early books, in his view of the world from the crow's nest, differs markedly from those similar scenes in The Vision of Columbus. Because Barlow insists upon man's responsibility for controlling his own destiny, Columbus' observations are tempered by the poet's increased didacticism. In book 4, Barlow sings a hymn to freedom: Yes! righteous Freedom, heaven and earth and sea Yield or withhold their various gifts for thee; Protected Industry beneath thy reign Leads all the virtues in her filial train; Courageous Probity with brow serene And temperance calm presents her placid mien; Contentment, Moderation, Labor, Art

76 I AMERICAN Mold the new man and humanize his heart; To public plenty private ease dilates, Domestic peace to harmony of states. Protected Industry, careering far, Detects the cause and cures the rage of war And sweeps with forceful arm to their last graves Kings from the earth and pirates from the waves. But slow proceeds the work. Long toils, my son, Must base the fabric of so vast a throne; Where Freedom founds her everlasting reign, And earth's whole empires form the fair domain. That great coloniarch, whose exalted,soul Pervades all scenes that future years unrol, Must yield the palm and at a courtier's shrine His plans relinquish and his life resign; His life that brightens, as his death shall stain The fair, foul annals of his master's reign. For Barlow, moral, social, and political improvement are possible only if freedom rules, and only if man can establish a world that takes advantage of the progress that technological reform can provide. This technology, according to Barlow's view, will enable man to control the elements and make the land cater to his wishes. With the advent of the machine age, Barlow's garden becomes a mechanized one that will not only improve man's life but also unite both the country and the two continents. The major change .from The Vision of Columbus to The Columbiad occurs in books 6 and 7. Here Barlow expands his history of the American Revolution by describing in more detail and with greater pomp the heroes of the War of Independence. These books are the most interesting and probably the most successful,

WRITERS

for they have genuine epic proportions and portray much more vividly the heroic nature of the Americans and the villainous actions of the British. One of the new sections that Barlow adds to accomplish this is his melodrama of Lucinda and Heartly. Using the traditional conflict between honor and love as his basis for the inclusion of this episode, he recounts the story of two lovers who are separated because Heartly, the young hero, must answer the call to arms. When Lucinda, tearful at his imminent departure, follows him and is captured by the Indians, Barlow uses her suffering and death to contrast the innocence of the heroine with the demonic nature of the British hirelings (book 6): With calculating pause and demon grin, They seize her hands and thro her face divine Drive the descending ax; the shriek she sent Attain'd her lover's ear; he thither bent With all the speed his wearied limbs could yield, Whirl'd his keen blade and stretcht upon the field The yelling fiends; who there disputing stood Her gory scalp, their horrid prize of blood. He sunk delirious on her lifeless clay And past, in starts of sense, the dreadful day. Barlow's purpose in rendering this tearful scene is, of course, to protest the scourge of war and the destruction it produces. Only through peace can man hope to build a great nation. Elsewhere, Barlow demonstrates his welloiled epic machine by invoking Hesper to aid the army in its battle against flood and frost. In this scene Washington and his men are val-

JOEL BARLOW I 77 iantly attempting to cross the Delaware, only to discover that the frozen river is not hospitable to their efforts. Hesper appears, "not to insult the brave, [but to] teach the proud stream more peaceful tides to roll." As in most of the poetry written at the turn of the century, the theme of moral and spiritual instruction pervades almost all the books of The Columbiad. In book 8, which in part parallels book 7 of The Vision of Columbus, Barlow includes his hymn to peace, and adds a section on the survivors of the Revolution. In this homiletic ode to liberty, he reminds the patriots that they must preserve the liberty they so successfully fought for and won, and warns them that their task is not yet completed: Unnumber'd foes, far different arms that wield, Wait the weak moment when she quits her shield, To plunge in her bold breast the insidious dart Or pour keen poison round her thoughtless heart. For Barlow the battle for freedom and progress was never-ending. In book 9 the differences between The Vision and The Columbiad become even clearer. Because his philosophical and political ideas had matured rather radically over the years, especially in his version of the story of the Creation, Barlow revised his outlook and updated the explanation of the evolution of the earth. The world that Columbus sees is much more rational and utilitarian; nature, rather than God, is responsible for its development: Nature herself (whose grasp of time and place Deals out duration and impalms all space) Moves in progressive march; but where to tend,

What course to compass, how the march must end, Her sons decide not; yet her works we greet Imperfect in their parts, but in their whole complete. Barlow's last book reinforces this completeness as he reveals a unified world of men and nations. The process for this unification has been historically based, and his world is one that binds . . . all regions in the leagues of peace; Till one confederate, condependent sway Spread with the sun and bound the walks of day, One centred system, one all ruling soul Live thro the parts and regulate the whole. With these lines Barlow's epic poem was complete. What he had written several times over was certainly not novel to his friends, but it was something with which most of them agreed. Their support was laudatory and exhaustive. But for the anti-Jeffersonians the poem became an opportunity for criticism. The Federalists damned it profusely. Characterized as generally devoid of interest, The Columbiad was attacked as tedious, discordant, redundant, and pretentious. Even Barlow's old college chum, Noah Webster, attacked what he saw as the "atheistical principles it contains." The stinging criticism eventually subsided, but Barlow was never able to cast off the atheist label. Despite Barlow's celebration of the new American republic in The Vision of Columbus and The Columbiad, his mock-heroic and mock-pastoral poem on the growth and use of a favorite New England dish, The Hasty-Pudding, remains his most popular, most anthologized, and most readable work. Written in 1793, in the middle of his political and visionary

78 I AMERICAN work, The Hasty-Pudding, as Barlow suggests in the first stanza, is a poem written on a "softer theme," a "virgin theme, unconscious of the Muse, / But fruitful, rich, well suited to inspire / The purest frenzy of poetic fire." Barlow begins his most popular poem by softpedaling his patriotic epics and calling forth the Muses to aid him in his first poetic inspiration (canto 1): Oh! could the smooth, the emblematic song Flow like thy genial juices o'er my tongue, Could those mild morsels in my numbers chime, And, as they roll in substance, roll in rhyme, No more thy aukward, unpoetic name Should shun the Muse, or prejudice thy fame; But rising grateful to the accustom'd ear, All Bards should catch it, and all realms revere! Assist me first with pious toil to trace Thro' wrecks of time thy lineage and thy race; Declare what lovely squaw, in days of yore, (Ere great Columbus sought thy native shore). After dedicating his poem to an Indian maiden, "Some tawny Ceres, goddess of her days, / First learn'd with stones to crack the well-dry'd maize," Barlow explains "with logic clear" why the New England name of the pudding describes it best (canto 1): "In haste the boiling cauldron o'er the blaze, "Receives and cooks the ready-powder'd maize; "In haste 'tis serv'd, and then in equal haste,

WRITERS "With cooling milk, we make the sweet repast. "No carving to be done, no knife to grate "The tender ear, and wound the stony plate; "But the smooth spoon, just fitted to the lip, "And taught with art the yielding mass to dip, "By frequent journies to the bowl well stor'd, "Performs the hasty honors of the board."

Barlow concludes the first canto by recognizing that other dishes—"green Succatash," "beans and corn," "rich Johnny-cake," for example—are not tempting: "You tempt me not, my fav'rite greets my eyes, / To that lov'd bowl my spoon by instinct flies." Canto 2 details the rules and regulations necessary for creating a dish such as hasty pudding—a dish, he admits, "May still be bad, indifferent, or good, / As sage experience the short process guides, / Or want of skill, or want of care presides." At this point in the poem, Barlow allows his epic strain to take over briefly, as he describes in majestic terms the growth of the corn: Slow springs the blade, while check'd by chilling rains, Ere yet the sun the seat of Cancer gains; But when his fiercest fires emblaze the land, Then start the juices, then the roots expand; Then, like a column of Corinthian mold, The stalk struts upward, and the leaves unfold; The busy branches all the ridges fill, Entwine their arms, and kiss from hill to hill. This may seem mildly reminiscent of those melodramatic and discordant lines in The Vision of Columbus and The Columbiadt but the mock nature of The Hasty-Pudding enables Barlow's epic description to work for, rather

JOEL BARLOW / 79 than against, him. The very exaggeration present in these lines allows Barlow to poke fun at the epic vehicle, while at the same time it provides his readers with a chance to chuckle along with him. The context of the poem is serious, but its methods evoke good-natured humor. Most amusing is the third and last canto, which emphasizes the rules governing the consumption of the pudding. Here Barlow parodies much of the machinery of American folklore as he describes the husking of the corn: For each red ear a general kiss he gains, With each smut ear he smuts the luckless swains; But when to some sweet maid a prize is cast, Red as her lips, and taper as her waist, She walks the round, and culls one favor'd beau, Who leaps, the luscious tribute to bestow. Similarly amusing is Barlow's ode to a cow, which follows shortly thereafter: Blest cow! thy praise shall still my notes employ, Great sources of health, the only source of

joy;

How oft thy teats these pious hands have prest! How oft thy bounties proved my only feast! How oft I've fed thee with my fav'rite grain! And roar'd, like thee, to see thy children slain! The whimsical nature of these lines is very different from the seriousness Barlow displays in his epics. In recalling many of the pleasures of a simpler life he knew as a boy on the farm in Redding, Barlow takes a nostalgic look at his past and that of America. The future is temporarily shelved. To be sure, the progress of mankind has its place in The Hasty-Pudding,

but it is treated with far less of the millennial fervor found in his longer poems. The effect of this choice is both ironic and satiric. In The Vision of Columbus and The Columbiad, Barlow chose to display the benefits of progress by parading the development of American culture across the panorama of history. In this march through history, he foresaw something better for society. In The Hasty-Pudding, though, Barlow pokes fun at the result of progress by describing the trivial in the mock-epic tradition, as though it were of momentous importance. In the last canto, for instance, he describes in terms of exaggerated importance the process for selecting the proper spoons and bowls for eating hasty pudding: ... The shape, the size, A secret rests unknown to vulgar eyes. Experienc'd feeders can alone impart A rule so much above the lore of art. By suggesting that such trivial choices are the product of progress and a highly civilized and sophisticated society, Barlow at once satirizes that society and its artificial cultivation of good breeding. In fact, the entire poem moves in this direction. In tracing the acquisition of good manners from the most primitive times in America, when an Indian maiden prepared this dish, to its preparation and consumption in this cultured era, Barlow achieves an effect he was never able to achieve in his longer epic poems. In those the level of seriousness and didacticism was so elevated that, ironically, his message became almost trivial. But in The Hasty-Pudding there is never any question of Barlow's tone. Unlike The Vision of Columbus and The Columbiad, the success of The Hasty-Pudding results from his use of a distinctive portion of American folklore treated in such a way as to appeal to an American-born audience. There is no attempt to chronicle world history, no use of unfamiliar

80 I AMERICAN exempla to illustrate the way to glory and greatness. What was vague and unimportant to an American audience in his epic poems becomes, in The Hasty-Pudding, clear and distinctly American. Probably for that reason, it is as the poet of cornmeal mush that Barlow achieved popularity. Although The Hasty-Pudding and "Advice to a Raven in Russia" are Barlow's most popular and polished works, it is doubtful that he intended them to become his legacy. Surely Barlow saw The Vision of Columbus and The Columbiad, which occupied the majority of his creative energies, as his greatest works and those from which he derived the greatest satisfaction. They were symbolic of his foresight, and certainly represented for him the relationship he felt was necessary between Europe and America. But in a critical sense Barlow's greatest prose essays, remembered by few in the shadow of Thomas Paine's The Rights of Man and Common Sense, Thomas Jefferson's Federalist papers, and Franklin's prose satires, remain his most articulate expression of the progress of mankind in the late eighteenth century. Because these essays are not encumbered with the grandiose language and imagery of his epic poems or with the naivete of a visionary, they provide the modern reader with a more concrete and accurate assessment of Barlow's abilities and prospect for America. Unlike The Vision of Columbus and The Columbiad, which display in Homeric and Miltonic epithets an exciting but generalized glimpse of the future of America and of mankind, Barlow's essays articulate, through very logical and concrete examples, his advice for a better world. The best of Barlow's essays treat a variety of issues important to his prospect of the world at the turn of the century: the value of revolution (Advice to the Privileged Orders, Part I, 1792); advice to the leaders of Europe (A Letter,

WRITERS

Addressed to the People of Piedmont, on the Advantages of the French Revolution, and the Necessity of Adopting Its Principles in Italy, 1792) and of America (TVo Letters to the Citizens of the United States, and One to General Washington, 1799); the importance of a national university (Prospectus of a National Institution, to Be Established in the United States, 1806); and an oration that smoothly blended many of Barlow's earlier ideas (Oration Delivered at Washington, July Fourth, 1809). Of these Advice to the Privileged Orders is probably his best. In 1792, during his revision of The Vision of Columbus, Barlow was struck by Edmund Burke's contention that social change was unwise and harmful because it disturbed the status quo. That same year he had attacked Burke's ideas in a heavy-handed satiric poem, The Conspiracy of Kings. In it he had called Burke a "degenerate slave" who "leads you wrong, [for] the world is not his own." Portraying the Englishman as a "fool" and a "madman," he had urged his readers not to indulge the "vapory dream," the "thread-bare theme" that Burke espoused. It is not surprising, then, to see Barlow attack Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France as propagating authoritarianism. In Advice to the Privileged Orders, Part I, Barlow argues that the French Revolution was both necessary and desirable. He was convinced that tyranny was destructive, and that it not only violated the equal rights of men but also prevented them from taking part in their own government and determining their own future happiness. Taking a page or two from The Vision of Columbus, he advocates in strong and forceful language that the "example of America would have had great weight in producing this conviction." He believed that when Europeans recognized this, authoritarianism would

JOEL BARLOW / 81 be eliminated and man would become free. To explain his point, Barlow examines the "principal objects which make up the affairs of nations in the present state of Europe." Of these, Barlow most strongly attacks the church and the military, two institutions he sees as guilty of perpetuating a social caste. Religion, he suggests in chapter 2, dupes the "community at large" in order "to conceal the strength of the many, and magnify that of the few." Using Europe as his example, he argues that the "pretence of extirpating the idolatries of ancient establishments and the innumerable heresies of the new, has been the never-failing argument of princes as well as pontiffs," and that "the extending and purifying of the Christian faith" has been their excuse for war. In short, when church and state are allied and man is made to believe "he is doing the immediate work of God, he divests himself of the feelings of a man." For these reasons the American government is best, because it continues "public instruction in the science of liberty and happiness, and promises a long duration to the representative government." Likewise, Barlow states in chapter 3, the military keeps man in bondage. Suggesting that the code of honor that governs the military mind is also capable of "total perversion, of losing sight of its own original nature, and still retaining its name," Barlow concludes that the "principle of honor" works because it is "convenient for the governing power." The military system, like the church, is corrupt because it places one man above another and destroys freedom and equality. In other chapters Barlow explains the responsibility that government has for the individual, discusses the various theories of justice and the penal code, and carries on a disquisition against unfair taxes on the ground that taxation can easily lead to inequality among people. His ar-

guments are well supported and very convincing, and his carefully constructed reasoning helps him establish the rational necessity for the progress of society toward independence. Independence is also the subject, in part, of Barlow's advice to European leaders, especially the French and Italians. In A Letter, Addressed to the People of Piedmont, he encourages the Italians of the Piedmont to welcome the French army into their province so that freedom can be achieved. Believing that the French would invade Italy anyway, Barlow hoped to avoid bloodshed through his essay. Restating the principles of the French Revolution that he so ardently embraced, he appeals to reason by establishing the principles (paraphrased below) by which a majority can rule: 1. Because property requirement is a vestige of the monarchy, base representation solely on population. 2. Reduce the minimum age for a voter to twenty years, thus increasing the total number of voters. 3. Do not restrict citizenship by national boundaries. Give French citizenship to all who settle in France and allow those who move to other countries to retain their French citizenship. 4. Hold annual elections in order to keep representatives in touch with their constituents, and prohibit anyone from serving more than two years in every four, in order to ensure a larger number of active participants. 5. Keep salaries at a minimum, so that no one will pursue an office for monetary reward or the possibility of graft. 6. Make certain that representatives represent the people of the regions that chose them and not the nation as a whole. 7. Eliminate imprisonment for debt.

82 I AMERICAN 8. Reform penal practices and abolish the death penalty. 9. Require the government to undertake public instruction. 10. Eliminate public lotteries. 11. Reject colonies. 12. Eliminate the standing army, because if it is weak, it will fail to defend the country, and if it is strong, it will be a threat to the liberty of the people. Develop instead a militia. 13. Make provisions for amendments. Barlow's ideas were culled in part from his earlier writings, and certainly represent many of the Jeffersonian ideals he espoused. Although that advice was unnecessary—the political turmoil in France prevented the conflict from occurring—it again established Barlow as a practical and reasonable man whose principles, although sometimes too idealistic, were reflected in the spirit and philosophy of his young republic. Barlow also provided wisdom to his own government. With Napoleon on the move in Europe, he saw the political relationship between France and America in danger. In his letters to the American citizenry and to George Washington, he suggested a number of ways to avoid war between the two allies. In the first letter to his fellow Americans, "On the System of Policy Hitherto Pursued by Their Government," dated from Paris, March 4, 1799, Barlow corrects several misconceptions concerning his statements regarding the American attitude toward Europe. These had been misquoted when that letter, sent to General Washington on October 2, 1798, had been published without Barlow's permission. In the second letter, "On Certain Political Measures Proposed to Their Consideration," dated from Paris, December 20, 1799, Barlow advocates complete freedom of the seas to ensure free

WRITERS

trade. In both letters he urges restraint and argues that conflict would hinder, even destroy, rather than keep the peace and cooperation that had taken so long to establish. Always the practical man, he shows how a new war would divert the already dwindling funds of both nations into an unprofitable and unnecessary war. Barlow especially stresses cooperation among nations as the keystone to increased economic solidity. Several years later, as the final draft of The Columbiad was nearing its conclusion, Barlow spoke to the public on the necessity of a national university (Prospectus of a National Institution, to Be Established in the United States, 1806). He saw education as a vital part of the development of the young American democracy, and he strongly advised the organization of such a system based on research and instruction, much like the educational plan the French supported. Barlow's theories of education were clear: To explore the natural productions of our country, give an enlightened direction to the labors of industry, explain the advantages of interior tranquility, of moderation and justice in the pursuits of self interest, and to promote, as far as circumstances will admit, an assimilation of civil regulations, political principles and modes of education, must engage the solicitude of every patriotic citizen; as he must perceive in them the necessary means of securing good morals and every republican virtue; a wholesome jealousy of right and a clear understanding of duty; without which, no people can be expected to enjoy the one or perform the other for any number of years. Education was important to the future of America, Barlow felt, and throughout his literary career he based his theories of the future of mankind on man's right and ability to make choices that would be a product of knowledge, of freedom, and of education. Barlow hoped

JOEL BARLOW / 83 that through a federally directed and funded educational system, those principles he had articulated so forcefully in his writings could be realized. And only through education, he stated, could man make those decisions. In one of Barlow's last tracts, composed before he left America to chase Napoleon across the European continent and delivered to a Fourth of July crowd (Oration Delivered at Washington, July Fourth, 1809), he articulated these ideas once more. Barlow believed that the preceding thirty-three years of national existence had merely prepared "this gigantic infant of a nation to begin its own development. They are only the prelude to the greater events that seem to unfold themselves before us, and call for the highest wisdom to give them proper direction." For America in the early nineteenth century, progress could best be continued if the nation could find ways of uniting itself. The answer, Barlow says, lies in creating mass transportation, "public improvements, such as roads, bridges, and canals." Rather than view them in a "commercial and economical... light," Americans should regard them in a "moral and political light." In the same tract, mirroring a speech of Hesper's in The Columbiad, Barlow instructs his audience to "Cast your eyes over the surface of our dominion, with a view to its vast extent; with a view to its present and approaching state of population; with a view to the different habits, manners, languages, origins, morals, maxims of the people; with a view to the nature of those ties...." Echoing the advice given to Columbus, this oration reiterates Barlow's insistence that future glory and greatness are possible for America only if its people work conscientiously toward them through a dedication to education and a recognition of the importance of technological and environmental reform. Barlow's life and literary accomplishments

were devoted unquestionably and unequivocally to a proclamation of the future of mankind. It seems ironic, then, that on the eve of his death in 1812, just three years after his stirring oration to a Washington gathering celebrating the birthday of America, he could pen a poem that seemed so contrary to the philosophy of freedom and progress he had articulated in his epic poetry and in his prose. Barlow must have shouted his condemnation of mankind in a moment of utter despair, for his vilification, rather than vivification, of society is an angry voice coming out of the frozen wilderness. For him to see the chaos he had so long warned against in the world Napoleon had created must have contributed to Barlow's frustration. Nowhere else in his work is the irony so heavy, so bitter, as in "Advice to a Raven in Russia." His description of the frozen corpses as "Mere trunks of ice, tho limb'd like human frames" who "cannot taint the air, the world impest" paints a Dantean portrait of the world and questions even the intentions of a God he had come to ask "In what curst hands he leaves his world below." Barlow's life had come full circle. No longer a naive singer of hymns to the freedom he found in the ideas of the French Revolution, Barlow now vehemently condemned in his bitterest jeremiad what that revolution and its precepts had produced: Each land lie reeking with its peoples slain And not a stream run bloodless to the main. Till men resume their souls, and dare to shed Earth's total vengeance on the monster's head, Hurl from his blood-built throne this king of woes, Dash him to dust, and let the world repose.

84 I AMERICAN WRITERS Barlow's limitations as a poet are real, but his influence and role in American letters cannot be ignored. He is not a major American writer, but he is a very important one. He remains a vital figure in the history of American ideals, for his vision of America is vivid and accurate. Without question Barlow was a significant contributor to the American literary and cultural tradition. He should not be forgotten.

POETRY

The Vision of Columbus; a Poem in Nine Books. Hartford, Conn.: Hudson and Goodwin, 1787. The Vision of Columbus ...the Fifth Edition, Corrected ... to Which Is Added, The Conspiracy of Kings. Paris: English Press, 1793. The Conspiracy of Kings. London: J. Johnson, St. Paul's Church Yard, 1792. The Hasty-Pudding: A Poem in Three Cantos. Written at Chambery, in Savoy, January, 1793. New Haven, Conn.: n.p., 1796. The Columbiad a Poem. Philadelphia: C. and A. Conrad and Co., 1807. The Columbiad... with the Last Corrections of the Author Paris: Printed for F. Schoell, Booksellev [sic], 1813. The Columbiad. A Poem, with the Last Corrections of the Author Washington, D. C.: Joseph Milligan, 1825. Howard, Leon. "Joel Barlow and Napoleon." Huntington Library Quarterly, 2:32-51 (1938). Contains "Advice to a Raven in Russia." Zunder, Theodore. "A New Barlow Poem." American Literature, 11:206-09(1939).

The Prospect of Peace. A Poetical Composition, Delivered in Yale-College, at the Public Examination, of the Candidates for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts: July 23, 1778. New Haven, Conn.: Thomas and Samuel Green, 1778. A Poem, Spoken at the Public Commencement at Yale College, in New-Haven; September 12, 1781. Hartford, Conn.: Hudson and Goodwin, n.d. [1781]. An Elegy on the Late Honorable Titus Hosmer, Esq; One of the Counsellors of the State of Connecticut, a Member of Congress, and a Judge of the Maritime Court of Appeals for the United States of America. Hartford, Conn.: Hudson and Goodwin, n.d. [1782]. "The Anarchiad—A Poem on the Restoration of Chaos and Substantial Night." The New Haven Gazette and Connecticut Magazine (October 26, 1786-September 13, 1787). The Anarchiad—A New England Poem, edited by Luther G. Riggs. New Haven, Conn.: Thomas H. Pease, 1861. The Anarchiad—A Poem on the Restoration of Chaos and Substantial Night, edited by William Bottorff. Gainesville, Fla.: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1967.

PROSE An Oration, Delivered at the North Church in Hartford, at the Meeting of the Connecticut Society of the Cincinnati, July 4th, 1787. In Commemoration of the Independence of the United States. Hartford, Conn.: Hudson and Goodwin, n.d. [1787]. Advice to the Privileged Orders, in the Several States of Europe, Resulting from the Necessity and Propriety of a General Revolution in the Principle of Government. New York: Childs and Swaine, 1792. A Letter to the National Convention of France, on the Defects in the Constitution of 1791, and the Extent of the Amendments Which Ought to Be Applied. To Which Is Added the Conspiracy of Kings, a Poem. New York: Thomas Greenleaf, n.d. [ca. 1793]. A Letter, Addressed to the People of Piedmont, on the Advantages of the French Revolution, and the Necessity of Adopting Its Principles in Italy ... Translated from the French by the Author. London: Daniel Isaac Eaton, 1795. Letters from Paris, to the Citizens of the United States of America, on the System of Policy Hith-

Selected Bibliography WORKS OF JOEL BARLOW

JOEL BARLOW / 85 erto Pursued by Their Government Relative to Their Commercial Intercourse with England and France, etc. London: A Wilson, 1800. Prospectus of a National Institution, to Be Established in the United States. Washington, D. C: Samuel H. Smith, 1806. Letter to Henry Gregoire, Bishop, Senator, Compte of the Empire and Member of the Institute of France, in Reply to His Letter on the Columbiad. Washington, D. C.: Roger Chew Weightman, 1809. Oration Delivered at Washington, July Fourth, 1809; at the Request of the Democratic Citizens of the District of Columbia. Washington, D. C.: Roger Chew Weightman, 1809. A Review of Robert Smith's Address to the People of the United States. Originally Published in the National Intelligencer. Philadelphia: John Binns, 1811. Cantor, Milton. "A Connecticut Yankee in a Barbary Court: Joel Barlow's Algerian Letters to His Wife." William and Mary Quarterly, 19:86-109 (1962).

COLLECTED WORKS

Bottorff, William, and Arthur Ford, eds. The Works of Joel Barlow. 2 vols. Gainesville, Fla.: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1970.

BIBLIOGRAPHIES Blanck, Jacob. "Joel Barlow." In Bibliography of American Literature, vol. I. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955. Pp. 169-84. Spiller, Robert E. et al. Literary History of the United States: Bibliography. New York and London: Macmillan, 1974. Pp. 396-98.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL STUDIES Adams, M. Ray. "Joel Barlow, Political Romanticist." American Literature, 9:113-52 (1937). Arner, Robert D. "Joel Barlow's Poetics: 'Advice to

a Raven in Russia.'" Connecticut Review, 5, no. 2:38-43 (1972). -. "The Smooth and Emblematic Song: Joel Barlow's The Hasty Pudding." Early American Literature, 7:76-91 (1972). . "The Connecticut Wits." In American Literature, 1764-1789, the Revolutionary Years, edited by Everett Emerson. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1977. Pp. 233-52. Ball, Kenneth R. "Joel Barlow's 'Canal' and Natural Religion." Eighteenth-Century Studies, 2:22539 (1969). . "American Nationalism and Esthetics in Joel Barlow's Unpublished 'Diary—1788.'" Tennessee Studies in Literature, 15:49-60 (1970). Blau, Joseph L. "Joel Barlow, Enlightened Religionist." Journal of the History of Ideas, 10:430-44 (1949). Boynton, P. H. "Joel Barlow Advises the Privileged Orders." New England Quarterly, 12:477-99 (1939). Brant, Irving. "Joel Barlow, Madison's Stubborn Minister." William and Mary Quarterly, 15:43851 (1958). Christensen, Merton A. "Deism in Joel Barlow's Early Work: Heterodox Passages in The Vision of Columbus" American Literature, 27:509-20 (1956). Durden, Robert F. "Joel Barlow in the French Revolution." William and Mary Quarterly, 8:327-54 (1951). Ford, Arthur L. Joel Barlow. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1971. Griffith, John. " The Columbiad and Greenfield Hill: History, Poetry, and Ideology in the Late Eighteenth Century." Early American Literature, 10:235-50 (1975). Howard, Leon. The Vision of Joel Barlow. Los Angeles: Grey Bow Press, 1937. . "Joel Barlow and Napoleon." Huntington Library Quarterly, 2:37-51 (1938). -. The Connecticut Wits. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1943. Leary, Lewis. "Joel Barlow and William Hayley." American Literature, 21:325-34 (1949). Lizanich, Christine M. "'The March of This Government': Joel Barlow's Unwritten History of the United States." William and Mary Quarterly, 33:315-30(1976).

86 I AMERICAN WRITERS Panington, Vernon Louis, ed. The Connecticut Wits. Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1926. Pearce, Roy Harvey. "Toward an American Epic." Hudson Review, 12:362-77 (1959). . The Continuity of American Poetry. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1961. Richardson, Robert D., Jr. "The Enlightenment View of Myth and Joel Barlow's Vision of Columbus" Early American Literature, 13:34-44 (1978). Tichi, Cecelia. New World, New Earth: Environmental Reform in American Literature from the Puritans Through Whitman. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979. Todd, Charles B. Life and Letters of Joel Barlow. New York: G. P. Putnam, 1886. Tyler, Moses Coit. Three Men of Letters. New York: G. P. Putnam, 1895. Woodress, James. A Yankees Odyssey: The Life of Joel Barlow. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1958. Zunder, Theodore. The Early Days of Joel Barlow. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1934.

BACKGROUND READING Howard, Leon. "The Late Eighteenth Century: An Age of Contradictions." In Transitions in American Literary History, edited by Harry Hayden Clark. Durham, N.C.: Octagon Books, 1954. Pp. 51-89. Nye, Russell B. The Cultural Life of the New Nation, 1776-1830. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1960. Parrington, Vernon Louis. Main Currents in American Thought. 3 vols. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1927-30. Silverman, Kenneth. A Cultural History of the American Revolution. New York.: T. Y. Crowell, 1976. Simpson, Lewis P., ed. The Federalist Literary Mind. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1962. Spencer, Benjamin T. The Quest for Nationality. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1957.

—JEFFREY WALKER

H. P. Blackmur 1904—1965

L

any of the products of irritation, might be permitted freely to air, but spirit and emotion had to be forced out and through channels that offered the look of remoteness." For Blackmur these channels were poetry, criticism, and fiction, where fiction means the aura in which he dressed himself no less than the words he put on paper. The most scrupulous exegete among the New Critics, he made his life into myth. The compelling fictions he created were the yield and the condition of his own impairment. As a young man, Blackmur had wanted to go to Harvard. His unhappy childhood pushed him in other directions, however, and he never got through high school. This was a source of continuing disappointment, and characteristically he turned it to his credit. Having in himself (as he wrote of William Butler Yeats) a coldness or remoteness at the core, he warmed himself or discovered a center by dramatizing types as if they were individuals. He was the type of the scapegrace who has made an unexpected success, and friends took his dramatic version of the life at face value. Leslie Fiedler in a short story pictured Blackmur as having been thrown out of school "into the lap of literature" because he had written a term paper on self-abuse in the Old Testament. The crime of Onan, he had his Blackmurian hero insist, wasn't masturbation but simple birth control by withholding. On

N 1937 the poet John Holmes put a question to his friend R. P. Blackmur. Holmes wanted to know "was there always a close relation between what a man makes of his own life and what he writes?" This question is central for Blackmur's achievement. He himself was at pains to obscure the relation between his life and work. "Whatever the lack" in Samuel Butler, he conceded in an early review for Hound & Horn, "we should not have had Butler without it." But the lack remained mysterious, and the reviewer was satisfied to leave it at that. Echoing Oscar Wilde, he said more than once how the artist is interesting only in what he makes, being totally uninteresting in what he is. Blackmur's devotion went to art for its own sake. He was in spirit a man of the Yellow Nineties, and that is the appropriate matrix in which to locate the New Critical method he sponsored. His distrust of biography rose from more than aesthetic conviction, however. He did not know how you got to the heart of the matter. Behind what he called "the indurated New England exterior," he maintained an impenetrable reserve. This was by choice and from personal need. "In men of reticent habit," he wrote, comparing Blaise Pascal and Henry Adams, "it is the spiritual that is reserved even more closely than the emotional. Mere temper, 87

88 I AMERICAN WRITERS Blackmur's own account, his high school principal had caught him reading Tobias Smollett, a "vulgar" novelist, and forbade him to return. He was remembering and outdoing his friend John Brooks Wheelwright, who liked to tell how he himself had been dismissed from Harvard for misspelling a word. Blackmur thought he could spin a better yarn than this. In fact Blackmur had quarreled bitterly with the headmaster of the Cambridge High and Latin School, which would not take him back unless he apologized. He did not apologize, and his formal education ended in the fall term of his junior year. He was failing all his subjects at the time of his expulsion. This was not from want of interest in books, but rather from the things his instructors said about the books he was reading. From early childhood, he had haunted the public library in Cambridge. He had all the time he wanted to read on his own. Until he was almost nine, his mother kept him from school. She was his instructor, in cosseting ways his protector, and the close relation between them lasted until she died in old age, only two years before he died. Often she dressed him like a little girl, and she saw that his hair was cut long, like a girl's. He was the oldest of her five children and the one she loved best. Already marriage had begun to go sour for Helen Palmer Blackmur when her first child was born, in Springfield, Massachusetts, on January 21, 1904. A career in medicine was what she had hoped for, and she prepared for this career at the Cambridge High and Latin School and after that at the Sargent School of Physical Education. She was just into her twenties and full of great expectations when she met and married George Edward Blackmur, an Englishman by birth and a rebellious but faltering kind of man more than twice her age. Helen Palmer's family tree went back to the Revolution, with roots in Fairfield, Maine. The family was in the Blue Book. Both her father

and her grandfather were celebrated Episcopal preachers, and her father's pastoral life reflected an unswerving commitment to duty. The man she chose for a husband followed the promptings of his wayward spirit. This made for a corrosive marriage and left an enduring stain on young Richard Blackmur. About 1905, Blackmur's father took his wife and infant son to New York City. There he worked as a stockbroker on Wall Street, and there Ted and George, Richard's younger brothers, were born. After five years the move turned out abortive, and the family went back to Cambridge. In the dreary years that followed, Richard's mother was pretty much the sole support of the family. She ran a boardinghouse on Irving Street, near the Harvard Yard, while Richard's father failed successively as a wool broker and manufacturer's salesman specializing in children's toys. The birth of two daughters, Helen and Elizabeth, kept the marriage going. But having children did not make a marriage. It didn't make a family either, except in name's sake. Richard quarreled early with his dignified and reclusive father, and the two remained at swords' points all his young life. When George Edward Blackmur died in 1940, his embittered son declined to go to the funeral. Early stories, only thinly disguised as stories, tell of the bitterness. To the friends of his maturity, Blackmur said nothing of his childhood. For all they knew, he might have been an airborne spore. You can make out in this, obscurely but suggestively, the impinging of the life on the work. The artist, as the New Critic conceived him, was like the God of the Creation, knowable only in what he created. In the fourth grade, Blackmur entered the Peabody Grammar School. He did not cut much of a figure there or later at his mother's old high school. After his expulsion in 1918 he lived at home, keeping himself in pocket by stirring sodas and clerking for bookstores in

R. P. BLACKMUR / 89 Cambridge and for the Widener Library at Harvard. He did this for seven years, cherishing the genius he was sure he possessed but that only a few friends suspected. It does not seem fanciful to see him as like young John Milton in the six years' apprenticeship at Horton. Blackmur was poor in all the visible marks of success. His life was rich in fantasy, though, and he covered the walls of his attic room on Irving Street with lurid scenes from Dante's Inferno. In his own eyes he figured as a Byronic hero who has sampled every vicious pleasure and has the taste of dust and ashes in his mouth. (It never left him.) Or he saw himself, being so poor as to want blankets for his bed, as the indolent scion of a wealthy Cambridge family. Sometimes he was Percy Bysshe Shelley the would-be tyrannicide (with his Harvard friend Jorge Manach he planned to go to Cuba to blow up Machado's dictatorship), and in the attic room he constructed a chemistry lab and amused himself by setting off explosions. Often alone, he went for weeks without speaking. Long letters to his closest friend and cousin-byadoption, George Anthony Palmer, dwell on the loneliness and tell how he entertained it by writing poems and stories and by courting Tessa Gilbert, the daughter of the composer Henry Gilbert. In 1922 Richard's favorite uncle, George Munroe Palmer, who had married George Anthony's mother, killed himself. For Blackmur this event was cataclysmic. It shrouded the last years of his boyhood in a melancholy whose source he never divulged (except in private journals) and never shook off altogether. Here is a version of Blackmur in these years: "Born poor . . . he got just enough education to raise him from one state of society, and not enough—or not enough wealth to go with it— to adapt him to another state of society. Socially . . . he hung all his life suspended."

(Blackmur in his twenties was reflecting on D. H. Lawrence, a writer he detested, finding in him at a guess a disquieting version of himself.) "As economic society could not accept him, so neither church nor chapel was of much use to a mind self-trained in an age of liberalism stultified by wealth." By temperament Lawrence was profoundly religious, but formal religion left him an outsider. Sick all his life, he was an outsider in his body, too. Blackmur concluded his brief character of Lawrence: "He was not only an outsider but a fugitive.... Genius was his agonized resource." Blackmur's luck took a turn for the better in 1925. With his future brother-in-law Wallace Dickson, he opened a bookstore in Cambridge. Although the partnership of Dickson & Blackmur, Sellers of New and Used Books, lasted only a year, it had important consequences. Selling books put the young man in the way of Maurice Firuski, the proprietor of the Dunster House Book Shop in Cambridge. When Blackmur's venture failed, he caught on with Firuski. He learned shorthand and how to keep the books, and for two years he clerked for Firuski and served him as secretary. He read incessantly in these years, making his soul; he filled notebooks with poetry; and he developed his taste in music under the tutelage of Robert Donaldson Darrell, the creator in 1926 of the Phonograph Monthly Review. The small body of essays that Blackmur contributed to this periodical—they range in subject from Igor Stravinsky to the makers of Gregorian chant—adumbrate faithfully his lifelong preoccupation with form. Chaos was the milieu in which Blackmur lived. Unlike his model failures among the poets, D. H. Lawrence and Hart Crane (as he presented them later), he did not give himself to chaos. He stretched his reason to include it, so brought chaos to heel. Rational intent was what he wanted to evangelize in the arts, he

90 I AMERICAN said:"... rational statement, and rational technique; and I want to do it through technical judgment, and the judgment of discovery, which together I call rational judgment." You hear him protesting too much. But he had something in him to fear. In 1928 his friends Lincoln Kirstein and Bernard Bandler appointed him editor of the Hound & Horn, which became the best and most successful of the little magazines, after the demise of the Dial the following year. Blackmur lost this job in 1930 but continued to appear frequently in the Hound & Horn until it ceased publication in 1934. His literary essays of the late 1920's and early 1930's—notably on T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings, and Henry James—established his reputation as among the foremost American critics. Nobody has ever done more handsomely by these writers than Blackmur. He was not swelling the chorus of praise either. He began the chorus. So he had his foot on the ladder. Ambition consumed him, said his fellow editor A. Hyatt Mayor, and he did not live much except in the mind. But his body, a sort of appendage, clamored for attention. He put it like that in letters to his cousin, and on June 14, 1930—after much backing and filling—he hearkened to his body and married the painter Helen Dickson. For most of the next ten years they spent winters in the West End of Boston and summers in the Dickson farmhouse near Harrington, Maine. The experience of Maine changed Blackmur's life. He became an expert gardener and subsisted largely on what he grew and what he took from the sea. He cultivated an ear for country speech and country pieties, and this shows in his poetry, as in his fiction and his critical prose. You would never guess that the selfanointed State-of-Maine man had grown up on city streets and had never plucked a flower or put his hand to the soil until he was well into

WRITERS

his twenties. The taxonomy of flowers, Latin names included, absorbed him, and his urban past receded and finally disappeared from view. Friends like Edmund Wilson thought him a lobster fisherman in his beginnings, or a backwoods carpenter who had educated himself by reading prodigiously in his spare time. Blackmur did not make it his business to correct these impressions. Fame but not fortune was just over the horizon. In 1935 Blackmur's first book appeared. This was a gathering of twelve critical essays, mostly on modern poets, and was called, appropriately, The Double Agent. The title signifies the neutral critic who is neither fish nor flesh but partakes of them both. He has no "views," his allegiance does not go to theories or to causes, only to the matter in hand. With this book, said Allen Tate, Blackmur "invented" the New Criticism in America. The New Critical method meant essentially sitting down before a text with absolute patience and humility, so encouraging the words to give up their sense. The critic, Blackmur said, "treats of nothing in literature except in its capacity of reduction to literary fact." Biographical and social contexts were not scanted exactly—the ideal New Critic was, like John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Blackmur, a deep scholar—only the work itself got primary consideration. Blackmur did not read the work as "an elongation of the poet's self." It was independent of the poet, having within itself "a rational structure which controls, orders, and composes in external or objective form the material of which it is made." In this collection, as in The Expense of Greatness (1940), the unblinking eye, backed by the dictionary, was Blackmur's instrument for elucidating the figure a poem makes. He made them part of the critic's paraphernalia. An almost obsessive preoccupation with language and its meaning enlivens his first book of

R. P. BLACKMUR / 91 poetry, From Jordan's Delight (1937). Not the self, but the world, represented by the rocky island off the Maine coast that gave Blackmur his exotic title, functions as his point of departure in these poems, and that is all to the good. His early masters in poetry were T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, and in his juvenilia he imitated them slavishly. Blackmur became a poet as imitation gave way to expropriation. In these poems he speaks not in his own voice but in the Down East idiom he had practiced and made his own; and the result, said Tate, was "the best American poetry of the decade." Looking back, this seems a tenable judgment. Most readers have not been inclined to look back, or perhaps the makers of anthologies have neglected their business, and Blackmur's poetry is little noticed today. That is an oversight that time will put right. The level of quality goes up and down in Blackmur's three volumes of poetry, but the proportion of good things is very high. Blackmur made at least half a dozen permanent poems. In execution and by intention, his best poems are modest. He liked the short line. He was a formalist, writing in a time when many poets (as his friend John Crowe Ransom has it) were taking free verse as the inevitable form of the flux'of the matter. Blackmur disputed the inevitability of this. In his poems, as he wrote of the medieval mystics, "reason was stretched to include disorder and achieved mystery." The achievement depended, at least for him, on projecting or ordering "the chaos of private experience ... in a form external to the consciousness that entertained it in flux." (It did not occur to him that free verse might offer a projection of this form.) Mostly he wins your suffrage as he appeals to the ear—paradoxically the source of his "rational structure." But never mind the paradox, Blackmur's ear was infallible. In the peculiar excellence of his poetry, and in its limitation, he harks back to early

poets like Charles Sedley, Richard Lovelace, Charles Cotton, and Henry King. This is the company he keeps. Ideas were a will-o'-the-wisp for the autodidact, however, and as he got older he chased them, to his mortification. You see this in his poetry of the 1940's—in The Second World (1942) and The Good European (1947), where a growing dependence upon abstraction displaces the concreteness that validates the poems of From Jordan's Delight. The swapping of the lowercase for the capital-letter "Thing" weakens the later criticism too. With the outbreak of World War II and increasingly in the postwar period, Blackmur began to cultivate the prophetic and evangelizing mode. Criticism of fiction was not his strongest suit, but the great European fiction of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries attracted him irresistibly and with mounting force, as it constituted a vast "censorium" of ideas. From the eighteenth century on, he wrote, the novel "has had the charge of organizing all our disorders into theoretic forms of life." The novel fulfilled this charge not as it was theoretic but, rather, as it was parochial. Blackmur did not say this; and when he gave his attention to the great organizing genre, as in Eleven Essays in the European Novel (1964), he committed a sin that was unpardonable for him: he considered his material in translation. Inevitably his patented adherence to the text was a casualty of this reading-at-a-remove. Perhaps he thought that the social and political bias of his later writing and the amplifying in it of what he called the "heuristic" voice offered adequate compensation. But the loss was greater than the gain. In The Lion and the Honeycomb (1955) and A Primer of Ignorance (1967) the disappearance of the old "myopic" fixity (as hostile readers saw it) makes you feel how a great critic is losing his way. There is plenty of luminous writing in these books but

92 / AMERICAN WRITERS not much meticulous analysis. You could say that late Blackmur suffers not from a dearth but a plenitude of inspiration, where inspiration works out to self-indulgence. Blackmur, in his own view, was destined for greatness not only as a poet but also as a novelist and playwright. In the 1920's and 1930's he worked heroically at short stories, novels, and plays. He failed at this labor and it isn't hard to see why. Many years later he and W. H. Auden shared a radio talk at the University of Massachusetts. The subject was Henry James, the novelist Blackmur loved above all others. "There is a sense," he said, speaking of James, "in which the heroes of a man's work are himself." This is certainly true. But the more important truth—throughout his career Blackmur insisted on it almost hysterically— says how the artist, in his heroes and villains, estranges himself from himself. Gilbert Osmond, the neutered expatriate of The Portrait of a Lady (1881), who treats people as things, is Henry James—but at art's length, what this writer might have been. Blackmur in his fiction dispenses with art's length. He looks in the mirror, and what he sees is merely personal—so in the extreme case, nobody's business but his. Philosophizing, the fatal attending on ideas, came more easily to Blackmur than making the truth incarnate. In the achieved work of art, he said—his point was to the poetry of Emily Dickinson—you had to translate ideas "to the terms and modes of the imagination." Prescribing was not the same as achieving, however. Blackmur had high hopes for two of his plays—one a funny and rancorous version of life in the boardinghouse on Irving Street, the other an account of Charles Lindbergh, the hero as fugitive whose fabulous success turns to dust and ashes. Blackmur's characters in these plays dance about each other without ever taking hands. This mimics the isolation that enveloped their creator. Writers who are locked in

the prison of themselves do not find the theater congenial, and usually what they write declares their skeptical view of the chance for personal communion. Blackmur at theater dramatized this view, and the result was predictable. Attempts to secure a Broadway production for his mordant essays-in-autobiography came to nothing. At fiction also, Blackmur made a valorous failure. His first novel, "King Pandar," was rejected by fifteen publishers before he stopped sending it around. In the equivocal hero whom the title stigmatizes he presented himself; and friends like Florence Codman, who had published his first critical books, shifted uneasily when they read him in manuscript. Blackmur's surrogate, the Boston lawyer, Henry King, uses his words "with a deep piety of demeanor, as a man uses the long-sought sight of the sea." Blackmur was rusticating in Maine when he wrote this; the eminent years at Princeton were still remote in time, but already his hero makes you think of the Princeton professor. "He yawned, and, always a public figure in his own eyes, caught himself up, stroking his chin." Entering court, he "felt his face grow vitally public, and he could not help putting on the manner and mask of a personage." The critical verdict on "King Pandar" said it was "a bad book well written." Blackmur's inability to escape from himself persists and deepens in his second novel. He called it "The Greater Torment," intending the comparative to speak of love surfeited as against love unfulfilled. In the misadventures, mostly sexual, of the rarefied physician who is all there is for hero, the life and hard times of Richard Blackmur are replicated. Blackmur's failing marriage is everywhere apparent and too painful to contemplate, not least for him. Having blocked out three books—he describes them in a lengthy synopsis—he broke off with only a first book completed. Friends found even this

R. P. BLACKMUR / 93 first book stronger medicine than they wanted to swallow. Florence Codman had no quarrel with romans a these so long as the thesis stayed in the background and you could say at the end, "There's a humaneness, a richness of interest, a pleasure." She heard herself saying, when she got to the end: "Neither moon, nor sun, nor any stars shone there." Perhaps failure looks inevitable only in retrospect, and that is partly true for Blackmur at fiction. In his novels, as in the surviving short stories, the ear for dialogue is often sharp and the eye for prosaic detail acute. He saw the world clearly and he got it down on paper (when ideas do not blot out the palpable world). But the essential stuff in which he was trading, being personal, shows as fictitious. Mere reality will always come home as fictitious, and commands assent only as it makes an artistic coherence in which the author's life plays no evident part. Blackmur the critic did not have to be told. His comment on a bad novel of the 1920's sums up his own partial success: "The small jewels are real, the big are glass." Blackmur did better when he went afield for his subject. The great labor of the 1930's and after was his projected life of Henry Adams. To write this book, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1938, which was renewed a year later. During the Princeton years Blackmur continued to work on the book, and from time to time he plundered his manuscript for publication in the little magazines. At his death he left a huge fragment of more than six hundred pages. This fragment lacks both a formal beginning and the coda Blackmur kept promising to write. But it makes a great book, also a finished book, except as the author designed it. Blackmur's evocation of the High Middle Ages is the living heart of the book, and in eloquence and passion is unsurpassed—perhaps unequaled—elsewhere in his prose. In the essay he entitled sourly "A Feather-Bed for Critics,"

he said how the writer requires a deep collaboration between himself and society. This, for once only, Blackmur achieved. The collaboration, recorded in the life of Adams, "is marked by the unity ... [that the writer and society] make together, and by the culture which the individual, by the act of his convicted imagination, brings to light." Medieval culture is Blackmur's ideal subject because it is unassuming, impersonal, and catholic. So with rare force it "convicted" him where he lived. He wrote in his Japanese lectures: "When you get maturity of imagination and of intellect... balance without loss of passion or vitality, you get great literature and great criticism, or let us say, criticism that has become a part of literature." This phrase defines what he made. Himself a bifurcated man always in danger of coming apart, Blackmur celebrated in the medieval period a perfect stasis that held for a little while, then disappeared forever. Like Adams, he saw how the radiant energy or emotion that aspiring minds must feel toward the universe is expressed in some periods as intellectual understanding and in others as sexual love. This preferring of alternative modes of expression meant that the human equation was almost always imperfect. There were, however, those rare periods "when there is no clear dominance on either side, when, rather, a double effort is made with such intensity that a kind of vital, shaking balance is struck where both imaginative and rational faith make a single, and full—if perilous—equilibrium." The vital, shaking balance of which Blackmur wrote and which he located in the art, religion, and philosophy of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries is persuasive because aloof from himself. Finding his point of purchase, he was able to move the world. In this book the double agent transacts his proper business. Working both sides of the street, he pays homage to both, and the sum of what he honors is greater than the parts that

94 I AMERICAN compose it. Blackmur's best criticism is like the best of the book, objective or impersonal, hence ascending to art. What is a critic's business? he asked inferentially, and answered: to see "with supreme attention not only the actual but also ... the values that enlighten the actual as the actual grounds the values. This is critical labour." Subjective feeling taints the biography of Adams, however. Its intrusion made the book a cross for the biographer to bear as well as a crowning glory. For half his life, Blackmur sought to come to terms with his ambiguous hero. He identified with Adams the indurated man—in the words of his wife Marian Adams just before she killed herself, "such a man as God might envy." Struggle as he might, Blackmur could not get free from his personal involvement with the guilty husband and the stricken wife in whom he saw his own wife. The involvement, extending to complicity in Marian Adams' suicide, determined his inability to bring the book to conclusion. He was like Daedalus as Vergil tells of him, grieving for the death of Icarus and trying, unsuccessfully, to work the fall in gold. The failure envelops the life of Adams in mystery. What is missing from the book is what the artificer wanted most of all to record. Along the way, though, he found an unexpected success, and this is emblematic of the incidental nature of his craft. Only slightly less ambitious was Blackmur's endeavor to write the definitive study of Henry James. In 1940 he signed a contract for the James book with New Directions, but doubt began to assail him almost at once. "You see," he wrote to his publisher Jay Laughlin, "James is a man I feel at home with." This meant that he was troubled by "NOT saying too much, NOT making out the wonderful problems I feel in him always." He had intended a "shortish book," but he wrote in 1943 how the book "grows in prospect." Not seeing how to keep it short, he let it run into the sand.

WRITERS

Part of the book got written as essays on the ghost stories and on the artist in James's fiction—not for Laughlin but for little magazines like Accent and the Kenyan Review. But even the essays made Blackmur climb the wall. He feared they were too long for magazine publication. "But I cannot do anything about cutting them," he said, and he was unwilling for anyone else to cut them. The amputation he dreaded seemed almost physical, and James an extension of himself. When James spoke slightingly of Leo Tolstoy's "loose and baggy monsters," Blackmur showed in an essay how to turn this phrase back on its maker. But that did not argue a fault, or else the fault hinted at virtue. Reading over what he had written, he felt "both the warmth and distrust that go with affection rise" in him, "two tides at once." Importunate editors, appealing to the affection, could almost always rely on "the Jacobean visible sign" of assent. (Laughlin was the unlucky exception.) Blackmur's health was failing when he agreed to edit a collection of American short novels for the Crowell series—Washington Square being one—but he finished the job "despite my talent for the dilatory, and the processional squallings of my liver." By then he was nearing sixty, and his youthful enthusiasm had not abated but strengthened with years. James was one of the twin stars in Blackmur's firmament from the early 1920's until he died. (Adams was the other.) Already in the 1930's he told Morton Zabel at Poetry magazine that he had enjoyed "more than any criticism I have written" the piece he did for Hound & Horn on James's prefaces. He thought it "also my most useful piece." The novels and tales had begun to absorb him when he was only a boy. On a summer evening in 1922, having finished his first reading of The Wings of the Dove, he sat down "in an obscure richness of emotion" and tried to say what he had learned or what his reading corroborated, as the problems James canvassed met his sense of his own

/?. P. BLACKMUR / 95 problems. Style came first and last—"the soft voices... [James] so well composed"; the murmured but perfected conversations "one can never hope, in any society, to hear"; the beautiful voice "impressed on the, we admit, somewhat strained, audition." The syntax was what he learned and unconsciously parodied. It remained a lifelong addiction. The sense of James—his own anguished sense—Blackmur already had by heart. This was "the sure necessity, before sentient life, of despair." The book, charged with cumulative authority ("vraie verite"), convicted him of emptiness, "a void in the heart ... all that the roll of surf reveals." His cousin George Anthony Palmer, to whom he was writing, knew that mournful sound: he and young Richard had heard it often as they sat together, watching the sun rise over the ocean at Lynn, Massachusetts. It said that, in the core, "victory is no more than defeat." James's novel constituted a long gloss on this saying. "The novel is a growth—a change from a surety and a hope to frustration and despair." The change for the worse did not preclude elation, and this is worth emphasizing. Blackmur was not a sentimentalist, but got much satisfaction from despair. In 1962, in an inspired piece of hack writing, he remembered his first encounter with James. Alimony payments and then his new house in Princeton kept him short in the purse; and he took commissions he had no time for, sometimes staying up all night to fulfill them. This essay was the product of one of those times. "When I was first told, in 1921, to read something of Henry James," he began—characteristically, he moved the date back a year; it made him younger, so more prodigious: I went to the Cambridge Public Library looking, I think, for The Portrait of a Lady. It was out. The day was hot and muggy, so that from the card catalogue I selected as the most cooling

title The Wings of the Dove, and on the following morning, a Sunday, even hotter and muggier, I began, and by the stifling midnight had finished my first elated reading of that novel. Long before the end I knew a master had laid hands on me. The beauty of the book bore me up; I was both cool and waking; excited and effortless; nothing was any longer worth while and everything had become necessary. A little later, there came outside the patter and the cooling of a shower of rain and I was able to go to sleep, both confident and desperate in the force of art. Exhilaration marks the tone of this essay. Its burden, however, is "the dumb part of despair," which Blackmur defined elsewhere as "the menace of life itself." These are nebulous terms, though doubtless felt by the writer, and you can see how they make trouble for fiction. The great advantage of plot, Blackmur said, especially when you mean "to mirror or represent the ultimate conflicts of the spirit," is that the words released or precipitated by the crises of your story will, "however ordinary in themselves, gather from the plot an extraordinary or maximum force of meaning." He himself was mostly innocent of plot, so when he turns to fiction, his words live only in air. In 1961, Blackmur got a letter from a doctor in Grand Rapids, Michigan, who addressed him as an "authority" on James. The doctor wanted to know what ailed Milly Theale, the heroine of The Wings of the Dove. "I believe that she died of leukemia," he said. "But why didn't James ever say that she had a real illness?" Blackmur answered, "... about the leukemia: in James, people are ill of life." James would likely have assented to this. But the answer, for the purposes of fiction or medical practice, does not take us very far. Blackmur had earlier allowed himself another go at the question. In the long essay he wrote for Robert Spiller's Literary History of the United States (1948), he saw the mysterious

96 I AMERICAN illness that destroyed James's heroine as having crippled the author as well. This illness, attacking James in his youth, wrought "a deep central damage ... never repaired and never forgotten." You have the sense that Blackmur is the distressful subject here. The illness originated, he said, in "the experience of the immanence of overwhelming evil—the final menace to the self," and it barred the afflicted man not only from love and war but also from religion and history. So life remained "always perilous" for James. No need, perhaps, to draw the parallels fine. Blackmur at this point took refuge in a cloud of unknowing. Forensic medicine did not have a name for the affliction he was describing. He allowed that it was virulent in James's villains, though, and he called it "the thing, whatever it is, that ruins loyalty, prevents love, sullies innocence—the morass in which some part of every human being is in a nameless mortal combat." Your identity was forfeit as you sank in this morass; Blackmur did not care to particularize further. It was right that James's injury should remain obscure, he said, "for it was only the outward sign of the inward mystery of his character, the sign of his having been barred from the direct experience . . . of human passion." The injury remained obscure, but so did the passion. Blackmur knew that we live by this passion, and always he saw it as corrosive. But it offered the only chance for escape from the prison of the self. The passion comes and goes—remembering Eliot in The Waste Land—and we think of the key, each confirmed in his prison. The question for Blackmur in his life and art is all but put in these reflections on the life of Henry James, shading as they do to autobiography. To what degree did he escape the prison of the self? Blackmur's years as a free-lance critic and poet, living—often barely—by his wits, came to an end in 1940, when he accepted an appoint-

WRITERS

ment at Princeton University as assistant to Allen Tate in a newly constituted program in the creative arts. He took the job, he said, only to secure "the minimum necessities," and he expected to move on within a year. But the man who came to town as if he were passing through came at last to dwell in the sanctum sanctorum. Twenty-five years later he died in Princeton, on February 2, 1965. It is easy to say that the university destroyed him. This is partly true. The harder truth is that Blackmur collaborated in his own destruction. Princeton was his fate and his desire. He was still a young man, thirty-six years old, when he joined the faculty, but his life was already more than half over and much of his best work was done. On the rest of his life the university put its seal. It offered him a rostrum; he used it and became a famous literary person. His fame depended mostly on the sibylline style that grew in him in the later years. This dark muttering describes Blackmur in Princeton, not the early Blackmur, and is not only his hallmark but his vice. To distinguish between them is not exactly to winnow the chaff. There is plenty of chaff in Blackmur, but the good and great things are inseparable from it. In his life and work he is a parti-colored man. His sin is patched with virtue and his virtue patched with sin. In the beginning Blackmur jibbed at the unvaried routine of academic life, so different from the helter-skelter of his own life. He liked his informal sessions with the Princeton students and seeing Allen Tate and Caroline Gordon. He said he didn't like anything else. Tate, the first director of the creative arts program, had engineered his appointment. Later Tate came to regret this. He saw Blackmur as a cuckoo who had flown into his nest and fouled it, then taken the nest for himself. But Blackmur the ingratiating presence does not bear scrutiny. He got too much obvious pleasure from poking

R. P. BLACKMUR / 97 fun at the academic mind, "putting an inch rule on it," he said to Tate, "by way of amusement." One colleague recalled an evening when they played the dictionary game. "You open the book at random and consider the word on which your finger falls." On this occasion the word was "tenesmus," a medical term denoting the urgent need to urinate or defecate, with a straining but unsuccessful effort to do so. Great hilarity as Blackmur and friends identified various members of the faculty who, from their pinched facial expressions, must have suffered from this disease. On his students Blackmur was less severe, though he wrote in his journal how they ate him alive. Except to himself, he did not remonstrate. Lincoln Kirstein, remembering how Blackmur used to play professor to the Harvard boys when he was clerking in the Dunster House Book Shop, thought him a born teacher. But Blackmur found formal teaching "a queer and monstrous thing." Here at Princeton, he complained to Delmore Schwartz—mistakenly he supposed that Delmore was happier at Harvard—"I get dipped so deep in the adolescent bath all week that I begin to sweat behind my ears." He was obliged to be "professionally stimulating, habitually seminal," so "the chances of masturbation ... [were] overwhelming." What was he going to say "about Shelley's West Wind or Crane's Melville's Tomb at two thirty tomorrow to make both those poems ring and wring, too, as they both should?" After a while, Blackmur found things to say: His speech was elliptical, inclining toward the runic, but his lectures were legendary—Poetics in the fall and Aesthetics in the spring, the same course, what he happened to bring to class in his Harvard bookbag—and once an hour he would come awake as from a private reverie with a dazzling penetration of text or motive. To have him as a weekly presence in your life

was everything, said Geoffrey Wolff in The Duke of Deception (1979). Not unexpectedly, his special province was diction. Words to him were "rubies, emeralds, diamonds, dogshit." Each possessed its own weight. The reality of language, he said, "is superior and anterior to the reality of the uses to which it is put." He was prodigal with words but jealous of them too, venerating their anterior power, and his students loved and feared him for this. "We find ourselves closer to you than anyone," two of them confessed in a letter of the 1950's, "perhaps closer than you yourself realize." But they had to struggle hard "to find a form or adjustment for even starting to talk" to the imperious presence. Blackmur did not mean to be imperious. Detesting authority, he gave the students free rein. Perhaps his own bitter experience of school underlay the permissive manner and the insistence that you had to do it all on your own. Easy judgments were beneath him, though, and he made a tough critic of the fiction that his students submitted. Wolff was one of these students. Having completed his first novel, he went to Blackmur for sympathetic counsel. "Put it in your desk drawer," Blackmur said. This, Wolff supposed, was the old Horatian chestnut: leave the manuscript alone for a while, then come back to it fresh? "No," Blackmur said, "that is not my advice to you. My advice is to put it in your desk drawer, lock your desk drawer, lose the key to your desk drawer. However, keys are sometimes found, returned to their owners. This could happen, so I would set fire to your desk." The rigor was real enough, partly the toughguy pose was just that. If you sought out Blackmur not from weakness but from strength, you did not find it all that hard to get behind the indurated exterior. Strength in Blackmur answered to strength in his students. He liked them because their minds had not yet closed— always he felt drawn to what he called the "hos-

98 I AMERICAN pitable intellect"—and also because with young people he did not have to be on stage. He resented the compulsion "to act a series of caricatures of oneself, and then, in self-defense, to add to the series: it is as if one had always to keep the extracted promise and were never permitted to keep the given promise." On a lecture trip to the Middle West, he looked up a former student who had gone on to graduate school at Minnesota. They spent three hours together. They sat on the grass and talked about dogs— "dogs he had known—dogs I had known as a child." Later, at parties given for him by the faculty, who were there to kiss his hem, he said practically nothing. What on earth had he and his former student to say to each other, his frustrated colleagues wanted to know. The student was hard put to answer. The newly minted academic remained an alien presence in the academy. Some colleagues took him up, and some of them became his close friends. This failed to appease Blackmur's sense of alienation. In his letters he said how distasteful it was to cater to the social whims of the faculty, buy evening clothes, entertain people he didn't want to know. He made them aware that he did not want to know them in that Calvin Coolidge way he had, the taciturnity that complemented the monologues. The "wonderfully expansive" man, said William S. Merwin, was also a man "wonderfully Yankee reserved." Princeton stimulated both sides of Blackmur's nature. He thought "you'd have to live here to like it." He did not want to live in Princeton; neither did Pomfret, his cat. The receptions and the lectures induced boredom, so did the "flat, Polish" terrain of Mercer County. He himself presented New England; and Irving Howe recalled how he played "the role of smalltown feller" to his cosmopolitan associates. He liked to highlight the contrast between his own education, a crazy quilt made anyhow, and that starchier thing dispensed at Old Nassau. He

WRITERS

was Ben Franklin, the type of the autodidact, who had got on despite the absence of the usual advantages—maybe because of their absence. Along the way, to hear him tell it, he had been blowing up the neighborhood with his chemistry set. Blackmur played this role more easily since, on one side, he remained a provincial all his life. Confronting "the sharp abysmal difference that Princeton shows," he felt like a transient set down in a hotel. "You can have it," he wrote to the musicologist Robert Darrell. He looked back with regret to his three-story apartment on Chambers Street in the West End of Boston— dirty but palatial compared to Linden Lane with its bedbug-brown furniture veneered with boxwood on pulp—and his footloose life as a poet and critic. He had rather—"not starving"—live as he and his wife had lived in the 1930's. "I shall hope to return to doing so." That was how he ended his morose reflections on the new life. The trouble was starving. Blackmur's early poverty left him profoundly respectful of money. In the boardinghouse in Cambridge, there was not always enough to eat. His mother in her youth was a beautiful woman, emaciated as she got older. She suffered from malnutrition, and so did he. Matthew Josephson remembered the brilliant youngster of nineteen or twenty to whom John Wheelwright introduced him—"skinny, emaciated-looking, very poor." Blackmur got through the Great Depression thanks partly to his wife and the paintings she did for the WPA. The 1940's had "looked very bad" to him, failing the help of Allen Tate. So he was grateful to Tate for "the wonderful title" of associate in creative arts at Princeton, and nervous when he heard that the English department had considered replacing them both with T. S. Eliot. Never mind his scorn for the academy, he wanted to be reappointed; he even played politics a little to that end, and after one

R. P. BLACKMUR / 99 semester he thought he could stand the "loneliness and academic gossip" for "one more year." He got the reappointment, and he never left Princeton. In some respects it was the perfect job. The faculty of the English department would not have put up with him had they considered him "just like themselves." But they were willing to put up with a man who was merely a writer. Blackmur said to his cousin George how this expressed their indifference to writing. He cared for little else, and cared terribly. In his lonely dedication he defined the outsider—in Irving Howe's phrase, a man "gallant, passionate, strange." The scruple of his mind drove him outside, at the same time gave value to his eccentricity. His colleagues dwelt on the eccentricity, missing the rest. So he became their butt and they cautioned their students against him. A Ph.D., they supposed, "gave them a special place in the world." Blackmur had no Ph.D. and his place was a mystery. But as they despised him, they did not fear him, so left him alone. He saw the beauty of it, "that no one like me can be considered a professor au carriere." No matter how long he stayed in Princeton, he knew it would always be on a temporary basis. He called that a very good arrangement—"not because it diminishes responsibility but because it concentrates ... [responsibility] entirely on what I teach." He was not vexed with the busywork that preoccupied the rest of the department. "I am able, if I want," he told his cousin, "to keep myself on my toes precisely for my own work." The sense of one's work takes color from the environment in which it is performed. No environment is more seductive than Princeton's, not least for those who feel themselves an alien presence. Albert Einstein, living across town from Blackmur at 112 Mercer Street, felt equally "estranged from the society here." Unlike Blackmur, he had no yearning for it, being

more nearly secure in himself. Princeton he thought "a wonderful little spot, a quaint and ceremonious village of puny demigods on stilts." That is not what Blackmur's colleagues were saying when, in the mid-1940's, they gathered to discuss the relationship of the writer and the academy. "Why assume that life in a university is necessarily stultifying?" one of them asked. The question was rhetorical. "Princeton," said Professor X, "with its east end, west end, Italian section, negro section, etc. ... could provide a Trollope with material for a life time of work." Blackmur, unhappily, put in his oar. "Or a Balzac!" he said. Balzac and Blackmur's approbation notwithstanding, he had a difficult time catching on. Isolated among "the bland and heavy scholars" who ran the department to which he was only nominally attached (that is how his young friend A. Alvarez remembered him), he found his cronies mostly among sports like himself. Often they were Jewish—this, though you could say that Blackmur was anti-Semitic, not a particularly illuminating thing to say in the context of his own time. Almost "everyone" from Sheridan to Hemingway was unreflectively like him in this. Partly in his occasional betises he was aping the snobbish talk of his early friend March Wheelwright (as filtered through his reading of the archsnob Henry Adams), partly he was having on his liberal friends. They might have hooted him down, and they didn't. Anyway, some of his best friends were Jews. "You and I have a lot in common," he said to Philip Roth. "I'm a Maine Yankee and you're a New York Jew." Roth said, "Newark Jew." But Blackmur meant seriously the asserting of a tie between them. Different himself, he cultivated difference in others. He liked Irving Howe, "this odd bird with a radical background who aspired to literary things" and suffered from the chilliness of academic Princeton when he lived there in the 1940's and

100 I AMERICAN WRITERS 1950's. The professors of English who gave him the back of their hand had their reasons, Howe thought. "I was a New Yorker. I was connected with the Partisan Review group, which made them uneasy.... And I was Jewish." Professor X, on the Princeton that Trollope might have described, does not distinguish a Jewish community. Still, Princeton had always accommodated Jews. One of them—he came from New York—lived in "12 Univee" with Amory Elaine, the hero of F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise (1920). Elaine recalled how one night "they filled the Jewish youth's bed with lemon pie." This was fun. The Princeton Jew, like Robert Cohn in The Sun Also Rises (1926), was a figure of fun, sometimes a boor, by definition a little outre. The sprinkling of Jews who went to Princeton in Blackmur's time were left high and dry by the annual Bicker or fraternity rush, which denied them a bid to join the eating clubs on Prospect Street. Some became angry young men, like Ralph Schoenman, subsequently Bertrand Russell's private secretary, parading with his picket in front of Nassau Hall. No picket line formed behind him. Others, more or less fortunate, merged with the Princeton society that scorned them, effacing from their personality every trace of the nice Jewish boy from Bayonne. Blackmur, who was Anglo-Saxon all the way through, was also this nice Jewish boy. Later, in his essay on James Joyce's Ulysses, he told how the Jew is Everyman the outsider and how, "in each of us, in the exiled part, sits a Jew." He was thinking of himself. To palliate the life of the exile, Blackmur made himself an ultramontanist, more papist than the pope or more zealous "in the nation's service" (a motto of the university) than Woodrow Wilson, who coined the phrase during his tenure as president of Princeton. This misapplied zeal—it denotes the man who is looking over his shoulder—accounts partly for the shift

in Blackmur's writing from the meticulous criticism of the 1930's to the vatic pronouncements that characterize the Old Pretender. In the small community to which he came in the middle of his life, there was more intelligence per square foot than anywhere else in America. Intelligence argues laissez-faire. John Wheeler the physicist, speaking into his portable Dictaphone as he walked along Springdale Road, was an unselfconscious figure. Nobody marked him—or Wigner or Oppenheimer or Panofsky. This was Princeton on its democratic side. Another side was Presbyterian, and on that side everyone marked you, like the colleague who got divorced and was sent away to Philadelphia—he was Ovid among the Goths. Time passed and the scandal cooled, and they let him come back again. But Princeton was not exhausted in its dour morality. There was the bibulous Princeton, of which Blackmur was a mainstay, "the pleasantest country club in America." One of his former students, having it dinned into him that the university epitomized the life of the mind, believed at first that "student" derived from studeo. This proved a piece of simplicity. However, he wrote to Blackmur, "if you want a wife, a home, a car, a lot of names for cocktail parties (what a job Art 303 does), fine food at a Princeton eating club, it is still one of the top two or three universities." President Patton saw this Princeton, in an inspired gaffe, as dedicated to high living and plain thinking. In Blackmur's Princeton, aesthetics and morality declared their connection. "Learning without piety is pernicious," said President Witherspoon when the university was mewing its youth. No one used just those words to Blackmur the novitiate. In the imagery of official pronouncements their sense was residual, though. Blackmur was not offered a teaching job at Princeton. He was "called," as to a clerical cure. His vocation, unsuspected by himself,

R. P. BLACKMVR / 101 was charismatic; it was like the accession of grace. Other men were not so lucky. Edmund Wilson, the favorite candidate of his old teacher Christian Gauss, never heard the call. Blackmur's associates found Wilson contentious. Francis Fergusson didn't suit them, so they sent him away. Erich Auerbach was lost to Yale. It was a wonder, thought Robert Fitzgerald, "that Princeton didn't hang on to him." But Princeton was a small pond, so looked mistrustfully on the exotic species. You wonder, then, how Richard Blackmur made the grade. He had no formal credentials. In appearance he struck no sparks except for his dandyism, and that counted against him. An acquaintance of his in Cambridge would not have put him on a list of the hundred persons he thought most likely to succeed. The young man Sean O'Faolain first encountered as an editor of the Hound & Horn was substantially the man who came to Princeton, "slight, slim, reticent, patient, rather romantic looking." O'Faolain looked around for his Keatsian or Rossettian mistress. There wasn't one. At social functions the young man didn't circulate, he sat because "he was too thin to circulate, too thin in the rear, being but a flat bag under the coattails." This description, from an unpublished story Blackmur wrote in his twenties, is just right, except that as he got older he developed a compensating paunch. His own ear instructed him that "he declaimed in a voice whose very restraint was sonorous," the voice of the old lion emitting what Blackmur called the hymn in the throat. But the tiny, dime-shaped mouth—Blackmur's early sweetheart thought she heard it saying "piss and prunes"—was too small for the long words that came out of it. Dick, said Wheelwright, "had a mouth so small he had to feed himself with a pin." Above the mouth bristled the dark mustache, the smallest mustache Mark Van Doren ever saw. Blackmur's appearance, bristling and con-

stricted, reflected the man who took shelter behind it. This man was beleaguered. You meet him in his cramped handwriting, tiny, immaculate, as tight as the phone book. The autograph versions of his two novels so crowd the small quarto pages he used as to make your head spin when you read them. These manuscripts are finished in every detail, and run only half as long as the typewritten copies he prepared for his literary agent. He did not blot a line, but had nothing about him of the poet's fine frenzy. Words, when he composed, came with agonizing slowness, like birdlime from frieze. "It always takes me time to think thought," he wrote apologetically to William Phillips at the Partisan Review. This vice (as he saw it) was also a virtue. His best writing fairly breathes deliberation. But the writing, as it is costive, speaks of the man who could never bring himself to throw anything away. The power to discriminate was not part of his power, a strange thing to say of this absolute critic. He suffered, said Eileen Simpson, from paralysis of the will. Merest trivia weighed with him as heavily as heartfelt recollection; and when he died, his house was cluttered with yellowing injunctions like that from the Boston Five Cents Savings Bank, telling how payment of rent was expected for the dwelling at 50 Chambers Street "now occupied by you." It had been twenty-five years since he lived there. Northrop Frye sensed ^about him a deep insecurity. He was touched, however, by the fact that Blackmur never tried to conceal this "but made it an integral part of his relationships." Partly this meant a disingenuous candor. He told tales on himself as if he were letting you in on his secret. Mostly, the tales were fictitious. Princeton afflicted him, so did his wife and mbther, but he leaned on them all for emotional support. He feared driving a car, Francis Fergusson said. So he never owned one, but took cabs as a gentleman should. He hated to move,

102 I AMERICAN and when he ventured out of Princeton to teach at Cambridge University in 1961-1962, he barely made it through the year. Friends who saw him in England wrote how the year away gave him fits. Middle age overtook him before he could bring himself to travel abroad. He did this twice, in 1952-1953 and again four years later. He might have been Marco Polo, the way he went on about his travels. But the insecure man could fix you with a look wry or quizzical that made you squirm. His eyes were astonishing, not the mad electric eyes of Kenneth Burke or mad Shelley but imperious eyes that danced and flared with pain or malice. "When I start talking too much," said Delmore Schwartz to Blackmur, "let your eyes blaze at me as I have seen them do." Ask him about poetry—a question couched in capital letters— and he looked down his mustache, not deigning to reply. You remembered the twist of his mouth. To those he loved he was often cruel, not loving them less. When the black bile rose in him, he could annihilate a friend. Kingsley Amis, he said, looked at the upper classes through a periscope. In public he flayed the skin from R. W. B. Lewis, another of his speakers at the Christian Gauss Seminars at Princeton. Lewis, he demonstrated, did not know Vergil— the pot calling the kettle black. But the cruelty represented a turning outward on the world of the cruelty he turned mostly on himself. Blackmur's loyalties were fierce but parochial. People came first with him, then the places they had lived in. He knew that if you put together beauties not human—the stones of Venice, the twin towers of Chartres—they bred beauty into the human. "But where are youf holy places in America?" asked the son of Sir Herbert Read. This in its effrontery was typically English, but Blackmur took the point. At dinner after a lecture at the University of Keele, he waited out an attack on his absent friend David Daiches. Then he said to the room: "I like Daiches, I like his wife, and I like his dog."

WRITERS

This intellectual lived much in his blood. He had no country but the country of the mind, and was deeply and instinctively patriotic. As Pearl Harbor came closer, he found his students surprised at the attitude with which he awaited his own involvement—"that as I share the peace f must share the war of my society." He had no brief for government, but the government could have him if it wanted. He did not profess religion. His antecedents were nothing special; he was an American. But piety flamed in him. You imagined him saying, without irony, that his blood had not passed through any huckster's loins. Like Henry Adams, whose avatar he was in his complexity and in his simplicity, he impressed on you "the consciousness that he and his people had a past." Blackmur was a gentleman, and of course he was a snob. His manners were grave and studied, and he used them like a sword. Henry King in "King Pandar" has these Blackmurian manners. Meeting an obnoxious acquaintance, he "rose and bowed. His bow being unimpeachable where the impeachable was in order, was meant to be the perfect insult." One night when his host made a scurrile remark to a woman, the cheap and easy scurrility that passes for wit, he paled and stiffened, and would not speak. A breezy but affectionate colleague having clapped him on the shoulder and addressed him as Dick, he made his patented stabbed-in-theback face. He was a great panjandrum—that was what his manner said—and you were wise to keep your distance. Partly the distance between him and others constituted the expense of greatness, and partly in his loneliness he grudged the expense. When he grew passionate in argument, he used his hands. He was always proud of them, said Darrell, "this well before the larger concern with Gesture became explicit." The hands sought to render speech with a life of their own. Working, they let you see that words and ideas were as palpable for Blackmur as the soil he

R. P. BLACKMUR / 103 worked in his gardens. Abstraction was nothing unless, in his phrase, abstraction blooded. He was an expert gardener and he was, until he fell foul of greatness, absolutely concrete in his prose, finding his proper nutriment in "fidelity to the actual." On this fidelity, as compassion makes it quick, the writing of poetry depends. That is the nub of what Blackmur taught. Alone among the New Critics, he spoke out for Robert Frost. "The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows"—he thought that line a stroke of genius and, like Frost, he could have written it above his lintel. He knew what Frost was talking about—the reference was to wild orchids that fall before the scythe—and there was, he said, "additional piety in that." He had tried hard to raise wild orchids himself. Sometimes Frost slipped—"everybody slips." He ascribed to his Morgan colt in the poem "The Runaway" a noise like "miniature thunder." But "a colt is not shod. Unshod horses do not make thunderous sounds, especially if they don't weigh above forty or fifty pounds." This kind of prosaic knowledge and piety before it set Blackmur apart from the evacuated world of the university on which he had intruded. The instinct of Professor X—quoting from John Crowe Ransom's poem "Painted Head"—is "to try decapitation and to play truant from the body bush." It made him Blackmur's natural antagonist. Professor X and colleagues accepted the intrusive presence, at least in the beginning, because they misconceived what he really was. Knowing what they were, they knew what he should be. They bet on his orthodoxy under the skin, and it is true that he valued orthodoxy of the mind—but pragmatically, as "the energy of society in its highest stable form." He understood that it held only as it was capacious, able to absorb the heresies that aspired to orthodoxy themselves. The greatest of these he called the gospel of unity, whether asserted as God or, "as in art, as the mere imposed unity of specious

form." The last phrase comes oddly from the crier-up of unity and form. This was Blackmur's gospel. In adopting it for his own, though, he knew it for a heresy. So he was orthodox and also a skeptic. Like the twelfth-century cleric John of Salisbury, a hero of his, Blackmur preferred doubting to defining rashly what lies hidden. The doubting habit inclined him to accept "ignorance as the humbled form of knowledge." He pursued knowledge in its divers shapes, including the trivial, "to the point where they add to ignorance" rather than confess it. Then, he thought, the best response was silence. This habit and this pursuit made affinities easy but allegiance impossible. His colleagues heard the silences. They had no inkling of the double agent who owed allegiance to no sect or class or theory, and who rejected impartially the Marxism of Malcolm Cowley and the Christianity of T. S. Eliot, disbelieving that "any particular frame of faith, political, moral, or religious, can fit any large body of men at any one time, or even, what is more important, the abler minds among it." Blackmur's colleagues saw a cicerone like themselves, no doubt more facile and popular than they would wish to be, who could walk their students through the mysteries of modern literature. Allen Tate might have been the man they were looking for. But Tate let them down. When, in the spring of 1940, he was invited to give a talk to the English Club at Princeton, what he gave was "Miss Emily and the Bibliographer." Miss Emily is the gothic heroine who murders her lover and conceals his body in the bedroom in William Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily." This is grim but not so grim, Tate supposed, as what his academic hosts were doing all the time. "Better to pretend with Miss Emily that something dead is living than to pretend with the bibliographer that something living is dead." The pretending explained the phrase, widely current among scholars, "the corpus of

104 I AMERICAN WRITERS English literature." This phrase was their way "of laying literature out for burial." So Tate prepared his departure two years later from Princeton. "That night," said the secretary of the English Club—he had issued the fateful invitation and the memory of what transpired made him quiver as he spoke—"That night ... Allen Tate ... showed himself . . . in all ways... a cad." Blackmur also was a cad in this academic sense of speaking your mind, but never so entangled as Tate in his beliefs nor so aggressive in standing up for them. You do not hear him whistling "Dixie" ('Til Take My Stand") or challenging H. L. Mencken to a duel. His essays, said Tate, lacked "philosophical background." Partly, that is their virtue. Early on at Princeton, Blackmur recorded how "Tate came in and we talked more of our regular argument, he for hierarchy and absolute order, I for the disponible, non-Euclidean order." "Disponible" is out of Henry James, he of the sensibility so fine as never to have been violated by an idea. The non-Euclidean order works the death of general statement. The order to which Blackmur appealed had its roots in particulars. The exfoliating is particular, too. You feel his bent in laconic remarks by the way, as when he says that "observation is the cumulus of reason." (He might almost have turned that around.) You don't see a man's face—or anything else— "until you have put it into some kind of context." But more than seeing is involved. "To be in a state of life, the details must be freshly observed and aligned with other details." Dante's cosmology is in a state of life, so is the poet who made it. He gave us "the fullest imagined order any single mind in the history of Christendom has ever seen." The verb is decisive. First of all you must see. That is what Dante thought too. Blackmur talked a lot but you would not call him garrulous. At a guess, Allen Tate, who liked to put his foot in his mouth, was a shade

less offensive to Professor X than this polite fellow who kept tight on what he valued and said only what he saw. Blackmur the mandarin, who preferred the apothegmatic manner to discursive prose, argued an equivalence between seeing and doing. He said, "You cannot do still life in poetry." This sounds like the old academic confusion, familiar from Sir Philip Sidney and the humanists of the Renaissance, of art and kinesis. What else can it mean, that "poetry moves along a line"? Professor X augments this confusion in proposing to his students that art will make them better men. Blackmur is not so good-natured and enters no such claim. His ultimate claim is more extravagant. He sees how poetry moves along a line—not as it soothes the savage breast or whatever, rather as it confers importance on unimportant things. When you winkle out the sense of what he is saying, you understand how he parts company with the practical stylist like Quintilian or Sir Philip Sidney or President Witherspoon. Blackmur thought art aspires to a condition of tautology where things affect us only for themselves and only as they are themselves. It was another sore spot between him and the academy. This Blackmur stood in a direct line of descent from Wilde and the aestheticians of the Mauve Decade. At his best and most hardhearted he takes you back to their master, John Ruskin, who wrote in the appendix to Modern Painters: "Does a man die at your feet, your business is not to help him, but to note the colour of his lips." Art is for art, and butters no parsnips. "The seal of Princeton University," said Blackmur ironically, "is miraculously good in this respect"—that is, what it says would be miraculous if true. "It says that if you will study hard, you will prosper under the numinous power of God." But prosperity does not turn on diligence, and the connection between poetry and progress or literature and morality is more willed than

R. P. BLACKMUR / 105 apparent. Tate, writing to Lincoln Kirstein, objected that Blackmur, for want of a "comprehensive view," took "a schoolmaster's delight in the small differences." The observation is just, if you agree that God lives only in these differences. Renaissance humanism had asserted hopefully that "a name that is really a name communicates the essence of the thing named." This is to quote Blackmur himself. Unlike his predecessors, though, he is not dealing in magic, and the adverb makes the difference between him and them. What he is telling us underneath the obliquity is that liberty of observation—the only right way to denominate things—is the agent whereby things become most masterfully their own meaning. The becoming suffices. Poetry does not participate in building the New Jerusalem; neither, in Blackmur's view, does it enunciate permanent truths. Poetry partially embodies the truth by the license that is form. It is the deepest version of history. Sidney, the prince of humanists, in his Apology for Poetry exalts poetry above history, and the exalting is hyperbolic and enormously sanguine. Blackmur is more acute and less willing to cosset us. He exalts neither poetry nor history. History is a tissue of "the lies we tell until the meaning of our roles becomes plain." So poetry, step by step, is also mendacious, only "the account we must make of ourselves." We need the mendacity. If it gives a specious color to the reasons the heart has for reshaping life nearer heart's desire, it makes life more tolerable. There is sadness beyond skepticism in the concessive phrase, equability too. Poetry is a game, though played for mortal stakes. "Why not go for fun as far as you can?" The question encapsulates Blackmur's critical perspective. "Art is also play," and in this play or "freedom of movement under control," criticism participates. Play knows its own rules. "Under control" is

the phrase Blackmur uses. But the rules derive from convention. They do not mirror the truth (the definite article being out of place here), only someone's ipse dixit, no doubt approved and hallowed by use and wont. This makes Blackmur a pretty tentative critic. If you look at the criticism of the mid-1930's, you find it saluting, also exemplifying, the man of provisional temper. Shakespeare is admirable as he possessed "a mind full of many provisional faiths." Henry Adams, whose intelligence is "saltatory but serial," is "provisional in every position." The description speaks to Blackmur's own achievement, and in fact you often sense that in writing about Adams he is giving the character of himself. Adams alone did not much engage Wheelwright, but "Henry Adams in relation to Dick Blackmur should be very interesting reading." Saltatory and provisional— these are the binding terms. Blackmur said he rather liked "to work by other people's prescription." This saying denotes the faithful-inspired hack or opportunist. You give him a job to do, and in return he gives value. It teased his mind, in his humility and pride, to work that way. Shakespeare worked that way. Provisional means hospitable or catholic, also what holds only for this instance or this moment. Like the twelfth-century abbot Suger, another of his heroes, Blackmur saw the moral universe not as a monochrome but as a spectrum of colors that nonetheless make a harmony. It is understood that the harmony may vanish tomorrow. Until the desperation of the later years impelled him to abandon what he1 called his irregular metaphysics and to fish order from experience—the violent order that is disorder—he was content to take experience as it came. His thought seems turbid partly as shallow clearness, the metier of Professor X, was unavailable to him. Often you feel uncertain in what direction the thought is flowing, "for even a contradiction was to him only a

106 I AMERICAN shade of difference, a complementary color." The New Critical Blackmur is not an exegete or moralist or historian of ideas. He is meditating at a remove—art's length—on the mingled yarn of our life. The life of the criticism is independent, by -and large, of formal structures. This, curiously, is what it means to be a formalist. Conceptual thought is for theologians, philosophers, classical scientists, and English professors who are shirking their job. Occam's razor is a very good razor to carry in your pocket and ought to be standard equipment for critics: Entia non sunt mutiplicanda praeter necessitate™.—don't multiply your concepts beyond necessity, Blackmur told the Japanese. Like a frog, he didn't care much about the systematic organization of the way by which he jumped. Order, he said, taking order tactfully with a dogmatic colleague, is only "the objective form of what you know." Professor X disagrees. He is thef connoisseur of order, but the fictive order he sponsors is imposed from the outside and lives not in things but ideas. Tate gives his character in discriminating precisely the limitation of Edmund Wilson as a literary critic. For Wilson, "the subject matter alone has objective status." The form the work takes is external, only mere technique. So the de-formed substance is correlated with its origin, in the elementary sense with its meaning, and critical thought becomes impossible. How, Tate inquired, does the moral intelligence get into poetry? He answered, "It gets in not as moral abstractions but as form, coherence of image and metaphor, control of tone and of rhythm, the union of these features." This is absolute criticism. To the description of Tate as seduced by ideas, one will want to add Blackmur's more nearly plenary description of Tate as standing at the same time "absurdly outside them" in a violence of uncertainty and conviction. The sum of the New Criticism—for Black-

WRITERS

mur, Tate, and Ransom the Grail they pursued, for Professor X a gauntlet thrown down in his way—is, in Blackmur's words, "a distrust of rationality as the cumulus and discrimination of skills, and a tendency to make the analyzable features of the forms and techniques of poetry both the means of access to poetry and somehow the equivalent of its content." Each would shy at the description as applying to himself. But this, said Blackmur, is how each of them wrote when he was writing well. At the time Blackmur entered on his twentyfive-year residence in Princeton, the master critic to the academy was Plato. He spoke not for substantial things but for the de-formed substance or ghostly paradigm of things. Ransom said in 1939, in his Phi Beta Kappa poem at Harvard, "We're in his shadow still." The principal achievement of the New Criticism was to free us of this shadow. The New Critic insists—following Blackmur in a review of Tate's Reactionary Essays on Poetry and Ideas (1936)—that what does not transpire cannot be said to have been experienced. Blackmur escapes the Platonic heresy as he holds to the proposition that in poetry and the novel, "in the art of words, every economy and every expense of structure and conception is validated, if at all, in the particular words that render them." This is pious, also provident. "Words verge on flesh"—quoting from an early poem of his— "and so we may, someday, be to ourselves the things we say." Sensibility, Blackmur thinks, consists in "an arduous fealty to facts." A novelist like John Steinbeck, for want of this fealty, will not do. His sensibility was "not slowed enough by its subject matter." With the subject matter—not the idea, instead call it matter-offact—early Blackmur begins and ends. This does not mean that he is a nominalist among the critics, rather that he is an opportunist, a word meant in praise, willing to follow patiently where the facts take him. Opportunism and patience come together in

R. P. BLACKMUR / 107 the famous or notorious definition of the dictionary as "that palace of saltatory heuristics." The word he had written was "salutary," Blackmur said. When the printer got it wrong, he thought he would let the printer have his way. It makes a good story. Anyway, the story declares the opportunist or saltatory man whose mind "leaps or jumps from place to place as best it can." Heuristics means learning as well as teaching, and begins with the dictionary as first of all you must honor the word, submitting yourself patiently to the entire range of meaning it discloses. Professor X, here personated by Harry Levin, a model of the academic mind, is impatient of the word, most of all as the word is made flesh. You find him nipping at Blackmur's heels from the beginning, as when in 1940 he reviews The Expense of Greatness in the New Republic and complains that "Mr. Blackmur has a dictionary." The trouble with the dictionary, from the point of view of Professor X, lies in its solidity and matter-of-factness. What he calls "the rarefactions of New Criticism" start the venom flowing in him exactly as the New Critics are not rarefied but substantial. Tenuity is where he lives; substantiality sticks in his craw. That is why he denounces Blackmur, who cannot live in thin air, for his "distrust of reason." Blackmur thinks "we have not so much of reason that we can afford to lose any of it." Only, in his robustness, he wants to make room for "the quick and very membrane of style." Professor X is Ransom's "Painted Head." Blackmur fills an ampler role. Dwelling in his palace of saltatory heuristics, he throws back insistently to the words on the page. Adams, for example, is defined by his scruple. "The etymology of the word refreshes the meaning." There is the Latin scrupulus, "a small sharp stone, a stone in one's shoe, an uneasiness, difficulty, small trouble, or doubt." The passage goes on like that, and the end is elucidation. No other critic has ever written in English, not from

the beginnings of criticism in the Renaissance, who did his homework with such assiduity. Tick them off on your fingers, the few great critics (they are rarer by far than great poets)—Samuel Johnson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, T. S. Eliot—each casts a longer shadow than Blackmur. In this respect, however, none of them comes near him. Beyond all others in his trade, he was responsive to the facts. This defines responsibility in criticism—the playing on words is his—and explains how he realizes the ideal to which he aspired, an activity "as objective, indeed almost as anonymous" as any pursued by the Bureau of Standards. The anonymity makes Blackmur our closest reader of poetry. At the same time, it circumscribes his critical achievement. But the achievement is not of a piece. Anonymity describes the practical critic who wrote to Robert Penn Warren in 1936: "I take it that the final use of criticism is to elucidate the facts." To this Blackmur there succeeds the full-throated and nearly autonomous figure who longs to be freed from poetry, who contends against this longing and makes inspired criticism from the contention. Last of all, there is the "King over the Water"—the title of his essay in dispraise of Ford Madox Ford—who shows what it means to say: "I am myself alone." On one side, in one kind, Blackmur is only litmus paper, instrumental to the job. That is one definition of the critic's job of work. Often in Blackmur's judgments of poets and particular poems, the pH is just right, where in Johnson it comes out all wrong. But Johnson is incomparably the greatest English critic. George Santayana says: "It is the temperament that speaks; we may brush aside as unsubstantial, and even as distorting, the web of arguments and theories which it has spun out of itself." This seems unfair, but accounts for primacy in criticism. Temperament, writ large, is Johnson's possession. When temperament grew more imperious in Blackmur, the result was not practical criticism,

108 I AMERICAN or not chiefly that, like the work of Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren in their New Critical manifesto to the classroom. The result was a creative meditation worthy to stand with the poetry that affords it a point of departure as much as a reason for being. This Blackmur is the critic as artist. The culmination of his artistry is the book he called, deliberately, Language As Gesture (1952), on which his permanent reputation will depend. He thought that "when the language of words most succeeds it becomes gesture in its words." In this ultimate work, a pulling together of essays that had first appeared as early as The Double Agent, he managed the becoming, so defined the virile man thinking. One talent, at least, never left him. This was explication. But the best of the book transcends explication and is not as yet crochety, evangelizing, or merely personal. "In the gloom, the gold gathers the light against it"—remembering Pound's line on which Blackmur dwells and builds his own edifice or Adjunct to the Muses' Diadem. Meaning is not to seek, but meaning is elusive. It looms over the horizon and heaves like the sea swell under the bows, and you feel how the critic is also a poet and making a rival construction. The sensibility that declares itself in these essays on poetry partakes of the genius that is its occasion. Intellect has climbed to its highest pitch, is so fastidious, is working with such intensity as to achieve incandescence. Of filler there is hardly any. All that is burned away. Blackmur wanted from his teens to be a true creative artist. After all he did not fail. His colleagues we're not looking for a rival construction, and mostly they liked their poetry under glass. Blackmur's personal tragedy, the kind that waits on the autodidact, was that he came to identify with them. In his own words, harder perhaps than a reader would use, he acquiesced in "the substitution of the authoritarian for the authoritative, of violence for emo-

WRITERS

tion, frenzy for passion." The unrivaled consciousness turned to omnicompetence, the provisional faith to plenitudo potestatis. The professor manque, having no degrees, took to writing learned papers "in solicitude and critique." The critique is poorer for the solicitude. "In these papers, neither is the fog in the fii trees nor is the salt on the briar rose." Ideas, the kind that dance in air, exert their fatal fascination. The validity of the criticism comes increasingly "to depend on the validity of the ideas in that vacuum which is the medium of simple assertion." Increasingly, the voice you hear is the modulated voice of Professor X the belletrist, not Old Rocky Face but a leaderwriter in the New York Times. With the ascendancy of this voice and this prescriptive personality—benevolent but not beneficent—Blackmur's professional ascendancy began. The academy acknowledged him as one of its own—always with residual suspicion—as he put away the microscope and began to flourish his optic glass. What things he discovered in it! an equivalent, though still "putative," for the seven parts of the trivium and quadrivium of the Middle Ages—here he is the educational statesman beloved of nice people who deplore the two cultures and want to build a bridge between them—or a modus vivendi inspired by the question (he was false to his genius as he raised it) "What should be done?"— here, God help us, he sounds like Nikolay Chernyshevsky. Some of this stuff is fun and does really declare the great man before whom, with affection and exasperation, you throw up your hands. For example (Blackmur had been lucubrating, something like that, on a Latin phrase that recurs in the letters of John Quincy Adams): "It is a phrase from, I think, the eighth line of the third ode in the fifth book of the Odes of Horace. I may have that reference not quite right. I speak from memory."

R. P. BLACKMUR / 109 He rifled memory and old books; he made himself a coat out of old mythologies, here the numen, there the moha. This outlandish garment he wore in the world's eye. It brought him growing acclaim. In 1944 his patrons made him a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study, appropriately—for he personified the polymath—in the school of economics. He did not expect to be richly rewarded. He took it for granted that he would be patronized, and was. In time he became a patron himself. He brought John Berryman to Princeton, later Randall Jarrell, Delmore Schwartz, Saul Bellow, others. The National Institute of Arts and Letters, and then the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, elected him a member. The universities belatedly conferred on him the academic credentials he had decided as a young man he did not want or need. Rutgers but not Princeton gave him an honorary degree. Cambridge named him Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions in 1961. He prefigured the peregrine professor of a later time and was sought after constantly on the lecture circuit. His public lectures were mysterious, not more magnificent than dim. At home in Princeton he hobnobbed with the great and famous. He spent evenings with Oppenheimer and Ben Shahn. When he dined at the Lucius Wilmerdings', he didn't leave until two or three in the morning. Until he left, he didn't stop talking. John O'Hara, whom he met frequently at parties, paid him a particular compliment. "He not only dislikes me," Blackmur said, "but detests me." The detestation was that of one Great Cham for another. His salary grew and his tastes followed, then exceeded his salary. If you wore a hat, it had better be a Borsalino. You got the best neckwear at that shop on the via Condotti. Sometimes at dinner he served his guests RomaneeConti. He drank his bourbon in tumblers black almost to the top. "Why are there no second

acts in American literature?" someone is supposed to have asked James Thurber, who answered: "Because writers after forty can afford to buy their liquor by the case." More than any other faculty member, Blackmur made himself familiar with the mysteries of the budget. He could calculate to the penny, from a generalized account of university housing, the amount of rental increase against a colleague's house on Broadmead or Fitzrandolph. Why should he have done this? The answer is buried in his penny-pinching youth. Faculty politics engrossed him, and he blew them up out of all proportion, generally getting them all wrong. On the floor of the faculty he might have been wearing a toga. It would have become him more than most. Now he was Pliny the Younger, a laudator eloquentissimus. At Lahiere's, the best restaurant in Princeton, he held court five days a week. He had his own chair against the north wall. And now he was Ben Jonson, inviting a friend to supper. There is a line he used to quote, derisory of famous men: "What then?" sang Plato's ghost. "What then?" For a long time the prophet went unhonored in his own place. The English department did not want to promote him. Then Blackmur's patrons intervened. They were Christian Gauss, the dean of the college at Princeton; John Marshall, associate director of the Rockefeller Foundation and a close friend from early days in Cambridge; the economist Walter Stewart, a Rockefeller Foundation trustee and a permanent member of the Institute for Advanced Study; Lucius Wilmerding, another fellow in the school of economics. In the city he belonged to the Century Club. So did President Dodds. Finally Harold Dodds let it be known that he was for Blackmur. The English department saw that it had no option, and in 1951 the man who never completed high school was promoted to professor. Did he hear the dirge in the bells of his acces-

770 / AMERICAN sion? Like Neil Faraday, the famous writer in Henry James's "The Death of the Lion," perhaps like James, assuredly like Adams, Blackmur shows us in his life how renouncement depends on recognition. The flame that is the life attains its highest point, then the snuff that lives within it abates it. Blackmur had pushed to the point of success. But he had written long before how "success is not the propitious term" for a life, for a work. The propitious term, he said, is failure. Richard Blackmur was a dust-andashes man, self-convicted of what he called "that fundamental condition of the mind known as ennui." He never permitted himself to taste his honors before they sated, he never omitted to drink to the lees every drop in the cup of his dejection. In an early essay he drew on Pascal, "the great scrupulous mind of the seventeenth century," with whose night thoughts he lived on intimate terms. "We combat obstacles in order to get repose, and, when got, the repose is insupportable; for we think either of the troubles we have, or of those that threaten us; and even if we felt safe on every side, ennui would of its own accord spring up from the depths of the heart where it is rooted by nature, and would fill the mind with its venom." Perhaps Blackmur rejoiced in his triumph. Its entail was insupportable to him. In his self-contempt, he took care that it would be. On his nineteenth birthday, Blackmur had looked back on the years of adolescence when, as he put it, "I stepped out alone"—not rodomontade by a long shot—happy in the awareness of "true genius" in himself, "sure of my victory." His elation did not last. "I'm less sure now," he wrote. "If it turns out that I fail as creative artist, then I shall know I have only a swim for a life ahead of me." In middle age, he supposed it had turned out that way. By all odds, it should have turned out that way. Disorder and early sorrow mingle their spurs in Blackmur's story, and he conformed in

WRITERS

age to the bent imparted in his beginnings. Against this bent or impairment he struggled all his life, but neither as boy nor man could he escape what he called the great grasp of unreason, and failure looked unshunnable for him. His story is exhilarating as he did not fail. In Blackmur's papers at Princeton, this note in his own hand survives: "The right question to ask about a man of size, once he is dead and all his motion done, all his growth and his deterioration stopped, is always some form of the question: What good was he? What was the goodness in him that he amounted to—the goodness, the very virtue, that he was?" Blackmur in these questions was trying to make sense of the life of Henry Adams. But let the questions address his own life—or better, his achievement, now that the life is done. In the "very virtue" of this achievement, limitation participates. When Blackmur was still in his twenties, he wrote: "Our vices father our virtues, and in intent are indistinguishable." This swapping back and forth is how it was with him. The insecure man had great courage, and the man of many weaknesses was endlessly fertile in discovering new sources of strength. He triumphed as he made his weakness feed his strength. In the medieval song of Coeur de Lion, the minstrel Blondel de Nesle cries: O Richard! O mon Roi! L'univers t'abandonne. The Mozart sound of Andre Gretry's opera Richard Coeur de Lion only amplifies the pathos of these lines. Blackmur found them in Adams, for whom they conveyed his own suffering in a "pattern of acceptance, rejection, and expression." In this pattern Blackmur also composed the sense of his life. The pattern mirrors the life and distorts it. In his view of himself, the acceptance that he won counted far less than rejection. Only rejection was sure. Also, he considered it just. "I used to say that I had

R.P.BLACKMUR / 111 never known above one or two persons who had not at some crucial point let me down. Nothing could be further from the truth. In no instance I can think of among those which used to trouble me had I any right of firmer expectation than to have been—not let down—but let go; and so it was." Everyone with whom he became close let go at some crucial point. Out of rejection, whether real or imagined, came the work by which he lives, also the privation that diminishes the work. There is Blondel's expressive song beneath the prison walls, then there is the prison in which King Richard lies captive. In the trembling jar between, Blackmur's very virtue was engendered. Perhaps, as his friend Francis Fergusson thought, Blackmur was losing his critical gift about the time he came to Princeton. It seems right to present his artistic career, anyway on one side, as describing a downward curve. This is surprising only as you overlook the imposition he carried with him. The greater surprise consists in the magnitude of what he achieved. The achievement is figured in the image of the gyres, familiar from his master William Butler Yeats. As one source of energy waned in him, another source supervened. He abdicated the life of a free lance, you could say he quit on his talent. But he made himself a great teacher, and his impact on a generation of students, many of whom became famous in the arts and in public affairs, is still perceptible. Blackmur aspired to the role of lawmaker, and in later years he tried the catechistic manner and the legislating voice. But the ability to conceptualize was beyond him. So he was unlucky but lucky, too. He told the truth but told it slant. This precluded the chance for general statement. Also it predicted the fragmentary nature of his work. He passed judgment on the work in the preface to his Eleven Essays in the European Novel—"fragments of an unfinished ruin" was his self-denigrating phrase. The de-

nigrating is just. But the provisional bias you discern in the work gives Blackmur his charter. Debarred from acquaintance with the capitalletter Thing, he dealt almost exclusively in lowercase things. For want of a better, his mode was observation. Looking hard, he said what he saw. In this way he made his small body of permanent poetry. Blackmur's meticulous temper verged on morbidity and played into the criticism with unexpected results. Out of his impairment, he fashioned an instrument almost preternatural in its acuteness. His essays in criticism—they include the life of Adams—present the man who could not manage a total performance. What he gives you is not an integer but a series of provisional approaches—essays, precisely, in the sense that his hero Michel de Montaigne used the word. Life as he saw it was essentially discrete, and this was impairment too. He missed the Pisgah sight or unified theory. So he lowered his eyes and became our best American critic.

Selected Bibliography WORKS OF

R. P. BLACKMUR CRITICISM

The Double Agent; Essays in Craft and Elucidation. New York: Arrow Editions, 1935. The Expense of Greatness. New York: Arrow Editions, 1940. Language As Gesture; Essays in Poetry. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1952. The Lion and the Honeycomb; Essays in Solicitude and Critique. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1955. Anni Mirabiles, 1921-1925: Reason in the Madness of Letters. Washington, D. C.: Library of Congress, 1956. Form and Value in Modern Poetry. Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, 1957.

112 I AMERICAN New Criticism in the United States. Tokyo: Kenkyusha, 1959. Eleven Essays in the European Novel. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1964. A Primer of Ignorance, edited by Joseph Frank. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1967. POETRY From Jordan's Delight. New York: Arrow Editions, 1937. The Second World. Cummington, Mass.: Cummington Press, 1942. The Good European and Other Poems. Cummington, Mass.: Cummington Press, 1947. Poems of R. P. Blackmur. Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1977. (With an introduction by Denis Donoghue.) BIOGRAPHY

Henry Adams, edited by Veronica A. Makowsky. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980. (With a foreword by Denis Donoghue.)

BIBLIOGRAPHIES Baker, Carlos. "R. P. Blackmur: A Checklist," Princeton University Library Chronicle, 3:99-106 (April 1942). Pannick, Gerald J. "R. P. Blackmur: A Bibliography." Bulletin of Bibliography, 31:165-69 (1974). Tate, Allen. Sixty American Poets, 1896-1944. Washington, D. C: Library of Congress, 1954. Thomas, Harry. An Annotated Bibliography ofR. P. Blackmur, with a critical essay. New York: Garland Press (in progress).

WRITERS

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL STUDIES Foster, Richard Jackson. The New Romantics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1962. Frank, Joseph. The Widening Gyre. New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers University Press, 1963. Fraser, Russell. "R. P. Blackmur: The Politics of a New Critic." Sewanee Review, 87:557-72 (Fall 1979). . R. P. Blackmur: A Hero's Life. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich (in press). Greenbaum, Leonard. The Hound and Horn. The Hague: Mouton, 1966. Hyman, Stanley E. The Armed Vision. New York: Knopf, 1948. Jarrell, Randall. Poetry and the Age. New York: Knopf, 1953. Kenner, Hugh. Gnomon. New York: McDowell, Obolensky, 1958. Pritchard, William H. "R. P. Blackmur and the Criticism of Poetry." Massachusetts Review, 8:633-49 (Fall 1967). Schwartz, Delmore. Selected Essays, edited by Donald A. Dike and David H. Zucker. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970. Sutton, Walter E. Modern American Criticism. Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1963. Wain, John. Essays on Literature and Ideas. New York: St. Martin's, 1963. Webster, Grant. The Republic of Letters: A History of Postwar American Literary Opinion. Baltimore-London: Johns Hopkins, 1979. Wellek, Rene. "R. P. Blackmur Re-Examined." Southern Review, n.s. 7:825-45 (1971).

—RUSSELL A. FRASER

Pearl S. Buck 1892—1973 P

Her mother's influence was crucial, since Caroline Sydenstricker insisted upon frequent written exercises apart from tutorial or school assignments. She especially emphasized correct grammatical form and clarity, diligently examined each essay her daughter wrote, and made suggestions for revision and improvement. She encouraged her daughter to submit her writings for publication; thus, many of Buck's childhood writings were published in the Shanghai Mercury. In the midst of this educational development, there always lurked the menace of danger. In 1900, Buck, her sister, and her mother had to flee for their lives during the Boxer Rebellion. Numerous white families were murdered during this period, and even small children were not spared. Buck spent a year in Shanghai as a refugee. Later, during the Nationalist uprising of 1926-1927, when Chiang Kai-shek's forces attacked Nanking, more whites were slaughtered. As the soldiers neared the family dwelling and death appeared imminent, a Chinese neighbor guided the Buck family to her home and hid them in a "half room" there. Eventually American and British warships arrived in the Yangtze River and began shelling the revolutionaries. Buck and her family were taken aboard the gunboats and again brought to Shanghai. On another occasion an angry crowd surrounded the family home and threatened to

EARL SYDENSTRICKER BUCK'S biography is

one of the most unusual and varied in the history of American letters. She was born on June 26,1892, in Hillsboro, West Virginia, while her missionary parents were on a brief furlough from their Chinese pastorate. Taken to China as an infant, she grew up with fundamental Oriental influences, since her parents preferred to live among the natives rather than isolate themselves in missionary compounds. At an early age she was more conversant in Chinese than in English. Her playmates were Chinese, and like the youthful Willa Gather amid the immigrant families of the Midwest, Buck was early attuned to the customs, household activities, and family life of her neighbors. She was a bright, inquisitive child and an excellent student. She grew up on the Bible, Plutarch's Lives, the traditional Chinese sagas, and, from about the age of seven, the stories of Charles Dickens. She remarked that she read all of Dickens' novels over and over for at least ten years. Dickens conveyed a "great zest for life" and intensified an interest in people in all their variety. Late in her teens Buck developed a keen interest in the works of Theodore Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis. She delighted in their detailed factual presentations and savored their portrayal of character. From her earliest years she not only enjoyed hearing stories but also wished to tell them.

773

114 I AMERICAN WRITERS kill her and her sister and mother (the father at this time was away on a missionary journey), since the people blamed the Christians for a drought. Only her mother's persuasiveness and calm friendliness preserved the family from harm. Such a continuing climate of peril would inevitably sharpen a sensitive and perceptive mind, as well as emphasize a sense of dramatic conflict. At seventeen Buck was sent to the United States to attend Randolph-Macon Woman's College. Not only did she excel in her studies, but she also wrote numerous stories and poems, and even collaborated on a school play. She became president of her class and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. In her senior year she won two literary prizes. After receiving her degree in 1914, she stayed at the college as a teaching assistant until recalled to China by the serious illness of her mother, whom she nursed back to health. In 1917 she married John Lossing Buck, an American agricultural specialist employed by the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions. She and her husband settled in northern China, and Buck became closely involved in her husband's work and familiar with the farmers' lives and customs. Again she became intimately acquainted with native ways, and her command of the Chinese language attracted the people. In 1921 the Bucks moved to Nanking, where John Lossing Buck secured a post at the university. She also taught classes there, in English literature, and gave literature courses at two other Chinese universities. The students were in ferment because more modern customs and less traditional attitudes were challenging previously accepted standards of behavior and political thinking. These problems gave Buck the opportunity to comment in print, and as early as 1923 her articles began to appear in numerous periodicals, including the Atlantic Monthly, Trans-Pacific, Living Age, and the Nation. Her university lecturing, writing, and house-

hold activities were burdened by the realization that her first child, Carol, was mentally retarded. She took the child to America for treatment in 1925, and her husband was given a year's leave of absence. While in the United States she decided to join him in advanced study, and therefore enrolled at Cornell to pursue an M.A. in English. She acquired the degree in 1926 and wrote an additional essay that was awarded the Laura Messenger Prize in history, the largest financial prize offered by the university. She had deliberately sought this lucrative award. Upon returning to China that same year, Buck continued her writing and published essays as well as short stories. In 1930 her first book, East Wind: West Wind—which, although considered a novel, really consists of two long short stories—appeared. This volume, immediately popular with the reading public, focuses on a young Chinese married couple who are caught in the conflict between traditional customs and the new, fashionable Western beliefs. The husband, a physician who has spent many years abroad, wants his wife to be on an equal level, but she has been reared and trained in the ancient manner and wishes to be no more than a total slave. She is particularly distressed when her husband insists that she unbind her feet. She has followed one of the oldest and more frequently practiced Chinese customs, designed to develop tiny and pretty feet. Her husband knows that this binding has done considerable physical damage to her feet. Kwei-lan, the wife, is placed in a quandary. To her, bound feet have always been an essential mark of beauty, and she has undergone much pain and inconvenience while growing up, enduring the soaking of her feet in warm water and the tight bandaging. When Kwei-lan tells her mother of the problem, the mother finds her son-in-law's attitude difficult to understand. Although she is thoroughly rooted in the

PEARL S. BUCK / 115 old ways and disapproves of change, the mother recommends that Kwei-lan please her husband. The conflict is resolved in this way. Husband and wife become more intimate, and Kwei-lan adopts up-to-the-moment Western ways. The contrast between the old and the new is strikingly delineated. In the second story Kwei-lan's brother, studying in the United States, marries an American girl against his family's wishes, since, according to ancient custom, he has been betrothed by his family to a Chinese girl since childhood. When he brings his wife to China, his parents refuse to acknowledge her status. When, in time, the wife becomes pregnant, the mother-in-law grows even more despondent and dies. Unless one of his parents recognizes the marriage, the son will be unable to obtain his inheritance. When his father insists that the marriage agreement contracted in childhood be observed, Kwei-lan's brother totally rejects his family and has his name officially stricken from the ancestral records. The baby that arrives, though, becomes a bond between East and West; and although much tragedy has been involved in the child's conception, the infant will bring about a knowledge and unity of two different worlds, so that, in time, harmony and understanding may develop out of the present antagonism. East Wind: West Wind possesses some of the defects of many first works of fiction. It is verbose, uneven, dotted with "purple passages," and rather loosely organized. Yet the characterizations are exceedingly well drawn and convincing. The parents' attitude and veneration of traditional customs and patterns of behavior give many insights into the China of the past. Kwei-lan's amazement at her husband's suggestions and her attempts to adjust to the new modes of Western life are persuasive and arouse considerable sympathy for her plight. The inflexible views of Kwei-lan's brother ring true, and his stubbornness, contrasted with that of

his parents, never appears farfetched or exaggerated. This note adds much verisimilitude to the situation and intensifies the dramatic tension. Furthermore, East Wind: West Wind exemplifies two qualities that became hallmarks of Buck's writing. This novel features a strong narrative drive; it is compelling and agreeable to read. It impels the reader forward and keeps one turning the pages in fascination and suspense. Second, there is an authentic flavor of time and place. We are on the scene, and reality cannot be doubted. The locale, customs, and attitudes of the characters are perceived from a firsthand viewpoint, and this quality furnishes decidedly effective verisimilitude. Some critics have argued that the locale itself is responsible for the story's appeal, that the aura of "faraway places" carries an inherent interest. To some degree this may be true; but no matter how exotic or picturesque setting, atmosphere, and characters are, they still must be presented with a tone and ring recognizably valid, and Buck is obviously tuned to the correct notes. She achieves total mastery over the Chinese material she treats; and although East Wind: West Wind contains defects, its author has discovered her metier. In 1931, The Good Earth appeared, one of the most successful books in publishing history. There persists the misconception that this was a novel without an apprenticeship, yet this notion is patently untrue. Besides her youthful appearances in print, and later numerous short stories and articles, Buck had already written a biography of her mother that she had temporarily decided not to publish. She had also completed a novel, but the manuscript was destroyed when her home was looted during the Nationalist revolution of 1926-1927. Thus, including East Wind: West Wind, Buck had written three full-length books before the appearance of her most significant novel.

116 I AMERICAN The Good Earth demonstrates that its author had gained a thorough knowledge of Chinese peasant life. This authenticity furnished a universality to the novel that constitutes one of its most vibrant appeals. Carl Van Doren noted that the Chinese family analyzed by Buck seemed to be "as familiar as neighbors." The book incorporates eternal verities: birth, marriage, children, failures and successes, death, a new generation. The ambivalent tension that a wedding can generate, the occasional bouts with illness that all humans experience, the difficulties suffered from inconsiderate relatives, and the intense disappointment caused when children, grown to maturity, turn against their parents' values and wishes are just a few of the universal episodes that ring so true despite the distant setting. Just as the problems and events create a compelling verisimilitude, so too does Buck's command of the locale. It is evident that she knows her setting thoroughly. When the book achieved instant popularity, some chauvinistic Chinese critics, finding the portrayal of their country and its people unflattering, immediately attacked the novel as inaccurate. One critic claimed that no woman in China ever had premarital intercourse; another insisted that Chinese robber gangs no longer existed, and even faulted the way making tea was described. In rebuttal Buck, as well as Lin Yutang and others, was able to refute such extreme viewpoints. As she remarked in an article in the Yale Review, many Chinese intellectuals living in foreign countries feel that they have a mission to protect China. Consequently they propagate the notion that Chinese life centers on spirituality, intellectualism, and the philosophical aspects of Confucianism. In such a romantic, idealistic portrayal the life of the common Chinese farmer is distorted or simply ignored. The New York Times felt obliged to editorialize on this debate, defending The Good Earth and

WRITERS

expressing appreciation for the portrayal: "Mrs. Buck has enabled us to witness and appreciate the patience, frugality, industry and indomitable good humor of a suffering people, whose homes the governing intellectuals would hide from the sight of the world." Although Buck was easily able to refute every charge made against the novel's authenticity, the notion still lingers in certain circles that her portrayal of Chinese life was inaccurate; this notion even appeared in some of the obituary accounts of her career. This misconception must be laid to rest. A knowledge of Chinese history and studies of the Chinese peasant totally support her portrayals of Chinese life. Part of the appeal of The Good Earth is achieved by the characterization of Wang Lung and his wife, O-lan. Wang Lung is a personification of human nature in all its vagaries. In his early life he works with particular diligence, and his attitudes parallel the qualities of the soil he tends. He bears his burdens with a pragmatic stoicism and opportunistically snatches fortune's favor when it is briefly up for the taking. As he grows more prosperous and successful, the pitfalls of wealth enmesh him in indolence, promiscuity, and cruelly indifferent egoism, especially in areas where poverty and family concerns had prevented such irresponsibility and thoughtlessness. He is a paradigm of mankind's admirable aspects as well as its despicable tendencies, and as such brings forceful reader identification. O-lan is less complex. She knows and suffers the pain of existence, but her stoicism is much more complete than Wang Lung's. She requires only a husband and family to care for. She gives her family self-sacrificing devotion, and centers all her strength on day-to-day necessities. She endures repression, poverty, neglect, disloyalty, disappointment, and emotional injury, yet she remains undefeated. She is a Hemingway code hero, never exaggerating her plight and accept-

PEARLS. BUCK / 117 ing every blow of fate with amazing resignation. She receives her one triumph when one of her sons marries and she can confidently look forward to grandchildren. She joys in her role as breeder, as race propagator, as a link between past and future generations. The portraits of the two main characters animate the novel and, to paraphrase Dorothy Canfield Fisher's comment, they engage our sympathies as much as real people whom we daily encounter. But Wang Lung and O-lan so dominate the book that the other characters are diminished: they appear as types rather than as totally convincing people. This is one of the few blemishes of The Good Earth. The style of The Good Earth is one of its most appealing qualities. It derives from the mellifluous prose of the King James Version of the Bible intermingled with the technique of the traditional Chinese sagas. In many respects the two style sources are similar. The choice of words is clear, simple, and vivid, and features considerable use of parallelism and balanced sentence structure. The sentences, on the whole, tend to be lengthy as well as solemn and stately. There is an archaic flavoring derived from the choice of words, the repetition, and the natural musical flow of the parallelism. Purple passages and colorful biblical imagery have been omitted, and the style is expertly tuned to the subject matter—simple but forceful, moving but stoic, graceful but never excessive. Considerable controversy has centered on the question of whether The Good Earth is a naturalistic novel. Oscar Cargill has argued the similarity of Pearl Buck's viewpoint to that of Emile Zola, and she has acknowledged that she read and admired Zola's writings. She has confused the issue further by often using the term "naturalism" to describe her early work. It is clear, though, that by "naturalism" she means "realism"—a close, detailed look at life as it really is, rather than a slanted view deliberately

emphasizing the seamier aspects of existence for a sociopolitical purpose. Although naturalism and The Good Earth emphasize a documentary, objective approach to the presentation of material, and focus on people of the lowest economic levels, there is a marked difference between the novels of Zola and Buck: she stresses the importance of free will. Her characters are not overwhelmed in a deterministic world, totally oppressed by the forces of heredity and environment. They realize that through the exercise of choices, through hard work and human initiative, difficulties and problems can be overcome and despair subdued. While it is not in any manner a pronounced message, in the sense of being an obvious preachment, The Good Earth possesses an affirmative belief in human nature and in the ability of men and women to rise as high as their ambitions and willingness to strive will carry them. The "message" must be inferred; but industry, common-sense behavior, and a closeness to the soil are extolled, while luxury and idleness are seen as corrupting and destructive. After the success of The Good Earth, Buck decided to proceed with a sequel describing the fortunes of Wang Lung's family. She hoped to keep readers absorbed by involvement in a roman-fleuve as well as by presenting other phases of Chinese life. In Sons (1932) the three offspring of Wang Lung are a pleasure-loving, decadent landlord, a shady merchant, and a former military officer turned warlord. The major focus is on the third son, called Wang the Tiger. He becomes a powerful brigand and land baron who exerts control over a large section of a province. Although the warlord was a prominent feature of Chinese life—at least until the Communists came to full control—and many of these brigands were colorful and larger-thanlife characters, Wang the Tiger does not have the personality to capture the imagination. His

118 I AMERICAN WRITERS all-consuming passion is his son Yuan. He expects that Yuan will follow in his footsteps and ultimately become an even more puissant leader. But the boy is uninterested in a military life, and his father's disappointment does not arouse sympathy because the Tiger's character is remote and has small appeal. The same combination of Chinese saga and biblical narrative is used, and in parts of the novel it is handled very competently. Nevertheless, the style cannot really give adequate color when the main character is colorless and so much of the material seems lifeless and unduly distant. Then, too, the universality, so crucial a part of The Good Earth, is missing. Although Buck undoubtedly knew real-life counterparts of Wang Lung and O-lan, she was unfamiliar with warlords (except for reading about them). This distancing seriously mars the book. The saga of Wang Lung's family was carried forward in A House Divided, the last segment of what came to be called the House of Earth trilogy. In this novel Yuan quarrels with his father and attempts to find direction for his life. For a short time he returns to his grandfather's original farm, but he cannot adjust to that environment. He then goes to live in Shanghai and mingles with the wealthy, fashionable people introduced to him by his elder uncle and other well-to-do relatives. Eventually he travels to America, where he acquires a doctoral degree. But in none of these places is he really at home. He returns to China and encounters new government reforms and revolutionary activities. But he has neither certitude nor real roots. He is too far from his grandfather's farming background to be content on the land, and he is too questioning of modernistic thinking to be at ease in a China that, in the late 1920's, is in turmoil, torn between the old customs and radical, modernistic notions. A House Divided suffers badly from a lack of unity. The novel moves from the farm to the

city, and from China to the United States and back to China. There is almost no cohesiveness as the book constantly scatters its impact. Here begins a defect that was to grow in Buck's fiction and that would damage many of her post1930's novels: an obsession with overplotting. In her devotion to the traditional Chinese saga, she talks of the "storyteller in a village tent," who by his stories "entices people into his tent." She comes to believe that "Nothing must delay the story. Story was what [was] wanted." As a consequence the story is allowed to run rampant without characterization fully drawn or a scene totally probed. The plot becomes an all-consuming passion, and probability and a sense of verisimilitude—so ascendant in The Good Earth—start to decline. The reader is not allowed to penetrate deeply and logically enough into many of the important characters—Yuan, for instance. We are told a considerable amount about Yuan, but we are not really convinced that we know him or that he is appealing enough to want to know. Whereas Wang Lung and O-lan were absorbing and intriguing individuals, Wang the Tiger and Yuan seem more like puppets who are being manipulated, with the strings of the puppeteer all too obviously on view. Before the third volume of the House of Earth trilogy was published, one of Buck's most memorable novels, The Mother (1934), appeared. The protagonist is a young farm wife who, in addition to her household and family chores, works in the fields. After her erratic and indolent husband deserts her, she continues all her previous chores and has to work even harder. One of her children is almost totally blind, and this increases her burdens. This child later dies, and the sorrow of the mother intensifies. Still later, her favorite son becomes involved in political activities and is executed. The mother's suffering is deeply experienced and the reader's empathy engaged. When her

PEARLS. BUCK I 119 first grandchild arrives, the mother's view of life is resuscitated. A joy of hope and purposefulness assuages all her previous heartbreak. In attempting to draw a portrait of the eternal, universal mother, a saga mingling joy and sorrow, birth and death, despair and hope, Buck has written a book with many effective scenes and many poignantly realized emotions; yet the novel is only partially successful. Its weakness rests in the fact that the mother is not sufficiently individualized. She is, and is intended to be, a type, but the difficulty is that the type dwarfs a necessary individuality. One needs to believe in her as a flesh-and-blood character in her own right, not just as a representative mater dolorosa. The typecasting detracts from those qualities needed to render her larger than life. The year 1936 was distinguished by the publication of two of Buck's finest books: The Exile, a biography of her mother, and Fighting Angel, a biography of her father. Caroline Stulting Sydenstricker, Buck's mother, was an effervescent extrovert. She was exceedingly pleasant, outgoing, and lively, but possessed a sensual strain that warred with religious tendencies. The deeply serious and spiritual Absalom Sydenstricker had settled on a missionary calling early in life but was required to work on his father's farm until he was twenty-one. When further schooling was completed, he became a Presbyterian minister; and after he married Caroline Stulting, they set out for China as missionaries. The pair found they were ill-suited. Caroline wanted to share more fully in her husband's work, while he really wanted a housewife. He was almost indifferent to anything not totally directed toward his missionary calling. He was too rigid and too ascetic for a wife who took a more balanced, more allembracing view of life. Caroline and Absalom endured much hardship and danger in China. On several occasions they barely escaped death. Both of them gave

up many things and sacrificed greatly for their missionary cause, and each in his or her own way—opposite as they were in so many things—lived a heroic life in a period that their daughter recorded in every possible familial, social, political, and historical detail. The portraits of Buck's parents emerge clearly and fully. Absalom, in particular, is shown in all of his lonely mysticism and otherworldliness. He really did not know his family and was never close to anyone, since only God dominated his thoughts. Because Buck felt her father's remoteness and aloofness, her picture of him is frequently caustic and usually thoughtful. She clearly sees his deficiencies, yet she realizes he was very honorable and totally dedicated. Fighting Angel is therefore the stronger book because it is free from sentimentality. The picture of Buck's mother, while equally honest and perceptive, frequently becomes maudlin because the author was very close to her warm, spirited mother and could not help but be emotionally tied to her. Both books, taken as a whole, are remarkable historical recordings of a way of life. When Buck was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1938, the citation of the Nobel committee read: "For rich and generous epic description of Chinese peasant life and masterpieces of biography." It is unfortunate that these biographies are now so seldom read, because the description is reasonably accurate. Buck settled permanently in the United States in 1934. Her marriage had collapsed, and in the following year she married publisher Richard J. Walsh. She now began to write on American topics as well as continuing to use Chinese subject matter. This Proud Heart (1938) was Buck's first notable novel using an American setting. Susan Gaylord, the protagonist, is admittedly based on the author. Susan is exceedingly energetic and very intelligent. Although happily married, she

120 I AMERICAN is restless and seeks further experiences and fulfillment. She has a special gift for sculpting but refuses to leave her husband and children to pursue the additional study and training needed to perfect her art. Her husband's death gives her the opportunity to travel to France for further study. She falls in love with an avant-garde artist and remarries, but in time realizes that his selfishness and jealousy prevent her from achieving artistic fulfillment. She separates from him and determines single-mindedly to develop her talent for sculpting. The theme of the woman genius has received relatively little treatment in literature, so This Proud Heart focuses on a particularly captivating topic. The autobiographical aspects add further appeal. Buck was aware that she possessed enormous energy and a- very fine mind. Although she came into contact with many intellectual men, and Richard Walsh, her second husband, was very bright and talented, she could say late in her life that the Harvard philosopher Ernest Hocking was the only man she ever met who had a better mind than she. The more thoroughly familiar one becomes with Buck, the more one realizes that this remark is doubtless true. Her mind was acute and always intent on intellectual matters, and every conceivable subject was of interest to her. She constantly researched topics that aroused her interest. Yet at the same time she had a strong romantic strain. She wanted to be loved, to know all the joys of marriage and family, and yet to be treated as an absolute equal. This conflict appears more commonplace in recent years because of the women's liberation movement. Nevertheless, for women like Buck the difficulty moves to a higher level because genius is involved. A woman like her who can create, who has an extraordinary talent, must reconcile this gift with wifehood and motherhood, because in Buck's nature both were strong drives. Although the genius of Susan Gaylord is ac-

WRITERS

knowledged by everyone in the novel, her aptitude is never fully explained. It is simply there. It appears to be an innate combination of intelligence, energy, and talent. Perhaps this is as far as one can reach in explaining genius, but the feeling persists that the reader should be brought more into Susan's mind. She is externalized too much; hence we do not come to know and understand as much as if a more introspective or stream-of-consciousness technique had been employed. The novel is fascinating thematically, but its impact is considerably reduced by deficiencies in style. Buck is writing a serious novel, for the first time in a new idiom. She leaves behind the mixture of Chinese saga and biblical language that marked her earlier fiction, and attempts an American style that is dominated by cliches and a limited vocabulary. All the freshness and beauty evident in the books on Chinese topics are lost in prose that is incredibly flat and pedestrian. It is evident that Buck had, in a sense, to learn an American idiom. This Proud Heart should have been ruthlessly edited for stylistic awkwardness and infelicities, but the success of her earlier books obviously precluded this much-needed task. Considerable insight may be gained into Buck's philosophy of writing if her major pronouncements on fiction are chronicled. Her first statements appeared in two talks given in Peking, early in 1932. She analyzed the traditional Chinese saga, which she used as the basis for much of her work, and noted that the authors presented the omniscient point of view and stressed external statements of characterization. Internal states of mind were either ignored or treated rather casually. There was no deep probing. Because she adopted this approach, Buck's novels—especially the post1930's stories—are frequently unconvincing in characterization. We are often told that a character "feels" this or that, but this externalizing

PEARL S. BUCK / 121 prevents a penetrating analysis of state of mind. Without detailed observation of their minds in action, the characters often seem capricious and flimsily motivated, acting only as cardboard cutouts subject to their creator's fancy and manipulations. Buck also stressed the considerable burden put on the story. The Chinese saga writer wished, above all, to keep his audience interested. Action was paramount, and therefore the writer had to keep adding new episodes, striving for constant suspense. Although Buck claimed that she was more interested in characterization than in story, in reality the story often seizes the predominant role and Buck is caught in the trap of plotting, more plotting, and overplotting. She realizes she must keep narrative interest, and she frequently achieves this by writing a novel of almost pure storytelling without equally rewarding insights into character. In a later address, "On the Writing of Novels" (1933), Buck insisted that no single form of relating a story was superior to another. She did not believe that the form is more significant than the plot. She indicated that form tends to be a preoccupation of literary critics, and it is evident that she did not possess a high regard for modern schools of criticism or for professional pronouncements on novel writing such as those of E. M. Forster and Percy Lubbock. In a highly significant passage Buck remarked that didacticism is not looked upon with favor by literary pundits and that she can see the logic and value in this viewpoint. Nevertheless, she was obviously attracted to the didactic aspect of fiction, although in theory she acknowledged that an artistic genius cannot be a moralizer because the material would then be altered or slanted to fit the message and reality would be distorted. She pointed out that in the traditional Chinese sagas "little moral precepts are inserted almost anywhere." A notable con-

flict in Buck's career is here revealed in embryo. She certainly was keenly aware of the pitfalls of turning novels into preachments, yet she was unable, especially in her post-1930's work, to resist the appeal of propagandizing for various causes and attitudes. Perhaps there was a strong subconscious need to "preach" inherited from her missionary father. Although she was not religious in the sense of adhering to an organized church, she certainly felt a mission to convince her readers of worthwhile and humane beliefs. She wanted to eliminate racial prejudice, poverty, oppression, war, and other miseries that prevent people the world over from achieving a sensible mode of behavior in which love, kindness, generosity, common sense, and peace predominate. When she received the Nobel Prize (1938), Buck gave her address on the development of the Chinese novel and observed that she wanted to write for the many, not the few. She did not intend to write for scholars or literary critics. If the ordinary readers were interested mainly in popular magazines, then she would tailor her stories for those magazines. According to The Exile's Daughter (1944), the biography written by her sister, Cornelia Spencer, Buck insisted that . . . story belongs to the people. They are sounder judges of it than anyone else, for their senses are unspoiled and their emotions are free. No, a novelist must not think of pure literature as his goal. He must not even know this field too well, because people, who are his material, are not there He must be satisfied if the common people hear him gladly. As her career progressed, Buck's attempt to reach the largest possible audience intensified. She not only made her novels much more didactic, thereby hoping to inculcate sensible moral values and civilized behavior, but also began to write almost unceasingly for large-cir-

722 / AMERICAN culation magazines, furnishing both stories and articles on numerous contemporary issues. One of her most revealing statements was made in an address before the National Education Association: "One cannot dismiss lightly a magazine bought and read by three million people. ... It is a serious thing for literature if three million people read—not literature, but something which gives them greater satisfaction." Spencer elaborated on this attitude: Underlying her interests and her writing and her other active life there was and there is one unchanging unity All she does must work toward mutual understanding between the common peoples of the earth and toward justice for all.... More and more, then, in keeping with her purpose she wrote where she would be read, not only by the student and lover of books but by the workman and the clerk and the stenographer. With deliberate intent she wrote that everyone might read because she wants to write for people. It is evident that Buck could not resist the lure of reaching the widest audience possible and of preaching to her readers. This attitude may explain, in part, her prolific writing. Although she possessed boundless energy, much of her furor scribendi may be explained by her desire to preach her messages in both fictional and nonfictional form. She seemed to believe that she could not lose her audience if she kept up an unceasing flow of material. Producing books and articles at an incredible rate kept her in the limelight, where she could hold the attention of countless readers and constantly enlighten them. Theodore Harris' "official" biography claims several times that Buck's goal was "to entertain." This infinitive needs a partner—"to entertain and to enlighten" is a more precise description of her goal. The missionary spark so strong in her parents did not die with them—in her own special manner Buck carried on their

WRITERS

humanitarian aims independent of sectarian considerations. Such a philosophy of entertaining, of preaching, of reaching the greatest number of people meant that Buck's aesthetic view of the novel was narrowly prescribed. Her credo was the very opposite of art for art's sake, and it cut her off from the highest possible artistic goals. Perceptive symbolism, finer points of style, and inventive approaches such as the stream-of-consciousness technique are just a few of the most challenging and broadening developments in the novel precluded by such a limited view of fiction. In her address on the occasion of receiving the Nobel Prize, Buck observed that she had been instructed by the Chinese never to regard the novel as an art form. When she was young, she was taught and much influenced by a Mr. Kung, who was a follower of Confucius. Confucian philosophy denigrated the novel as frivolous and unintellectual. The Chinese saga was, therefore, always related to the common people, and an effective novelist was required to be natural and ordinary in both language and character portrayal. The Chinese novel was supposed to be a representation of life without any of the artifice of pure literature. Also, Buck's family regarded novels as secondary, frivolous, and irreligious. Thus, parental upbringing and Chinese tutoring combined to plant in her mind a jaundiced view of "fiction." Perhaps realizing, after writing This Proud Heart, that she was not yet prepared to deal effectively with contemporary styles, Buck turned her attention back to the Orient and produced The Patriot (1939), one of her best books. This novel is a historically accurate portrayal of the late 1920's and 1930's. I-wan, the chief character, is, like so many other young Chinese, filled with enthusiasm for Chiang Kai-shek's new revolutionary movement; but it is soon apparent that Chiang will compromise his ideals

PEARL S. BUCK / 123 and that few efforts will be made to bring about greater freedom and social and economic improvement. Many youthful enthusiasts are eventually hunted down as dangers to the state. I-wan flees to Japan, to escape persecution as a Communist. He marries a Japanese girl and observes Japanese military activity against Manchuria and China. The general view of the Japanese character of that period in history is sharply delineated. Japanese devotion to duty and to country are underscored, while the Japanese militarism and emperor worship that carried the country into World War II are viewed in all their ramifications. I-wan perceives the seeming contradictions in the Japanese character—a tenderness, yet a refusal to shrink from all the emotional appeals and the utter horrors of war. The Patriot is a well-conceived portrait of two countries caught at a crucial moment in history. Buck also demonstrates that she is an astute observer of Japan. While some events in the story appear improbable, the historical accuracy of the novel gives it a basic validity. In her next work of fiction, Other Gods: An American Legend (1940), Buck takes up an American topic and attempts to avoid the stylistic pitfall of This Proud Heart by setting much of the action in the Orient. The protagonist, Bert Holm, captures considerable attention and newspaper headlines by climbing to the top of a mountain in the Himalayas. He projects an image of rugged handsomeness and fearless courage. In reality he is a rather childish, naive, and totally nonthinking individual. He has been raised to the status of a hero, yet does not have concomitant qualities that would make him sensible and balanced. His ascent of a second mountain results in the death of his climbing partner, a death caused by Holm's selfishness and childlike, reckless behavior. Holm later thinks that he might enjoy visiting Hitler and Mussolini, since, like him, although on a much

greater scale, they are idolized by crowds and assume herolike proportions. In an interview at this time, Buck linked Holm with Charles Lindbergh, Douglas "WrongWay" Corrigan, and some of the "prima donnas" of the New Deal. The novel's themes are significant. The facts that all heroes have feet of clay and that frequently these defects are deliberately hidden from their adoring public (Bert Holm has a public relations agent to keep his image untainted) constitute a lesson that needs emphasis in every generation. Buck sees the hero in the United States as particularly vulnerable because the Americans' love of independence and democracy is so firmly implanted that they are distrustful of subordinating, in a sense, their beings to another person. If the hero does let the American public down, the tide of disillusionment and resentment is particularly overwhelming and remorseless. Bert Holm is kept from this fate by his wife and his public relations agent; but he, like others in his position, walks a very delicate line, and there are always iconoclasts lying in wait to topple the hero from his pedestal. One begins to notice another specific pattern in Buck's novels after House of Earth, a pattern that was to follow for most of her career: she invariably picks an interesting topic to write about. There will be some moral, intellectual, political, social, or historical problem analyzed—at times the topic will blend these various materials. She will rarely pick facile subject matter just to relate an adventure or tell a love story. She may be primarily trying to "entertain," but such "entertainment" is always built around some intellectual issue, some controversial, challenging, or thought-provoking material. Pursuing her late 1930's-early 1940's policy of veering back and forth between Chinese and American topics, Buck chose as her area of inquiry the Japanese invasion of China and the

124 I AMERICAN Chinese resistance against this atrocity. Dragon Seed (1942) had a wide audience and was made into a popular movie, doubtless because it had become timely with America's recent involvement in World War II. The novel vividly depicts the horrors of Japanese air raids, the effects of the underground resistance movement, and the forceful closing of ranks that an invasion usually entails. Yet Buck carries this material further, intruding an obvious propaganda note. The Japanese are depicted as behaving barbarously, and this constant denunciation is strongly pronounced. There can be no question where sympathy and point of view rest. Dragon Seed appears almost to have been written at the behest of the Chinese government, and it became immensely effective propaganda. Dragon Seed is also damaged by something Buck rarely does: she introduces a romance into the story merely for the sake of adding a love interest. The beauteous Mayli, who is presented almost as a kind of comic strip Wonder Woman, is matched by Lao San, a handsome, courageous fantasy version of the Ubermensch. This totally incredible romantic element clashes mightily with the realism of the primary material; and although the propagandistic note is not affected, the book's credibility and artistry are weakened. Encouraged by the favorable reception of Dragon Seed, Pearl Buck produced a sequel. The Promise (1943) focuses on Chinese efforts to assist their British allies in Burma. Chinese forces go to Burma but are not allowed to enter the military action for many weeks. By that time the Japanese have pushed the British into a chaotic retreat. As the British and Chinese prepare to retreat over the Irrawaddy River, the British prematurely blow up a bridge in order to thwart the Japanese advance. As a result of this precipitous British action, the Chinese troops are trapped without an opportunity to

WRITERS

escape. The British, though, manage to cross the river to safety before destroying the bridge. It is the thesis of The Promise that racial prejudice was the major factor causing the disastrous Chinese campaign in Burma. The British supposedly did not want the Burmese to see Chinese troops led by their own officers, and refused to accept the Chinese as equals. In light of subsequent historical studies, it appears that there is much validity to Buck's argument, although the "official" British view is that poor planning and various strategic errors were the main causes of the defeat. Although the novel is blatant propaganda designed to aid the Chinese efforts and to demonstrate the predicament of being caught between the Japanese on two fronts, the strength of its point of view has reinforced documentary accounts of this phase of World War II. Since propaganda is at the forefront, the characters become stock figures fulfilling their assigned roles in the thesis. Although The Promise can in no way be considered a successful novel, it is living history and its thesis remains long after all other aspects of the book are forgotten. Buck's prolific pen began to overwhelm her publishers. She was writing more books than could be profitably marketed at one time. If she had her way, she would be turning out two or three books a year. To solve this problem, her publishers suggested a pen name. John Sedges was born, and The Townsman, the first of five novels published under this pseudonym, appeared in 1945. Buck felt that she would have an opportunity to reach a new audience and that her American novels might be given more balanced critical treatment if her identity was concealed. She did not like the idea of being considered a writer whose success occurred only when she treated Chinese subject matter. She also felt, not without justification, that male authors were treated more fairly than female writers, and she

PEARL S. BUCK / 125 deliberately chose a "plain English" male pseudonym. The hero of The Townsman is a schoolteacher in the early American West. Much of the material was based on Richard Walsh's relatives (indeed, Buck admitted that Jonathan, the protagonist, is based on her husband's Uncle John). She even visited Kansas in order to research material at first hand. She studied local history, traveled extensively, and collected the reminiscences of many of the pioneers and their descendants. Since Richard Walsh had originally come from Kansas, he was able to furnish extensive help with her historical probing. As a result of considerable research, The Townsman furnishes a very well documented portrayal of the settlement and growth of the fictional town of Median, Kansas, from the earliest pioneering days in the nineteenth century. Jonathan Goodliffe, the protagonist, realizes, and cleverly uses, the appeal of a school to the early western immigrants. The land around the town is turned into a thriving farm area, and the community becomes a center of local business activity. The gradual settlement, growth, and stability of the community under the leadership of the Jonathans of the West is handled so well that Ernest Leisy commends the book in The American Historical Novel. For once the emphasis has been taken away from the outlaws and sheriffs and dance hall girls, and the real source of the ultimate strength and permanence of a settlement stands on view. Given the authenticity of the settings and background, it is distressing that the novel is weakened by several stereotyped characters. Only Jonathan emerges as persuasive. The book must also be faulted for a too obvious attempt at propagandizing for racial equality. A black family in the story is treated unfairly by whites; and while the preachment that results is morally valid, it is not under artistic control. Buck

is usually on the side of the angels, but such excessive moralizing is inappropriate. All too often in her post-1930's works she seems to believe that a writer can be an influential polemicist and an artist at the same time. In some of her earlier novels, most notably The Good Earth, she was much more detached from her material and presented it with controlled and firm distance that ensured fundamental objectivity. The remaining John Sedges novels—The Angry Wife (1947), The Long Love (1949), Bright Procession (1952), and Voices in the House (1953)—are undistinguished journeyman writings, worthy neither of contempt nor of particular praise. They preach civilized, honorable behavior, put a strong emphasis on romance, and are decidedly sentimental. Their characters are utter stereotypes, lacking fleshand-blood dimensions. The books read smoothly and quickly, then are immediately forgotten. Nevertheless, the Sedges series did begin with The Townsman, a better-than-average work that ranks high among American local-color studies. It will always be valuable for its comprehensive portrayal of aspects usually ignored or overlooked in discussions, books, and movies about the early West. In the midst of the John Sedges books, Buck did not ignore Chinese topics. The appearance of Pavilion of Women (1946) caused best-seller lists again to flash the message of Buck's popularity. Madame Wu, the leading character, and Brother Andre, the totally unselfish, dedicated scholar, combine to create what is probably Buck's strongest statement of benevolence and humanitarianism within the pages of a novel. In several respects Madame Wu is a fictional counterpart of her originator. Brilliant, energetic, and a capable manager, she is converted to kindliness, generosity, and a loving awareness through Andre's philosophy and example. The book insists that biblical values

126 / AMERICAN (love of neighbor, charity, patience, and beneficence) can solve any problem. It reflects not only Buck's personal statement but also a basic emphasis on values and a search for stability that constituted much of immediate postWorld War II fiction, drama, and home-fromthe-war films. It should be stressed that this humanitarianism exists apart from standard religious orthodoxy, since Madame Wu in effect becomes the good pagan of ancient classicism and Andre is a defrocked priest who has been ostracized because of heretical beliefs. A new aspect of Buck's thinking is introduced when the death of Brother Andre intensifies Madame Wu's spirituality. She comes to believe that Andre's spirit is hovering about and actually guiding her in daily activities. She embraces a belief in life after death because Andre's divinity watches over and directs the course of her life from beyond the grave. Buck's talent as a storyteller and her ability to focus on interesting subject matter enabled her to follow Pavilion of Women with Kinfolk (1949), another best-selling novel. This book underscores a telling and significant point. For hundreds of years many Chinese intellectuals, as well as the upper classes, either ignored the farmers or oppressed them. Snobbishly destructive and scornful attitudes replaced humane, altruistic, and logical concerns. Landlords, political figures, and government bureaucrats were guilty of this oppression, and the seeds for communism were sown. The gradual rise of Mao Tse-tung came to completion in 1949, when his government took full control. This novel furnishes valuable insights into the reasons behind his ascent to power. The young American-reared physician James Liang works with the impoverished Chinese farmers. He not only aids them medically, but he and his sister help them economically and educationally. James's marriage to a young

WRITERS

peasant girl helps to promote the farmers' cooperation. The thesis, although overly logical, is thought-provoking: only through a union of the intellectuals and the peasants will China remedy its deficiencies and take a giant step forward in progress and stability. From her earliest period of writing to the end of her life, Buck constantly wrote short stories. Indeed, several of her briefer unpublished narratives are being issued posthumously. Buck brought to her shorter fiction the traditional Chinese narrative techniques used in the novels. The omniscient point of view is employed, and characters are revealed mainly by dialogue. Buck does not probe deeply into internal states of mind. There are no penetrating analyses involving poetic emanations or perceptive subtleties of memory. The stories are related directly, in a utilitarian prose that is neither pedestrian nor elevating; the style is pleasantly readable and smooth—really unnoticeable, since the author's and reader's concentration rests on the story being told. Narrative drive is the major concern, and plot interest and energy are effectively maintained. While the shorter narratives are eminently readable, the majority are generally forgettable. They are mostly glossy magazine fiction with a persistent emphasis on romance. Buck was not above frequent sentimentality and a Pollyanna's view of most situations. In reviewing Fourteen Stories (1961), Richard Sullivan remarked: They have craft, compassion, and admirable goodwill. They are never careless; they deal with meaningful matter; they are seriously intended, generous and hopeful.... [but] Everything always gets nicely, neatly, tidily resolved in these pages [The] stories present human experience ... as engaging matters to be worked out with just a bit of sound humanitarian ... good sense, and with most excellent

PEARL S. BUCK / 127 good intentions. Good stories seldom solve problems; they simply pose them in bright words. Pearl Buck's best short fiction pieces are on Chinese subjects. In "The First Wife" (19311932) a young Chinese goes abroad to study. After being away from his homeland for several years, he returns and finds himself opposed to the old ways. He is hired as a government official and moves in intellectual and sophisticated circles. Although his wife is devoted and ready to aid him in every way, he rejects her because she is too old-fashioned and uneducated to fit in with his new friends and his progressive way of life. He divorces his wife, who is shattered by his unwarranted cruelty and indifference. She finally commits suicide. The old China and the new China are thus bitingly juxtaposed, with tragic results. The contrast is effectively presented and thoroughly persuasive. Although the suffering and bewilderment of the young wife are accentuated, Buck manages to hold back undue emotionalism and the maudlin sentimentality that could easily have occurred. Similar material is treated with equal skill in "The Rainy Day" (1925). A young Chinese student has been educated at an American university, where he has produced an outstanding dissertation and has been regarded as one of the most brilliant scholars ever produced by that school. When he returns to China, to help his country keep pace with new discoveries and developments, he is faced with a perplexing problem. His family wishes him to marry the girl to whom he was betrothed as a child. He is also expected to support several of his relatives. Again the clash between the traditional ways and the more intellectual, sophisticated goals of the new China resounds forcefully. He does not desire a high-salaried position in a field he has no interest in; yet, unlike his counterpart in "The First Wife," he is too honorable, too sensitive, and too conscious of ancestral require-

ments to reject the old ways. He seeks refuge in opium. This time the old dominates the new, with disastrous results. The China scene is again handled especially well in "The Angel" (1937), in which the focus is on Miss Barry, a lonely American missionary. Although she has come to a foreign country to spread the message of brotherly love emphasized in the Gospels, she finds herself constantly incensed against Chinese workers and servants who cannot perform any task to her satisfaction. She discovers that in general she cannot relate to the Chinese; this situation intensifies her isolation and alienation, and brings further conflicts with her vocation. Finally she becomes totally irrational and commits suicide in an especially violent way. Although the bare outline of the story may not convey the force and sharpness of the conflict, this is a powerfully realistic saga, totally credible and expertly free of sentimentality or false notes. "The Angel" demonstrates that Buck could compose a commanding narrative when she chose, and it is one of a handful of her stories that can be reread with satisfaction. "Enough for a Lifetime" (1935) also focuses on the missionary spinster in China. Amy Willey, although dedicated to a spiritual calling, has found little joy and love in her life. Her superior is particularly harsh and demanding, and her associates in the mission compound succeed only in making the atmosphere more oppressive and gloomy. Eventually she is given the opportunity to play the part of Elizabeth Barrett Browning in an amateur production of The Barretts of Wimpole Street. She involves herself completely in the dramatization and imagines that she and her handsome leading man are in love. Although she receives a setback upon discovering that her dramatic partner is romantically attached to someone else, she soon adjusts, being overwhelmed by a realization of what love is and means. The Elizabeth Barrett-Rob-

128 I AMERICAN ert Browning relationship has given her a new outlook and purpose. She can now imbue her life and career with new dedication and live with inner strength and conviction. Again the realism without frills—an approach used so well in The Good Earth—works effectively to render this short story memorable. It should be noted that this is one of Buck's earlier short stories. As her career progressed, her writing became more romantic and the taut realism diminished. The later stories are dominated by a cloying optimism and excessive romanticism. For example, in "The Lovers" (published posthumously in 1977) a young couple decide to marry. Their romance and joie de vivre bring the girl's estranged parents back together. In "Miranda" (also published posthumously in 1977) a male and a female physician fall satisfactorily and all too predictably in love. In "John, John Chinaman" the prejudice a young Chinese American faces is diluted when he is chosen as the first recruit in the World War II draft lottery held in his midwestern home town. These later stories indicate how far Buck had strayed from the searing, sharp realism of "The Rainy Day" (1925) and "The Angel" (1937). When not writing novels and short stories, Buck was publishing magazine articles and works of nonfiction, studies of racial prejudice, discussions about Soviet communism and Nazi Germany, and books for children. During World War II she was intensely involved in promoting the Allied cause. She gave talks, produced radio scripts, and wrote numerous articles and pamphlets. In 1941 she founded the East and West Association, a group designed to bring about closer harmony and understanding between the Orient and the West. Throughout the war she denounced fascistic and totalitarian philosophies, while remaining equally critical of racial prejudice and imperialism. She was responsible for keeping China, the almost forgot-

WRITERS

ten ally of America in World War II, in the public eye, and also managed to bring about the delivery of much-needed food and military supplies to that country. Later, when she learned that many children had been fathered by American servicemen abroad and that these youngsters were destitute and ill-treated, Buck founded Welcome House, an adoption agency for such children. She and her second husband, Richard Walsh, took the first two unwanted children into their home. Ultimately, Buck established the Pearl S. Buck Foundation, which set up centers in several foreign countries to assist the half-American children fathered in those nations. She was also involved in the Training School in Vineland, New Jersey, which worked to improve the lot of mentally retarded children. She publicized the need for the independence of India from Great Britain and objected to the treatment of those Japanese Americans who were taken from their homes and farms and interned in distant camps. Buck spoke out on virtually every question involving freedom and human rights. She was active in the American Civil Liberties Union and was especially incensed over the censorship of books. After World War II she also cautioned against what she perceived to be the undue influence of the military in American life. She felt that America might surrender its precious freedoms; and although she did not fear a military dictatorship, she believed that citizens could become so indoctrinated by the military mind that peace and general freedom of thought might be jeopardized. These activities were carried on while Buck maintained a full writing schedule, usually four hours a day, five days a week, producing both novels and volumes of nonfiction. Her humanitarian endeavors explain part of Buck's popularity with the general reading public. Her audience knew that she was involved in bringing about a better world; and though these efforts

PEARL S. BUCK / 129 hampered her artistry, they placed her in an unusual category. Of all the writers in the history of American literature, Buck was perhaps the most altruistic—not a mere speaker of the word, but a writer devoted to practical action. Buck's restless and inquiring mind was always fascinated by contemporary events. She became especially interested in questions involving atomic power. Again a novel resulted from her studies; Command the Morning (1959) was the product of visits to Los Alamos, New Mexico, and to almost every other atomic study or test area in the United States. The main focus of this book is the Manhattan Project, from its conception to the first explosion at the New Mexico test site. At this point the novel wrestles with the question of actually using the bomb against the Japanese. Before the defeat of the Germans, the development of the bomb was thought to be a race against the German technical skill that might enable the Nazis to acquire and use the bomb first. Once Germany was defeated, it became obvious that Japan did not have this ability. Many of the experts supported a naval blockade of Japan and the use of conventional weapons; others believed that the lives of many American soldiers would be saved if the bomb were employed. Although arguments were amassed on both sides of the issue, the decision to use the bomb was made. It is immediately evident how Buck feels about this event. Despite seeming attempts at objectivity, she vehemently opposes the dropping of the bomb. She marshals every conceivable argument, including the racial issue. She suggests that the atomic bomb would not have been used against Germany because of a concern for the white race, whereas using it on Orientals would not cause a second thought. Although most of the characters in Command the Morning are stereotypes, the book is a rewarding experience because it was so thoroughly researched. The history of atomic re-

search leading to the dropping of the bomb is presented in considerable detail. The exposition of atomic developments is so lucid that the novel becomes an illuminating textbook as well as a captivating story. Although Buck continued to write almost a novel a year until her death, only three of these narratives—The Living Reed, The Time Is Noon, and The Goddess Abides—warrant detailed consideration. The Living Reed (1963) is prefaced by a nine-page discussion of the history of Korea. Buck points out that for centuries Russia, China, and Japan had been interested in controlling Korea, which has fertile land and attractive seaports. At one time Russia and Japan had concluded a secret accord in which they agreed to divide Korea at the thirty-eighth parallel. Buck's preface summarizes the most significant aspects of Korean history until shortly before 1883, when a treaty was signed between Korea and the United States. This preface serves as a useful introduction to a book that is not just a novel of Korea but a textbook chronicle. The first section of this three-part study uses an obvious narrative device. Il-han, the protagonist, receives permission from Queen Min to tour Korea in order to investigate the people's resolve in what promises to be a struggle against Japanese encroachment. Although transparent, the technique neatly accomplishes its purpose, since the reader is taken on an instructive tour of Korea, visiting the mountain settlements, the farms, and the coastal regions. This segment presents a valid cross section of the population, establishes an authentic feeling for time and place, and effectively describes social customs and traditions. In the second part Buck emphasizes the brutality of Japanese rule after their conquest in 1905. (Although the United States had signed a treaty in 1883 guaranteeing the independence of Korea, America did not intervene, mainly, it

130 I AMERICAN WRITERS is argued, because of political ineptitude.) Some Koreans look to Woodrow Wilson and his "selfdetermination" statements as a salvation from Japanese oppression. Il-han, in particular, idolizes Wilson and joins the Korean delegation that travels to Paris during the peace conference after World War I. (Such a delegation actually did visit Wilson.) Again disillusionment with American promises and statements results. The third section follows the wanderings of one of Il-han's sons, who is a rebel leader. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 arouses new hopes for the Korean independence movement. But after the war America concludes an agreement with the Russians allowing them to occupy Korea from its northern border down to the thirty-eighth parallel. The novel moves to a tense climax as the forces of the incoming American military government land at Inchon, in the south, and, instead of acknowledging the Koreans, defer to the Japanese army of occupation. Buck builds her indictment of American treatment of the Koreans with devastating power. American incompetence and lack of knowledge of the real importance of Korea and of the political realities in that area of Asia are intensely and vividly demonstrated. The knowledge that all the historical facts are authentic— as Buck makes clear in the prefatory note and in the epilogue—gives the book a striking impact. Although most of the characters, with the possible exception of Il-han and Yul-han, suffer diminution in contrast with the historical happenings, The Living Reed is a book to remember. The characters fade, but the events and the history portrayed linger and render this work one of the most unforgettable of Buck's novels. The book represents her fiction at its thematic best. It makes the history of Korea memorable, and although Buck does not carry the story as far as the war in the 1950's or the later standoff

between North and South Korea at the thirtyeighth parallel, she compels readers to understand what led to these distressing events. The Living Reed has gone through numerous printings and deserves such attention because it gives the American reader the background material necessary to understand American involvement in Korea, which from its beginnings has been tainted by inadequate knowledge and illusionary hopes. The Time Is Noon (1967), one of Buck's most unusual novels, had been written much earlier, but she and Richard Walsh deemed it much too personal to publish, even though the manuscript had been set up in type. Research has now established that the novel was composed over a three-year period (1936-1939) and was begun not long after she divorced John Lossing Buck and married Richard Walsh. (Walsh also had to obtain a divorce in order to marry her.) Joan Richards, the protagonist of The Time Is Noon, has many affinities with Buck. She has a large-boned, heavy figure, yet is facially attractive. Intelligent, college-educated, and with vast energy and strength, she dreams of having a husband and children, and is extremely family-oriented. Although certain obvious changes were made (for instance, the heroine's father is a minister in the United States during the 1920's rather than in China; her husband is a farmer rather than an agricultural expert; and her married lover is an aviator rather than a talented publisher), the autobiographical parallels are so apparent that it is quite understandable why publication of the book was delayed for almost thirty years: the issue of the two divorces was unquestionably the major factor. Both Buck and Richard Walsh were concerned about the effect of their divorces on her public image and on the sale of her books. When she devotes a section of Other Gods to the way in which the

PEARL S. BUCK / 131 hero, Bert Holm, must manage the proper image presented to his adoring public, she is doubtless speaking from personal experience, remembering the risk of scandal during an era when divorce was generally frowned upon. What is of more consequence is that The Time Is Noon contains some of Buck's best writing—writing having the forceful realism characteristic mainly of her books published in the 1930's. There are two particularly powerful segments: the penetrating portrayal of daily life in a minister's family and the depiction of Joan Richards' early period of marriage while living with her husband's family. In describing Joan's life with her mother and father, Buck transposed material from The Exile and Fighting Angel onto the pages of the novel. The dialogue and descriptions are so authentic that the reader understands why her biographies fascinated the Nobel committee. The father's God-obsessed remoteness is brilliantly conveyed, and his wife's ambivalent response is equally persuasive. When she becomes terminally ill, Mary Richards does not want to see her husband. The resentment that has been building for years boils over in her last illness. The family situation, with its underlying compromises and tensions, is rendered with excellent verisimilitude. When Joan Richards marries, she goes to live on the farm of her husband's parents. Again a family is depicted with rare authenticity and power. The Pounder family is completely joyless. Their existence is a perpetual round of work, meals are silent rituals, and the only thing the family shares is a regular Bible-reading session. They want nothing fresh or out-of-theordinary to disturb their dull, plodding lives. The mother, in particular, does not wish her ways disturbed. (Even Christmas, in such circumstances, is a dismal experience.) For the mother everything is extra work and trouble. Mrs. Pounder simply does not wish to be both-

ered, to make an effort, to be concerned and involved. When her children were small, she did not want to invite their playmates into her house. Youngsters, like everything else, were a burden. Even her own children are epitomized with the comment that although they were well behaved, they "made work." Though the other members of the household are also genuinely alive, the mother-in-law is splendidly brought to life. This episode echoes in every way Buck's best writing of the 1930's. The Goddess Abides (1972), published the year before her death, is another novel in which Buck is personally involved. Edith Chardman, the forty-two-year-old heroine, is loved by two men: a twenty-four-year-old scientist and a seventy-six-year-old philosopher. Both men look upon her as a goddess. She furnishes inspiration and adds idealism to their lives. Although a passage from Robert Graves's The White Goddess is quoted at the beginning, Buck is not concerned with any of the deeper aspects of myth or theories of primitive concepts evolving into modern beliefs. She is close to the idea of the medieval knight and his ladylove, the courtly love tradition. A woman beloved rests on a pedestal and inspires her knight (in this case her knights) to high-minded thoughts and noble deeds. This notion, Buck believes, can still be valid in the latter part of the twentieth century. At least in the case of Ernest Hocking (the retired Harvard philosopher, who is called Edwin Steadley in the novel), there is documentary proof in his letters that he beheld Buck as a modern goddess. The identity of the young scientist is unknown, but he could be a composite based on several younger men of Buck's acquaintance. A reading of the nonfiction dialogue For Spacious Skies (1966), written in collaboration with Theodore F. Harris, illustrates one such case. The Goddess Abides is fundamentally a paean to love. Certainly for both Buck and Er-

132 I AMERICAN WRITERS nest Hocking their experience as friends and correspondents was elevating and invigorating, and buoyed their lives. The themes of the grandeur of love and the glories of giving and selfsacrifice—themes reiterated in several of Buck's books—here reach their most emphatically emotional expression in her fiction. This heavenly love will not cease on an earthly plane, it is clearly implied; it will pass beyond death and, in some form, unite the lovers in a spiritual existence. As the love of the aged philosopher does not terminate with his death, but continues, so Jared Barnow, the young scientist, must use goddess worship for his own development and growth. Love on its proper plane must seek the fulfillment of the lover and the beloved. When Edith arranges the opportunity for Barnow to marry another, her self-sacrifice and encouragement will aid him in the most ennobling way possible. Worship is used constructively and beneficently, for the betterment of all parties concerned. By using the man's worship in this way, the goddess ennobles herself. Individual aspirations, development, and possibilities reach their highest potential and transcendence, and ultimately all of this passes on to a heavenly realm. Although the themes and philosophy reach for the highest realms, the novel possesses an unreal, flowery aura—and yet there is the evidence of the Hocking letters and For Spacious Skies, which indicates that, improbable as it may seem, Buck is relating the situation as it actually was. Deep personal involvement played a particularly significant role throughout Buck's career. In her early writing, especially in The Good Earth and the biographies of her father and mother, she created powerful books that record Chinese peasant life and the American missionary experience with memorable accuracy and feeling. Such works could have been written

only from perceptive, sensitive, firsthand knowledge and experience. Buck eventually decided that she wanted to reach the widest possible audience with her personal philosophy and viewpoints; thus didacticism became the primary concern. While this didacticism was involved with excessive optimism, stereotyped characterization, and overplotting, it could never diminish her spellbinding narrative gift. This ability led to her best-selling status and made her the most widely translated author in the history of American literature. (Only Mark Twain has approached her in this category.) Buck's personal commitment was also evidenced in her lifelong devotion to social ideals. She worked tirelessly for human rights, racial equality, and understanding between East and West. Even after her death, in Danby, Vermont, her royalties work to aid several humanitarian causes, chiefly the Pearl S. Buck Foundation, which provides Amerasian children with food, clothing, medical supplies, and educational opportunities. It would appear that Buck's fame will continue into the future on two levels: as author and as humanitarian.

Selected Bibliography WORKS OF PEARL S. BUCK NOVELS AND SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS

East Wind: West Wind. New York: John Day, 1930. The Good Earth. New York: John Day, 1931. Sons. New York: John Day, 1932. The First Wife and Other Stories. New York: John Day, 1933.

PEARLS. BUCK / 133 The Mother. New York: John Day, 1934. A House Divided. New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1935. House of Earth. New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1935. (Trilogy of The Good Earth, Sons, and A House Divided.) This Proud Heart. New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1938. The Patriot. New York: John Day, 1939. Other Gods: An American Legend. New York: John Day, 1940. Today and Forever. New York: John Day, 1941. Dragon Seed. New York: John Day, 1942. The Promise. New York: John Day, 1943. Portrait of a Marriage. New York: John Day, 1945. The Townsman. New York: John Day, 1945. (Written under the pseudonym of John Sedges.) Pavilion of Women. New York: John Day, 1946. The Angry Wife. New York: John Day, 1947. (Written under the pseudonym of John Sedges.) Far and Near. New York: John Day, 1947. Peony. New York: John Day, 1948. Kinfolk. New York: John Day, 1949. The Long Love. New York: John Day, 1949. (Written under the pseudonym of John Sedges.) God's Men. New York: John Day, 1951. Bright Procession. New York: John Day, 1952. (Written under the pseudonym of John Sedges.) The Hidden Flower. New York: John Day, 1952. Voices in the House. New York: John Day, 1953. (Written under the pseudonym of John Sedges.) Come, My Beloved. New York: John Day, 1953. Imperial Woman. New York: John Day, 1956. Letter from Peking. New York: John Day, 1957. Command the Morning. New York: John Day, 1959. Fourteen Stories. New York: John Day, 1961. The Living Reed. New York: John Day, 1963. The Time Is Noon. New York: John Day, 1967. The New Year. New York: John Day, 1968. The Good Deed and Other Stories of Asia, Past and Present. New York: John Day, 1969. The Three Daughters of Madame Liang. New York: John Day, 1969. Mandala. New York: John Day, 1970. The Goddess Abides. New York: John Day, 1972. All Under Heaven. New York: John Day, 1973. East and West. New York: John Day, 1975. Secrets of the Heart. New York: John Day, 1976.

The Lovers and Other Stories. New York: John Day, 1977. The Woman Who Was Changed and Other Stories. New York: Crowell, 1979. NONFICTION

East and West and the Novel: Sources of the Early Chinese Novel. Peking: North China Union Language School-California College in China, 1932. The Exile. New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1936. Fighting Angel. New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1936. The Chinese Novel. New York: John Day, 1939. Of Men and Women. New York: John Day, 1941; reiss. 1971 with new epilogue. American Unity and Asia. New York: John Day, 1942. The Spirit and the Flesh. New York: John Day, 1944. (Combines The Exile and Fighting Angel in one volume.) Talk About Russia. New York: John Day, 1945. (With Masha Scott.) Tell the People. New York: John Day, 1945. How It Happens. New York: John Day, 1947. (With Erna von Pustau.) American Argument. New York: John Day, 1949. (With Eslanda Goode Robeson.) The Child Who Never Grew. New York: John Day, 1950. My Several Worlds. New York: John Day, 1954. A Bridge for Passing. New York: John Day, 1962. Children for Adoption. New York: Random House, 1964. The Gifts They Bring: Our Debt to the Mentally Retarded. New York: John Day, 1965. (With Gweneth T. Zarfoss.) Essay on Myself. New York: John Day, 1966. (This is the first part of a two-part pamphlet; the second is by Jason Lindsey, below.) For Spacious Skies: Journey in Dialogue. New York: John Day, 1966. (With Theodore F. Harris.) The People of Japan. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1966. To My Daughters, with Love. New York: John Day, 1967. China as I See It, edited by Theodore F. Harris. New York: John Day, 1970. China Past and Present. New York: John Day, 1972.

134 I AMERICAN WRITERS BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL STUDIES Bentley, Phyllis. "The Art of Pearl S. Buck." English Journal 24:791-800 (December 1935). Birmingham, Frederic A. "Pearl Buck and the Good Earth of Vermont." Saturday Evening Post, 244:70-73, 135, 139, 141, 143-44 (Spring 1972). Block, Irwin. The Lives of Pearl Buck. New York: Crowell, 1973. Canby, Henry Seidel. "The Good Earth: Pearl Buck and the Nobel Prize." Saturday Review of Literature, 19:8 (November 19, 1938). Cargill, Oscar. Intellectual America: Ideas on the March. New York: Macmillan, 1941; repr. Cooper Square Publishers, 1968. Pp. 146-54. Carson, E. H. A. "Pearl Buck's Chinese." Canadian Bookman, 21:55-59 (June-July 1939). Cevasco, George A. "Pearl Buck and the Chinese Novel." Asian Studies, 5:437-50 (December 1967). Cowley, Malcolm. "Wang Lung's Children." New Republic, 99:24-25 (May 10, 1939). Dickstein, Lore. "Posthumous Stories." New York Times Book Review, March 11, 1979, pp. 20-21. Doan-Cao-Ly. The Image of the Chinese Family in Pearl Buck's Novels. Saigon: Duc-Dinh, 1964. Doyle, Paul A. Pearl S. Buck. New York: Twayne, 1965. . "Pearl S. Buck's Short Stories: A Survey." English Journal, 55:62-68 (January 1966). Harris, Theodore F. Pearl S. Buck. A Biography. 2 vols. New York: John Day, 1969-1971. Henchoz, Ami. "A Permanent Element in Pearl Buck's Novels." English Studies, 25:97-103 (August 1943). Janeway, Elizabeth. "The Optimistic World of Miss Buck." New York Times Book Review, May 25, 1952, p. 4.

Langlois, Walter G. "The Dream of the Red Chamber, The Good Earth, and Mans Fate: Chronicles of Social Change in China." Literature East and West, 11:1-10 (March 1967). Lask, Thomas. "A Missionary Heritage." New York Timest March 7, 1973, p. 40. Lee, Henry. "Pearl S. Buck—Spiritual Descendant of Tom Paine." Saturday Review of Literature, 25:16-18 (December 5, 1942). Lindsey, Jason. A Study of Pearl S. Buck. New York: John Day, 1966. (The second part of a twopart pamphlet; see Buck's Essay on Myself, above.) Shimizu, Mamoru. "On Some Stylistic Features, Chiefly Biblical, of The Good Earth." Studies in English Literature (Tokyo), English no. 1964:117-34. Spencer, Cornelia. The Exile's Daughter, a Biography of Pearl S. Buck. New York: CowardMcCann, 1944. Thompson, Dody Weston. "Pearl Buck." American Winners of the Nobel Literary Prize, edited by Warren G. French and Walter E. Kidd. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1968. Pp. 85-110. Van Doren, Carl. The American Novel 1789-1939. Rev. and enl. ed. New York: Macmillan, 1940. Pp. 350, 352-53. Van Gelder, Robert. "Pearl Buck Talks of Her Work." In his Writers and Writing. New York: Scribners, 1946. Pp. 26-28. Woolf, S. J. "Pearl Buck Talks of Her Life in China." China Weekly Review, 62:145-46 (September 24, 1932). Zinn, Lucille S. "The Works of Pearl S. Buck: A Bibliography." Bulletin of Bibliography, 36:194208 (October-December 1979). —PAUL A. DOYLE

Malcolm Cowley 1898"WHATwe need are more American classics,

now have a criticism—structuralism, phenomenology, deconstructionism, new literary history, and other schools—that is in considerable disarray, largely because the critics involved believe that criticism has parity with literature. In "The New Age of the Rhetoricians," the opening chapter of The Literary Situation (1954), Cowley comes to the same general conclusion as Jarrell, but he does so in an entirely different spirit as he shows the close relation of criticism to contemporary literature:

not more criticism," Malcolm Cowley remarked in conversation in April 1971, during the time that he was writing A Second Flowering. The point, which is misleadingly simple— like many of his shrewd observations—cuts to the heart of the literary situation in the United States, since the masters of the early modern period—William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, T. S. Eliot, John Dos Passos, Robert Frost, and others—had completed their major work in the 1940's and early 1950's. Since about 1950 it has been obvious that this is the Age of Criticism, as Randall Jarrell lamented in an essay of the same title (collected in Poetry and the Age, 1953). Jarrell could complain about this situation even as he regularly contributed to the rising flood of criticism with his own reviews and essays. Were Jarrell alive today, one can be certain that he would be outraged by the present state of criticism. Since about 1970 the pyrotechnics of criticism have blinded readers in and out of the academy, and the light, while sometimes dazzling, has been momentary in most cases. The literary landscape has more often than not been thrown into new darkness by the latest critical strategies. The critical hegemony of the 1940's and 1950's, painstakingly established through the triumph of the New Criticism, has been shattered. We

Unexpectedly, most of the really new developments since 1940 have been in the field of criticism. Even the new creative writing shows a high degree of critical consciousness—so much of it that the novels and poems of the new age sometimes read like themes written to illustrate the best critical principles. Criticism has come to occupy such a central place in the literary world that it is hard to find historical parallels for the situation. Cowley goes on to observe that "there are indeed clear traces of Alexandrianism in presentday critical writing, but more among the younger disciples than the older critics." He praises Eliot, Kenneth Burke, Yvor Winters, Allen Tate, R. P. Blackmur, I. A. Richards, Lionel Trilling, Edmund Wilson, Newton Arvin, Francis Fergusson, Jarrell, and others,

135

136 I AMERICAN saying that "an atmosphere of lowered creative vitality is not a characteristic of the newer criticism." He hastens to ^dd, however, that the younger critics "of the less original or adventuresome type" are failing to ask the right questions and make the proper judgments, and that they are writing about absurdly narrow "objects of admiration." Cowley's conclusion is that "criticism has not become autonomous, for all the efforts to make it so, and its future still depends on that of the other literary arts." Since he framed this postulate, matters have gotten considerably worse; and it is probably fair to say that criticism since at least 1965 has contributed more nearly to the exhaustion of literature than to its enrichment, just as Cowley predicted. It would be more accurate to say that the classics have been more nearly submerged by a numbing weight of commentary than exhausted by criticism. Over the long course of his distinguished career, Cowley has seen the rise and decline of literary modernism, and in response the rise of a subtle (sometimes supersubtle) criticism from the new humanism through structuralism. When he was a student at Harvard in the 1910's, and immediately thereafter, a freelance writer, criticism, with the exception of H. L. Mencken's and that of a few other writers, was in a primitive state. In the academy one found only philology and literary history, and American literature was ignored. But Eliot was beginning to write the masterly essays that went into The Sacred Wood (1920), and he was soon followed by I. A. Richards. These fathers of the Scrutiny critics in England and of the New Critics in the United States exercised an immense influence that Cowley has often felt but steadfastly resisted, even though he has been sympathetic to many of the critics involved, especially Kenneth Burke, whom he has called "one of the truly speculative thinkers of his American era," and

WRITERS

who has erected a vast system of interpretation and thought that extends from literature to many other fields. Only a little less complex is R. P. Blackmur, who praised Cowley for his "deliberately plastic intelligence" in his review of Exile's Return. Although Cowley has often expressed sympathy not only for Blackmur but also for Ransom, Tate, and others of the New Critics who struck a criticism that could measure and chart the terrain of modernism, he regularly enters caveats about this criticism. In "The Difficulties of Modernism and the Modernism of Difficulty" (1979) Richard Poirier persuasively argues that modernism depends upon "the phenomenon of grim readings," "the degree of intimidation felt in the act of reading"; he taxes Eliot and James Joyce as the chief proponents of the "promotion . . . of the virtues and necessities of difficulty" and accuses them of forcing the reader to believe "that the act of reading should entail difficulties analogous to those registered in the act of writing." This article of faith, convincingly fobbed off on the reading public by Eliot, Ezra Pound, and others, is that "the difficulty was something only the poet could confront for us, and that the reader should be selfless and humble and thankful for the poet's having done this." The modernist therefore often exults in the rituals of technique, in the indirections of the guarded style. That Edmund Wilson, Philip Rahv, the New Critics, and others propagated the virtues of modernism and rewrote literary history in its shadow is a truism; and, as Poirier argues, these critics were not as severe about the defects of modernism, especially its obscurantism, as they should have been. All the same, this criticism was conducted in a proper spirit, and none of these men were enthusiasts. Unlike many present-day critics they did not attempt to displace literature: they saw criticism (in Rahv's formulation) as a department of letters and viewed

MALCOLM COWLEY / 137 it as a "superstructural form of literature, . . . a form of literature about literature." Criticism, Rahv concluded in 1958, "has cognitive value in relation to literature to the degree, no more and no less, that literature can be said to have cognitive value in relation to life." Hence the critic should perpetually reforge "the unity of the literary mind," and he or she should "recover the role of the participant in the literary event." Instead, unlike Rahv's ideal, which Cowley's work admirably fulfills, we now have a criticism that, more often than not, is an exploration of the critic's self. In this new impressionism, an impressionism that seeks to overthrow history, the text is mere fodder for the critic's ego to engorge and regurgitate. The structuralist would fastidiously recoil from Rahv's axiom that "criticism exhausts itself" in its essential act of assimilation and mediation— mediation between art and life—for the structuralist takes for granted that the bath water should be kept and the baby thrown out. What is Cowley's role and position in the currents and crosscurrents of criticism? First, it should be emphatically said that he has maintained a remarkably consistent position over the course of his career, even in the 1930's, when he was strongly influenced by Marxism. ("Reviewing his articles between 1932 and 1939, one suspects he only half believed his own adjuration to artists to take part in the class struggle. He believed in it objectively but not religiously," Daniel Aaron has argued in Writers on the Left, 1961.) Cowley's fundamental belief, the bedrock on which he has anchored his criticism, is framed in "Adventures of a Book Reviewer" (1967): "Literature is a part of life, not subordinate to other parts, such as politics and economics, but intimately affected by them and sometimes affecting them in turn. All the parts were interwoven ... in the web of history." In —And I Worked at the Writers Trade (1978) Cowley says (after complaining about

the New Critics' "ignorance of the writing profession" and their neglect of social, economic, historical, and biographical factors): I too believed that the work itself should be the focus of the critic's attention, but I was also deeply interested in the authors: how they got started, how they kept going, how they pictured themselves, and the myths that they embodied in their work. I was interested in their social backgrounds and in the question of whom they were thinking about when they said "we." I liked to speculate on the relation between an author and his audience. Cowley's criticism is eclectic and pluralistic, and remains peculiarly his own. The influences, such as that of Van Wyck Brooks, have been thoroughly absorbed. ("I have tried to avoid critical endogamy and inbreeding," he says in "A Many-Windowed House," 1970.) He would agree with John Crowe Ransom's judgment that "the critic must be his own authority." The critic must always depend upon the authority of the text ("I always start and end with the text itself," Cowley writes) and the authority of his response ("I also try to start with a sort of innocence . . . , a lack of preconception," he adds). No school and no method, however sophisticated, will do the critic's job for him. What Cowley characteristically does is to read the writer's work in the largest possible context—as much of the work as possible, not merely the most important or the most representative. He said of the philosophy underlying the Viking Portables: "The notion revealed here is that a masterpiece, although it can be studied alone, becomes richer when read in relation to an author's whole production, his oeuvre." On criticizing the literary work in "A Many-Windowed House," he said, "a truly innocent search might lead us into studies of the society in which an author lived [or] the nature of the particular audience for which it was written."

138 I AMERICAN WRITERS Of his specific field of endeavor, Cowley has written that it is and always has been "the contemporary history of American letters, though I also liked to trace the lines of descent by making incursions into the literary past." Cowley's most important subject is the lost generation, but he has written a great deal on the first flowering of American literature, especially of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Walt Whitman, and of the interrelations between the two periods. Unlike Edmund Wilson he has written as convincingly of poetry as of prose: his essays on Whitman, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Pound, and Frost are among his best, and it is worth noting that his views of Pound and Frost are dissenting—minority reports. He is very much his own man. Why this is so, and how this ruggedly independent man formed his character and vision, may be partly inferred from a biographical sketch of his life and a brief history of his career. Malcolm Cowley was born during a thunderstorm on August 24, 1898, on a farm near Belsano, Pennsylvania. Belsano is seventy miles east of Pittsburgh, where he attended public school from 1904 through 1911. After leaving the Liberty School, he went to Peabody High School in Pittsburgh, excepting four months in 1912, when he was enrolled at a Swedenborgian school near Philadelphia. Cowley's father, a physician who practiced old-style homeopathic medicine, was a Swedenborgian, a fact to which his son alludes in "Prayer on All Saints' Day" (1978): "Graves played no part in our Swedenborgian family, / with my father's trust in celestial reunions." From the eighth grade through the twelfth, Cowley was in school with Kenneth Burke, his lifelong friend. In 1915 Cowley matriculated at Harvard, where he ranked second in his class of 700 at the end of his freshman year. In April 1917 he went to France to drive an ambulance for the

American Field Service, but ended up driving a munitions truck instead. Early in 1918 he was back at Harvard for the spring semester, but in the fall he toent to a training camp for artillery officers. After he was mustered out of the army, Cowley moved to Greenwich Village in New York City, where he married Marguerite Frances Baird in August 1919. In the fall he returned to Harvard for his final semester (officially graduating with the class of 1919 in the winter of 1920). He earned a Phi Beta Kappa key at Harvard as well as a B.A. His formal education, superior to that of most of his literary contemporaries and peers, nurtures some of his many strengths as a writer and editor. In 1920-1921 he became a free-lance writer in Greenwich Village before becoming a copywriter for Sweet's Architectural Catalogue. In 1921, Cowley was awarded an American Field Service Fellowship. He attended the University of Montpellier and earned a diploma in French studies. The fellowship was renewed for 1922-1923. The Cowleys then lived in Giverny, fifty miles west of Paris. Cowley met many of the artists associated with dada, particularly Andre Breton, Tristan Tzara, and Louis Aragon. During this period, which he has chronicled in Exile's Return (1934), he also helped with the editing and publication of two little magazines, Broom (1921-1924; edited by Harold Loeb, later in association with William Slater Brown and Matthew Josephson) and Secession (1922-1924; edited by Gorham B. Munson with Josephson and Kenneth Burke), which were born in Europe and died in New York. Among the contributors were Conrad Aiken, E. E. Cummings, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, Jean Toomer, and William Carlos Williams. In 1923 Cowley returned to New York, going back to work for Sweet's Architectural Catalogue. Two years later he moved to Staten Island and resigned from the catalogue to return

MALCOLM COWLEY / 139 to free-lancing. He was able to make a bare living at it. In 1926 he and his wife moved to Sherman, Connecticut, where they rented a house for ten dollars a month. In 1928 he bought an abandoned farm in upstate New York near Sherman. The seventy-acre farm sold for $2,800. He made the down payment with a prize of $100 from Poetry, Harriet Monroe's well-known little magazine. Among the Cowleys' neighbors were Matthew Josephson, Allen Tate and Caroline Gordon, Robert M. Coates, Hart Crane, John Brooks Wheelwright, and Peter Blume. In October 1929, Cowley went to work for the New Republic, beginning an active association with that magazine that lasted until 1948. He joined the magazine's editorial board in 1930 and started a ten-year tenure as its literary (or book) editor, succeeding Edmund Wilson. When he lost that post in 1940 owing to his Communist sympathies, he became the magazine's weekly book reviewer. Cowley resigned from the New Republic in 1948, when its offices were moved from New York to Washington, but he continues to write reviews for it on occasion. He has described his years at the New Republic in the afterword of Think Back on Us ... (1967) as well as in —And I Worked at the Writer's Trade (1978) and The Dream of the Golden Mountains (1980). That he was probably the best literary editor in the long history of this magazine one can easily perceive in reading Literature and Liberalism: An Anthology of Sixty Years of "The New Republic," edited by Edward Zwick (1976). Although Cowley's association with the New Republic is the most important of his professional career as an editor, its importance is rivaled by his tenure at the Viking Press; where he has been instrumental in creating one of the best literary lists in English published between the late 1940's and the early 1980's. When the history of the Viking Press is written, Cowley's

role in developing the Portable series will be seen as crucial to its commercial and critical success. As Marshall Best, general editor of the series, has said in correspondence, "his help in selecting other Portables and in suggesting suitable editors and contents has been beyond calculation." As general editor of the Viking Critical Library, Cowley has played another significant role in the evaluation of literary history. But he has accomplished still more at Viking, including the astute copyediting of many texts; and this story has been told only in Best's interview (with Louis Sheaffer) in Columbia University's project in oral history. In 1931, Peggy Cowley went to Mexico to obtain an uncontested divorce. The agreement was amicable: Cowley deeded the farm to her. In late December 1931 she began an affair with Hart Crane in Mexico that ended with his suicide on April 24. At about the same time in 1932, Cowley became involved in the mining strikes in Pineville and Harlan, Kentucky. These brutal episodes are described in The Dream of the Golden Mountains. In June, Cowley married Muriel Maurer. Later that summer he became embroiled in the Communist election campaign. ("For the only time in my life I took part in a political campaign," he has ruefully said; in 1980 he could not bear to listen to the Democratic convention as it was broadcast.) In 1933, Cowley had an entirely different experience of the South: in the late spring and early summer he stayed with Allen Tate, Caroline Gordon, and her family on the KentuckyTennessee border near Clarksville, Tennessee. During this visit he met many of the Nashville Agrarians, especially John Crowe Ransom, Donald Davidson, Robert Penn Warren (to whom he dedicated The Dream of the Golden Mountains), and Andrew Lytle. "Listening to the Agrarians," he wrote in 1965, "I felt they were trying to make a Northern convert, and for all my radical opinions I agreed with them

140 I AMERICAN on many points. I too had been raised in the country and was never happy for long where I couldn't feel the soil under my feet." The next year brought the publication of Exile's Return, Cowley's most famous book. It was panned in most newspaper reviews when it was first released, especially in Franklin P. Adams' "The Conning Tower"; but John Chamberlain, Clifton Fadiman, Bernard Smith, and R. P. Blackmur praised it. ("For years I couldn't bring myself to write another book," Cowley has admitted.) His first collection of poetry, Blue Juniata, had been published in 1929. He later revised and expanded both books—Exile's Return in 1951 and Blue Juniata in 1968. In December 1934 the Cowleys' son Robert was born. The family moved to a remodeled barn in Sherman, Connecticut, in 1936; Muriel and Malcolm Cowley still pursue their romance there. ("In the end, after starting with goodwill and $300,1 was to find myself possessed of, or by, a seven-room house, a cornfield, a brier patch, a trout brook, and a crazy edifice of debts to be razed stone by stone.") In the late 1930's Cowley continued to fight various literary and political battles that irrupted from communism in its varying forms— Marxism, Trotskyism, and Stalinism—and that swirled around his roles as literary editor of the New Republic and fellow traveler. In 1937 he attended a world congress of writers who met in besieged Madrid. In 1939, after the Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact and the Russian invasion of Finland, he severed his ties with the Communist party; but in 1942 he was taxed for his connections to the party by the Dies Committee of the U. S. Congress. He was then working for the federal Office of Facts and Figures in Washington. After four months on the job he resigned and returned to Sherman. (In 1949 Cowley testified for the defense at the first and second trials of Alger Hiss. This was his

WRITERS

last public connection with communism and those accused of being its adherents.) Cowley received a five-year fellowship from Mary Mellon in 1943, and he spent most of his time during this period reading American literature while continuing to review for the New Republic. The Portable Hemingway (1944) and The Portable Faulkner (1946) were early fruits of this period of study. The Portable Hawthorne was published by Viking in 1948, the year that Cowley became its literary consultant. He has told the story of this important series in "The Greene-ing of the Portables" (1973). In addition to the Portables Cowley has edited Whitman and F. Scott Fitzgerald, the first series of the Paris Review interviews (1958), Winesburg, Ohio (1960), and, with Howard E. Hugo, Lesson of the Masters: An Anthology of the Novel from Cervantes to Hemingway (1971). Cowley was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1949 and served as its president in 1956-1959 and 1962-1965. He also was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was its chancellor in 1967-1976. Cowley became the first Walker-Ames lecturer at the University of Washington in 1950, his first teaching appointment. Subsequently he taught at Stanford University (four times between 1956 and 1965), the University of Michigan (1957), the University of California at Berkeley (1962), Cornell University (1964), the Vniversity of Minnesota (1971), and the University of Warwick (1973). The Warwick stint in Coventry, England, was his last teaching assignment, but he has continued to give public lectures. In 1954, The Literary Situation was published; it was followed by Black Cargoes: A History of the Atlantic Slave Trade (with Daniel P. Mannix) in 1962; The Faulkner-Cowley File in 1966; Think Back on Us . . . , edited by Henry Dan Piper, in 1967; Blue Juniata: Collected

MALCOLM COWLEY / 141 Poems in 1968; A Many-Windowed House, also edited by Piper, in 1970; A Second Flowering in 1973; —And I Worked at the Writer's Trade in 1978; and The Dream of the Golden Mountains and The View from 80 in 1980. More than half of his books were published after his seventieth birthday; of these A Second Flowering, his best book, is the most conspicuous. Cowley continues to write at the top of his form, as his new books amply demonstrate. The View from 80 is a remarkable testament. "Every old person needs a work project if he wants to keep himself more alive," Cowley says. "For all my praise of indolence, which has its place in the old man's day, work has always been the sovereign specific." Cowley now has his work as a writer cut out for him, for he is writing an account of the most trying period of his career, 1935-1942. Malcolm Cowley's published work falls into many categories. The most obvious modes are the personal essay and the autobiographical memoir, criticism formal and informal, literary history, editorials, poetry, translation. In practice it is difficult to sort out the published work aside from the book reviews, editorials, poems, and translations, putting a given piece in this bin or that. But one can make general distinctions that hold true for the most part. Exile's Return and A Second Flowering belong together as critical and autobiographical accounts of American literary modernism, especially of the figures of the lost generation. The Literary Situation and —And I Worked at the Writer's Trade are books about the literary profession and the state of publishing; —And I Worked ... has a more definite critical aspect than does The Literary Situation, which Cowley says was not intended to be critical but was conceived as "a social history of literature in our times." The Dream of the Golden Mountains is chiefly autobiography, a reminiscence about the

1930's that shades into social history at many points. It has much in common with Exiles Return, Cowley's best-known and most representative book, a work that not only is essential to the unfolding of his literary career and of his thought but also is crucial to one's understanding of the man and his work. The collections, ably edited by Henry Dan Piper—Think Back on Us ... and A Many-Windowed House— show, respectively, Cowley the editorialist and book reviewer and Cowley the critic and literary historian in ways that are different from his characteristic modes of address in his own books. The Faulkner-Cowley File is a unique chapter in literary relations as an author and editor respond to each other. At an early age Cowley learned to write the informal essay, a form more demanding than the review or the formal critical essay. Proof that Cowley had mastered this form by the early 1930's is abundant: one need only read "Connecticut Valley" and "Drought" (from "Transcontinental Highway"), which appeared in the New Republic in January and February 1931. "Connecticut Valley" is developed by a series of characterizations—of natives and summer people—who make up the community. Zebulon Trumbull and his wife have sold their farm, which his great-grandfather bought from the Indians, and have moved to town. The Denisons have bought that farm, torn down its barn, and refurbished the house in the most modern way. Denison, "the best advertising copywriter in New York City," is deep into middle age at thirty-five. He drinks too much and worries too much. Other representative characters appear. In a few deft strokes Cowley tells us of the lives of the Casey boys, natives who let their land go untilled, and he etches a sharply generalized picture of the lives of other summer people. As the scene fades, the reader is left with an image: it is October, and the summer people are deserting their houses. Everyone, native and alien,

142 I AMERICAN lets the land lie untended, and the orchards are also neglected. The beautiful valley is bereft of stewards. In this sketch, as in "Drought," "The Meriwether Connection" (1965), and other informal essays, one is struck by Cowley's gift for characterization and narrative, his eye for detail, and his idiomatic voice—traits that a novelist might envy. "Connecticut Valley" is a parable about the modern world that achieves its effects through the author's bold delineations and images. Without the characters and the pictures of their lives we would be left with a cold exposition of a growing fad—New Yorkers buying summer places in Connecticut—and its results, with a shrill emphasis on waste and neglect. Cowley the man, like his friends and acquaintances among the Nashville Agrarians, is a steward of the land who keeps a garden and an orchard, reaping the land's benison. Cowley the writer knows that the best way to develop a theme is through people, not ideas—hence his approach to his subject on this and many other occasions. Cowley's brilliant use of the informal essay and the personal report reaches its fruition in The Dream of the Golden Mountains, in which dozens of scenes of the 1930's, both urban and rural, are memorably depicted. He portrays the rout of the bonus marchers, strikes, meetings of the Communist party, writers' congresses, and other representative events. These are complemented by deeply shaded autobiographical portraits of life at the New Republic and in pastoral Tennessee and Connecticut. Cowley alternates picture and scene, again like the good fictionist as well as the good reporter. He knows when to slow the pace of the narrative and present a representative scene. At the same time he is adept at stopping the action and concluding a given sequence with a sharp image. One of the best of these appears at the end of " The New

WRITERS

Republic Moves Uptown." In the last half of the concluding paragraph, Cowley is describing the cocktail party that was thrown to christen the new offices: Almost everyone drank the martinis fast, then shouted to be heard by his neighbor. John Dewey got into an argument, made a sweeping gesture with his arm too low, and swept the cloth off the new square table, sending fifty glasses crashing to the floor. More glasses appeared and the din rose higher. A young matron was sitting happily on Stark Young's well-tailored lap, where few women had sat before her. George Soule was beaming through rimless spectacles. Bruce Bliven, a temperate man, looked more and more unhappy. "Why don't you go home?" Otis [Ferguson] said to him, and almost added, "Buster." We missed an artist friend and found him vomiting in the women's toilet with his wife holding his shoulders. A little crowd was waiting for the only elevator that ran after six o'clock. This wasn't Herbert Croly's New Republic; it was a midtown office party. In this part of a sequence of roughly 750 words, Cowley not only describes a cocktail party that is typical and untypical but also creates an image of the end of an era at the New Republic. He also conveys the hint that the Great Depression is beginning to ease. Cowley's reviews fall between his informal essays and his formal critical pieces. In the epilogue to Think Back on Us... t "Adventures of a Book Reviewer," he described his experiences writing a regular weekly review for the New Republic. He called it "my art form for many years" that "became my blank-verse meditation, my sonnet sequence, my letter to distant friends, my private journal." By joining narration and exposition (or anecdote and analysis) Cowley attempted not only to review the given

MALCOLM COWLEY / 143 book but also to "produce a reasoned criticism that could be read like a story." Alfred Kazin thinks that these leading reviews "brought the week to focus" for regular readers who relished the confrontation of "a gifted, uncompromising critical intelligence" with a representative new book. The review was more dramatic than a meditation or letter or journal, and it carried with it not only the tang of literary criticism but also the sense of the great world of affairs. In the English-speaking world few book reviewers in our time have been as good over the long haul, and only Edmund Wilson and V. S. Pritchett have been better. Since 1920, Cowley has reviewed hundreds of books, a large proportion of which has remained significant. And the books have encompassed a wide range of interests—sociology and politics as well as literature. The formal critical essays appeared almost as regularly as the reviews, and covered American literature from the New England renaissance in the 1830's to the present time. A Many-Windowed House presents the best selection of these, but others may be found throughout Cowley's books—in the collection After the Genteel Tradition, nearly half of which is by him; in A Second Flowering; and occasionally in —And I Worked at the Writers Trade. Cowley's quintessential critical essay in the formal mode has a strong biographical underpinning, just as his informal essays are built on an autobiographical foundation. The epilogue to A Many-Windowed House presents Cowley's credo as a critic: he forswears theory in the pure and rarefied sense; and while he stresses the value of the work under consideration, he prefers to deal with the author's life and work as a whole within the social and historical context in which the life was lived and the work was written, rather than considering a particular phase or a single title. "Judgment is the end of the

critical process," he says; "but if the work has been defined and interpreted correctly, then judgment often follows as a matter of course." Cowley typically casts a wide net, and even in a review he is stalking larger quarry than the book under consideration. The characteristic essay tells a story in the same way that Cowley's reviews do—the story of the development of an artist's work against the unfolding of his life. Among his best essays in this mode are "Dos Passos: Poet Against the World" (1937), "Frost: A Dissenting Opinion" (1944), "William Faulkner's Legend of the South" (1944), "The Real Horatio Alger Story" (1945), "Whitman: The Poet and the Mask" (19461947), "Hawthorne in Solitude" (1948), "Fitzgerald: The Romance of Money" (1953), "Pound Reweighed" (1961), "Hemingway: The Old Lion" (1973), and "Conrad Aiken: From Savannah to Emerson" (1975). On occasion Cowley has written articles that are not chiefly literary. These include his political essays, but the best known of the miscellaneous essays concerns language rather than politics. "Sociological Habit Patterns in Linguistic Transmogrification" (1956), which has been anthologized often, criticizes the language of sociologists by both analysis and parody. Here Cowley shows himself a master of language and style who is impatient with cant; in his literary criticism he has more than once inveighed against pretentious and obscure prose that is windy, wandering, repetitious, belletristic, and stuffy. In this minor classic one hears distant echoes of James Thurber, George Orwell, and others who have criticized pompous and viscid language, such as E. B. White, who once remarked editorially, "We would as lief Simonize our grandmother as personalize our writing." Cowley's plain style affords him a tool that is right for every occasion. Some of his readers, particularly the academic ones inclined to think

144 I AMERICAN WRITERS that tortured syntax, Latinate diction, and a highfalutin tone must be used to express the obscure and complex aspects of literary history and criticism, may underrate him because his expression is always simple and clear. "No American at present writes a more lucid prose than Cowley," Tate said in 1929. The simplicity and clarity he had achieved by then and has since maintained are the result of Cowley's constant effort. The result is that effort to measure a subject without distortion or oversimplification. As Kazin has said, this manner of expression suggests "the Hemingway style of artful plainness that united simplicity of manner with a certain slyness." Nouns and verbs provide the backbone of his prose, as they do in Hemingway's. Cowley is suspicious of adjectives and other modifiers, as he has made clear in A Second Flowering, especially in "The Other War," "Hemingway in Paris," and "Wolfe: Homo Scribens." At once homely and unvarnished, concrete and economical, colloquial and persuasive, his style is an admirable vehicle for description, characterization, and judgment. Although Cowley has the poet's feel for language, he never indulges himself and becomes giddy with its possibilities, as did Wolfe, Faulkner, Crane, and many another writer of the lost generation. The distinctive earmark of Cowley's style, his bold signature, is metaphor. What he has done is to deploy metaphors of all kinds, both condensed and expanded (including similes), to amplify, reinforce, and enrich the texture of his meaning. In the examples that follow, one sees the range and depth of Cowley's metaphoric expression. Farmhouses curl like horns of plenty, hide scrawny bare shanks against a barn, or crouch empty in the shadow of a mountain. Here there is no house at all—

only the bones of a house ("Blue Juniata," 1926) Paris was a great machine for sharpening the nerves and stimulating the senses. (Exile's Return, 1934) Having taken vows of poverty, chastity and obedience to his art, he could accept donations as if he were a whole monastic order. ("Edwin Arlington Robinson," 1948, in After

the Genteel Tradition) Sometimes [the writer] regards himself as a soldier fighting against the unknown and unexpressed; he is like a Roman legionary always serving on the frontier. Sometimes he is an explorer trying to broaden that civilized homeland which is the area of consciousness, by finding the proper words for new experiences. (The Literary Situation, 1954) Before and after the Toronto venture, Hemingway studied writing in Paris as if he were studying geometry without a textbook and inventing theorems as he went along. ("Hemingway in Paris," 1962, in A Second Flowering) Browder was a gray-faced man in a rumpled gray suit; he had the honest face of a clerk in a Kansas feed-and-grain store. (The Dream of the Golden Mountains, 1980) To enter the country of age is a new experience. . . . Nobody, man or woman, knows the country until he has lived in it and taken out his citizenship papers. Here is my own report, submitted as a road map and guide to some of the principal monuments. (The View from 80, 1980) In this series of representative instances we see Cowley's exact use of the language of analogy. In the poem, originally called "Bones of a

MALCOLM COWLEY / 145 House," one is struck by the comparison of houses to the people who own them and live in them. The metaphors in prose that I have chosen reveal Cowley's penchant and gift for drawing out the possibilities of the conceit that he forges. Robinson is not simply a monk but a whole monastic order; the writer is not only a Roman soldier on the frontier of the empire but also an explorer who is trying to expand the frontier. Hemingway studies the geometrical possibilities of prose by inventing his own theorems. Browder, the secretary of the American Communist party, looks like an honest clerk. (Another metaphoric characterization in the same book—that of Sinclair Lewis—is equally effective: Lewis' face is likened to "a rubber mask drawn tight over the skull.") In the last example Cowley returns to the metaphor of exploration, but he develops this analogy in an entirely different way: here the subject is immigrant, citizen, and reporter. In a different but related context, Cowley's metaphors provide the sinews connecting the syntax and idiom of his prose. In them one sees the poet at work. Here Cowley permits himself short lyric flights, but the metaphors are always meant—which is to say functional, not decorative. "I can't keep my pencil out of a manuscript, especially if it's my own," Cowley has remarked; and the soundness of his revisions— their shrewd idiomatic Tightness—may be seen in a comparison of the leading paragraphs of the same essay as it was published in two different versions. John Dos Passos is in reality two novelists. One of them is a late-Romantic, an individualist, an esthete moving about the world in a portable ivory tower; and the other is a collectivist, a radical historian of the class struggle. These two authors have collaborated in all his books, but the first had the larger share in Three Soldiers

and Manhattan Transfer. The second, in his more convincing fashion, has written most of The 42nd Parallel and almost all of 7979. The difference between the late-Romantic and the radical Dos Passos is important not only in his career: it also helps to explain the recent course of American fiction. ("The Poet and the World," in New Republic, April 27, 1932) Sometimes in reading Dos Passos you feel that he is two novelists at war with each other. One of them is a late-Romantic, a tender individualist, an esthete traveling about the world in an ivory tower that is mounted on wheels and coupled to the last car of the Orient Express. The other is a hard-minded realist, a collectivist, a radical historian of the class struggle. The two authors have quarreled and collaborated in all his books but the first had the larger share in Three Soldiers and Manhattan Transfer. The second, in his more convincing fashion, wrote most of The 42nd Parallel 7979 and The Big Money. Although the conflict between them seems to me rather less definite on reflection than it did at first glance, nevertheless it is real; and it helps to explain several tendencies not only in the work of Dos Passos but in recent American fiction as a whole. ("Dos Passos: Poet Against the World," 1964) The first version is the more direct and succinct, and it demonstrates the qualities that Kazin praises in Starting Out in the Thirties: clarity, concreteness, authority. The second version is superior all the same—and not merely because the writer has more room in which to operate. (The revised essay is only 10 to 15 percent longer than the original two parts that M. D. Zabel reprinted as a single essay in Literary Opinion in America.) What immediately strikes one is that in the revised version Cowley has developed his origi-

146 I AMERICAN nal thesis by metaphor. Dos Passos is "two novelists at war with each other" whose "portable ivory tower" is now "coupled to the last car of the Orient Express." By such homely and obvious metaphors Cowley often secures or amplifies a point. But he does not allow his prose to accrue the wrong tone or momentum when he deploys such metaphors as "two novelists at war." Late in the revised essay he warns: "But the distinction I have been making ... could be easily carried too far. The truth is that the art novel and the collective novel as conceived by Dos Passos are in opposition but not in fundamental opposition: they are like two sides of a coin." Again we see the homely metaphor at work. Cowley is not afraid to use such figures of speech. On the other hand his "portable ivory tower" is considerably bolder. The extrapolation of the image in the second version enables him to suggest that Dos Passos has a sentimental and romantic side that the author is powerless to harness and control. There are other differences in the two passages that need detain us but a moment. Cowley effectively uses the second- and first-person address in the fuller version ("you feel" and "seems to me"); the reader now thinks himself part of a common enterprise. The critic also adds words and phrases to give his formulation a more exact shade of meaning and a less stark tone. Dos Passos is now "a tender individualist" who is at the same time "a hard-minded realist." These sides of the man have "quarreled and collaborated" (italics mine). The parallelism between the romantic and the realist is now more exact; in the first formulation Dos Passos' "collectivist" and "historical" side seems to be a tough political antiquarianism rather than what one expects of the hardheaded political novelist: tough-minded realism. The second version is the more considered and persuasive. Here, as elsewhere in his work, Cowley has

WRITERS

made good use of the opportunity to take another look. The willingness—almost the compulsion—to take another look and to revise time and again is one of many attitudes and habits that set Cowley apart from the vast majority of literary critics. Most of the other important critics of the twentieth century have tended to assume— often wrongly—that their judgments, once formulated, have the permanence and resilience of the Ten Commandments. Cowley's willingness to revise not only his prose but also his judgments has been part and parcel of his ability to make books from essays that are seemingly scattered, disparate, and fragmentary. Hence he has been able to bring them into a unified whole. Most critics in the twentieth century have been content to collect essays from time to time within the covers of a book and let it go at that. This practice may be seen from Eliot's The Sacred Wood (1920) to Blackmur's The Double Agent (1935), Tate's Reactionary Essays (1936), Ransom's The World's Body (1938), Wilson's The Triple Thinkers (1938), Rahv's Image and Idea (1949), and Trilling's The Liberal Imagination (1950). Of these men only Wilson, Trilling, and Cowley have written book-length critical studies. The emphasis here may seem misplaced, and therefore I hasten to say that I am not in any way dismissing or downplaying the great critical achievement of Eliot, Ransom, Tate, Blackmur, and Rahv; what I am pointing out is that writing a book-length critical study is an order of achievement different from writing a series of independent essays that are wholly disparate or only loosely connected. When Cowley says—as he does, for instance, in The Literary Situation—that the book in question is not a collection but a unified whole, he is not whistling in the dark, as most critics do in the same circumstances. Most of Cowley's critical and

MALCOLM COWLEY / 147 historical books have this kind of unity—from Exile's Return to —And I Worked at the Writer's Trade. (In this estimate I obviously would not include Think Back on Us... and A Many-Windowed House.) Cowley's stature as a literary historian and critic cannot be properly seen until one reads two or three of his books. A handful of essays, read in periodicals or anthologies, will not reveal the full force and effect of his literary and critical acumen. There is a deceiving simplicity about many of his essays: the prose, which always meets Orwell's standard of being as clear as a windowpane; the unpretentious and genial tone; the apparently rambling style; the casual anecdotes—all these earmarks and more make it seem that one is being "led up to the most immense spread of literary tidbits," as Kazin remarks. Yet, taken in concert, Cowley's essays and books constitute considerably more than mere literary small talk and gossip. Cowley has given us the most nearly complete account of modern American literary history. In the foreword to —And I Worked at the Writer's Trade, his last critical book, he writes: "Once I set out to write, but never finished, a history of American letters in the twentieth century. Most of the chapters that follow might have found a place in it." In fact Exile's Return, The Literary Situation, A Second Flowering, and —And I Worked at the Writer's Trade constitute a personal history of American literary modernism. In the prologue to the second edition of Exile's Return, Malcolm Cowley says that what he "wanted to write was less a record of events than a narrative of ideas." Here I want to consider the ideas that signify in the unfolding of his life and the making of his work— those not considered elsewhere in this essay. R. P. Blackmur's concise synoptic view of Cowley's position (which appears in "The Dan-

gers of Authorship," a review of Exile's Return and Eliot's After Strange Gods) remains accurate and valuable. Cowley . . . regards literature as it interprets life rightly or wrongly, with reference to a general, complete view of life as distinguished from the free, uncontrolled, merely literary view. [He] deeply realizes that literature does not ever in fact—at least in the degree that it is serious—escape into thin air without first influencing the moral and spiritual life of its readers. Therefore literature must be tempered by "a definite intellectual and spiritual discipline." "Cowley suggests a discipline that rises from an honest recognition of the class-struggle and all its implications in economic and political life." Most of Cowley's leading ideas either are presented and extrapolated in Exile's Return or appear there in germinal form. He makes the assumption—daring and prescient at the time, but abundantly clear since about 1950—that the lost generation has produced many of the best American writers of the twentieth century. These writers will be partly remembered as the generation that routed the genteel tradition. This assumption about the lost generation conceals another daring and prophetic judgment that Cowley made in the 1920's—that American literature had come of age, could hold its own with European literature, and was a respectable object of study. As he says in the epilogue, "in 1920 it had been a provincial literature By 1930 it had come to be valued for itself." In "Malcolm Cowley and the American Writer" (1976), Lewis P. Simpson has written the most comprehensive account of Cowley's career, showing the integral relation of the poetry and the criticism, the relation of poet to critic. This is the heart of Simpson's interpretation of Cowley's quest. In consequence Allen

148 I AMERICAN WRITERS Tatc perceived that relation and remarked it in conversation and correspondence. As both a creator and an interpreter of the literature of the lost generation, Cowley is a contributor to one of its leading aspects: a myth or a legend of creativity which is definable as a poetics of exile. He apprehended first the American writer's exile from childhood, second his exile from society, and finally his exile from what may be termed the sense of being in the wholeness of the self The deracination of the lost generation was inherent in the condition of American life. This sense of alienation, Simpson goes on to observe, was sharpened by the lost generation's experience in World War I, during which they developed what Cowley calls the "spectatorial attitude," a sense of detachment and remoteness from life that led to their immersion in the "religion of art," the symbolist discipline of pure consciousness that is founded on the notion that only in art is reality fully and truly apprehended. At its most fanatical, as Cowley points out in Exile's Return, the religion of art can lead to extreme forms of exile: to an escape from modern society, a withdrawal to a remote primitive land, or to the "irreligion of art, a state of mind in which the artist deliberately fritters away his talents through contempt for the idiot-public that can never understand." The life of the artist has a more mundane and even practical side, and no other critic has described the writer's quotidian existence with Cowley's thoroughness and sanity. In discussing the secular side of his vocation in The Literary Situation and in —And I Worked at the Writer's Trade, Cowley has provided a remarkably thorough account not only of the writer's apprenticeship, his working habits, his attitude toward the ideas of his time, and his relation to the academic community and the publishing world but also of his connection to the reading

public and the wider world of society as a whole. (Flannery O'Connor, who experienced several kinds of exile in her brief life, shrewdly described this complicated series of relations in "The Fiction Writer and His Country" [1957]: "When we talk about the writer's country we are liable to forget that no matter what particular country it is, it is inside as well as outside him. Art requires a delicate adjustment of the outer and inner worlds in such a way that, without changing their nature, they can be seen through each other. To know oneself is to know one's region. It is also to know the world, and it is also, paradoxically, a form of exile from that world.") In the concluding chapter of —And I Worked at the Writers Trade, Cowley describes the code of the serious modern writer, a code that, he goes on to say, "preaches a curious mixture of extreme self-centeredness with something close to self-abnegation" and that is "dangerously incomplete" as a guide to the moral life. Here is his pentalogue: The artist "must believe in the importance of art, as well as the all-importance in his own life of the particular art to which he is devoted"; "he must believe in his own talent... having a universal validity"; "he must honestly express his own vision of the world and his own personality, including his derelictions"; he "must produce grandly, to the limit of his powers"; "the work of art should be so fashioned as to have an organic shape and a life of its own, derived from but apart from the life of its maker and capable of outlasting it. Only the work provides the artist's claim on the future, his hope of heaven " At the end of Exile's Return Cowley proposes a similar set of beliefs, which Simpson discusses in "The Decorum of the Writer" (1978). The essential difference in the earlier pentalogue is Cowley's insistence in Exile's Re-

MALCOLM COWLEY / 149 turn that the writer participate in reforming society. Simpson considers the implications of this "comprehensive moral criticism of man and his history," showing how the shrinking of the literary sensibility and its ideals since the 1920's and 1930's has affected Cowley. He obviously believes that few writers of the present time will appear in what he calls Art's hagiography and its Book of Martyrs. In the essay on Wolfe in A Second Flowering Cowley also observes that "the usual author is two persons or personalities working in partnership. One of them says the words to himself, then writes them down; the other listens to the words, or reads them." This dialogue, or "process of inner dialectic," is essential to the working habits of any good writer. Cowley has spoken of the process often, and in "Privatation and Publication" (1975) he relates it to his own writing. "I took long walks, sometimes nine or ten miles in the wet snow, while I dreamed about or mumbled the words I should write the following day." His most thorough account of this inner dialogue appears in the introduction to The Portable Hawthorne: Hawthorne seems to have divided himself into two personalities while dreaming out his stories: one was the storyteller and the other was the audience.... This doubleness in Hawthorne, this division of himself into two persons conversing in solitude, explains one of the paradoxes of his literary character: that he was one of the loneliest authors who ever wrote, . . . while at the same time his style was that of a social man eager to make himself clear and intensely conscious of his audience. Hawthorne, more than any other writer in the American renaissance, created his own legends and his own myth. In this and other ways he is related to Faulkner, the writer to whom Cowley has been most attracted (but whom he slightly underrates, just as he overrates Hem-

ingway). It is Cowley who more than any other critic has revealed the mythic dimensions of Yoknapatawpha County. In the powerful conclusion to A Second Flowering he writes that nearly all the writers of the lost generation are "great spinners and weavers of legend." Behind their legendary heroes lie "larger patterns of myth." "Hemingway and Faulkner most of all, but other writers as well, seemed to plunge deep into the past, or into themselves, to recover a prehistoric and prelogical fashion of looking at the world; then they looked in the same fashion at events of their own time and thereby surrounded them with a feeling of primitive magic " That magic earned for them a place among the great writers of the twentieth century, but not the great writers of all time, as Cowley points out: "They lacked the capacity for renewed growth after middle age that has marked some of the truly great writers." This lack of stamina adversely affects most of the writers of the period from Crane to Hemingway, but not Edmund Wilson or Cowley himself. Cowley's work in the 1970's is more than a simple matter of stamina and persistence, for it brings to his career a special aura and achievement, stamping him not as poet and critic but as man of letters. In the appendix to A Second Flowering, "Years of Birth," Malcolm Cowley lists 385 American authors born from 1891 to 1905. The name of each is followed by a succinct description of his or her literary accomplishment: Faulkner is deemed a novelist; Thurber, a humorist; A. J. Liebling, a journalist. Rarely is the description askew, as in the case of Katherine Anne Porter, who is chiefly a writer of short fiction, not a novelist. The most intriguing category by far is man of letters: Cowley calls John Peale Bishop, Kenneth Burke, Allen Tate, Mark Van Doren, Robert Penn Warren, and Edmund Wilson by this term "as a token of

150 I AMERICAN WRITERS their refusal to specialize." But much more is involved. One might ask why Bernard DeVoto, E. B. White, Yvor Winters, Lionel Trilling, and R. P. Blackmur were not included. One answer is that Cowley puts a low premium on editing, teaching, and journalism when he defines a writer as a man of letters: he shies from academic types (Trilling, Winters) and journalists (DeVoto, White). He is also loath to deem a writer "man of letters" who has written principally in two forms: this applies to Trilling (an indifferent fictionist) and to Winters and Blackmur (who wrote only minor poetry aside from criticism). We can easily perceive that Cowley greatly admires the writers in this category and that he has deliberately limited its members, for with a less stringent measure he could have included many more. Aside from Trilling and the others, Donald Davidson, Katherine Anne Porter, and Glenway Wescott might have been added. The most important omission is not any of these writers but Cowley himself. Here he calls himself a critic and poet; elsewhere he has referred to himself as a literary historian. He is also an editor, essayist, journalist, memoirist, and translator. (These categories are applied to various writers in the appendix.) The man of letters devotes himself to the literary life. He is the embodiment of the idea (which many educated people would dismiss as a quaint notion, a singular fiction) that there is a fourth estate. This estate only incidentally comprises journalists, excepting the gifted and perspicacious ones like DeVoto and Liebling; in its true nature this realm of the mind and the imagination constitutes the community of writers that exists irrespective of national boundaries. This republic of letters is based upon a common assumption that can be expressed in Henry James's belief that it is "art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance." The professional writers in this community make up the great majority of its membership,

to be sure; but the men of letters are its leaders: they are the heart of this body politic. The man of letters like Edmund Wilson or Robert Penn Warren represents the idea of what literature and the literary life can be at their best. He may not necessarily be a great writer—in fact he seldom is—and on occasion some of his work, such as Wilson's collection of stories Memoirs of Hecate County, may be embarrassingly mediocre, as Cowley suggested in a review (New York Times Book Review, June 8, 1980). But through his dedication to literature and his unflinching professionalism, the man of letters elevates and upholds the profession of writing. Such a figure has an important role to play in the United States, for there is a deep and solid vein of anti-intellectualism running through American life to which many authors, no matter how great and how committed to art, have profoundly responded. One part of this response may be seen in Faulkner's absurd pretense that he was a farmer, not a writer. (As his brother John's reminiscence clearly shows, Faulkner was a deliberately casual and hopelessly incompetent farmer.) One cannot imagine Wilson's assuming such a preposterous role: he would have seen it as treasonous. Warren, while doubtless thinking that Faulkner's charade was humorous and probably harmless, could not behave in such a way himself despite his subtleties of self-deflation. It is Tate who bridles at this fiction, saying in his obituary of Faulkner: "The main source of my annoyance with him was his affectation of not being a writer, but a farmer.... Being a 'farmer,' he did not 'associate' with writers.... Excepting Malcolm Cowley he was not a friend of anybody who could conceivably have been his peer." That Faulkner did not assume the role of the farmer or the country bumpkin or the southern "good ole boy" with Cowley was a mark of his respect and affection. It is essential for most writers to think of themselves as part of a community and as mem-

MALCOLM COWLEY / 151 bers of a profession. The writer (the real writer, that is, not the hack—the maker of pulp fiction or the Hollywood scenarist or the sports reporter) ordinarily must see himself as having a real profession with actual standards. This does not require membership in a literary circle or clique (such as the Round Table at the Algonquin Hotel, which produced not a single major writer, only minor wits). What this sense of community does entail is a necessary fiction that enables the writer to see himself or herself as part of the tradition and development of literature and that gives the author a sense of belonging to something that is significant and enduring. Although the role of the man of letters is much diminished in England, in the United States it remains essential, largely owing to the American writer's strong sense of alienation from society at large. This profound sense, which Louis D. Rubin, Jr., has called the experience of difference, and which Cowley has discussed more thoroughly than any other American critic, partly involves the writer's nervous sense that his or her profession is not quite legitimate and that the writer would be better off living in a friendlier environment, such as Europe, or following a more respectable way of life. The writer of minor talent who is not driven by demons can be an amateur, writing as an avocation; but the writer who is bitten by Art, and who is prey to his or her talent (or, in rare cases, genius) and is driven by commitment and egoism, will continue in that lonely course. In such circumstances the community of letters often becomes a sustaining force, regardless of whether the given writer regularly sees other writers. As Blackmur has observed in "A Feather-bed for Critics": Without the profession of writing behind him, ... the individual writer is reduced to small arms; without society behind it, the profession

is impotent and bound to betray itself. A deep collaboration is necessary, a collaboration in which the forces are autonomous and may never consciously co-operate, but which is marked by the unity they make together and by the culture which the individual, by the act of his convicted imagination, brings to light. Blackmur sees the profession of writing as integral and necessary to the writer. The key figure in the profession is the man of letters: he provides the cement to bind society and the individual writer. The polity of letters and the publishing community have much in common, and there is a far greater sense of shared purpose among these worlds than there is within the academic profession or between writers and academics. The academic world stands apart from the profession of letters in much the same way that journalism does. There is a sharp difference, even an antagonism, between the university and the fourth estate; workaday journalism and the literary vocation are not so sharply divided, but there are basic dissimilarities. "The man of letters pursues literature as a vocation—seeing no difference between his vocation and his avocation," Tate has shrewdly asserted; on the other hand, as John Gross has argued in The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters, "journalism is a career; literature is, or ought to be, a vocation." Careerism (which embraces commercialism and popularization, among other vices), like philandering, alcoholism, and paranoia, is a constant threat to the writer, who, by succumbing to the impulse to live in the public image of what the writer is, damages himself and his work. The example of Hemingway as careerist overshadows all others in this regard. The man of letters is committed to the life of the mind, but unlike many intellectuals he has a more specific commitment—to literature and to the health of language and culture. "The true province of the man of letters," as Tate has said,

752 / AMERICAN WRITERS "is nothing less (as it is nothing more) than culture itself." If carried too far, this commitment can become a religion of art—aestheticism. In our day, when secular religions of every kind— from communism to transcendental meditation—threaten the fabric of culture in the West, the religion of art seems relatively harmless. The extreme form of the religion of art, aestheticism, Cowley first detected at Harvard. But he has never succumbed to it, doubtless in part because he saw aestheticism in operation in dada and other forms of modern aestheticism in Europe in the 1920's. Yet at the same time (1921) Cowley met Paul Valery and saw in him a model for the man of letters. Doubtless Tate thought of Valery's example when he wrote of Poe: "He was the first committed and perhaps still the greatest American literary journalist on the high French model: a critical tradition represented today by Edmund Wilson and Malcolm Cowley." Lewis P. Simpson has written in the Sewanee Review for spring 1976 that Cowley's ... approach to the literary profession is, like that of William Dean Howells or Van Wyck Brooks, often infused with a poetics of literary community. Through the cultivation of a large personal literary acquaintance, through a gift for friendship, through generosity and compassion ... Cowley has urged upon American writers the image of a community based on both goodwill and discipline. This approach, which springs from a marked geniality as well as generosity and compassion, sets Cowley in a league by himself. Although he has often defended the writer's deportment, Cowley sympathized with Maxwell Perkins and his difficulties with such perpetual adolescents as Fitzgerald and Wolfe by saying that "this bookish, professorial, modest, upright man has chosen a profession in which he has to deal constantly with writers, who as a class have distin-

guished themselves as barroom brawlers, drawing-room wolves, breakers of engagements, defaulters of debts, crying drunks, and suicidal maniacs." Perkins and Cowley came to maturity in the time during which such boorishness became the expected mode of conduct for the writer to indulge himself in. In our day most writers seem intent on proving Ford Madox Ford's axiom that the artist cannot be a gentleman. Part of the writer's habitual behavior toward fellow authors involves a thinly veiled petulance that often erupts into jealousy, dishonesty, disruption, and even violence. Hemingway is the perfect exemplar of such deplorable behavior, but he by no means cornered the market on it. That Cowley has remained openhanded and amiable—that is, himself— throughout his long life without being in any way a camp follower or toady demonstrates that there are exceptions to Leo Durocher's axiom— "Nice guys finish last." Cowley's difficulties with writers must often have rivaled those of Perkins, who had many unpleasant experiences with Wolfe (who, Cowley observed, sometimes had the disposition of a morose elephant), Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and others. That he has been a respected poet and critic for the entirety of his professional life has given Cowley a considerable advantage in his relations with authors, whether as editor or writer. The poet is the prima donna of the breed writer, and Cowley in his early life must have found Hart Crane the most trying of literary friends. In his later life that dubious honor would probably go to Allen Tate, the man who brought Crane and Cowley together. The problems that both Crane and Tate posed to their friends sprang from sexuality: Crane was bisexual in his habits and had many searing experiences as a homosexual; Tate, who was driven by satyriasis through late middle age, had to cope with its aftermath in his last years, an aftermath that included considerable pain

MALCOLM COWLEY / 153 and embarrassment for many of his old friends, Cowley among them. The impact in each case extended to Cowley's domestic life. Despite what must have been great anguish in many respects, he has maintained his affectionate regard for both men and has continued to write about them with personal sympathy as well as critical detachment and approval (see "Remembering Allen Tate" in the spring 1980 Georgia Review). This kind of experience—suffering through Crane's drunken violent rages and Tate's mercurial temperament—would have turned many a lesser man not only against the writers and their work but also against the profession. Cowley has an uncommonly even disposition, a remarkable ability to forgive, and a wise but not uncritical acceptance of human fallibility. Cowley is one of the rare people who can be counted among the saving remnant of what he has called "the truly good men and women" in the literary world, people who are neither saints nor rascals nor scoundrels. Among his wide literary acquaintance since 1915 he mentions only three people—Van Wyck Brooks, Marianne Moore, and Heywood Broun; to this list I presumptuously add John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, E. B. White, and A. J. Liebling. Cowley, who has considerably more faith in the literary mind and its works than in the worldly nature of the writer, is a man whose own character has borne the sharp scrutiny of committees of local vigilantes in Seattle and elsewhere and of U. S. congressmen, and has survived intact. The biographers of the future not only will marvel at his literary idealism (White has called him an intellectual idealist) but also cannot fail to be more impressed with his geniality, urbanity, decency, and goodness. In fact, to the unwary he may seem too good to be true, in much the same way that the clear surfaces of his prose and the neat contours of his arguments are deceptively simple.

In his old age Cowley has avoided a state that he describes in The View from 80, a book that springs in part from his long and acute study of generations. He fears declining into a simplified version of himself, "of being reduced from the complexity of adult life into a single characteristic." As ever, his fascination with the self is balanced by his view of the literary world and of society. In the deepening shadows of a distinguished career he is continuing to contemplate the patterns of his life and of life in the twentieth century: Life in general (or nature, or the history of our times) is a supremely inventive novelist or playwright, but he—she?—is also wasteful beyond belief and her designs are hidden under the ... rubbish of the years. She needs our help as collaborators. Can we ... lay bare the outlines of ourselves? In his case the answer is an emphatic yes. Cowley has lived out of himself, through himself, into himself, both making and chronicling literary history. Here is the story as he tells it in "Prayer on All Saints' Day" (1978): Mother, lying there in the old Allegheny Cemetery, last in the family plot— I stood there on that overcast November day; I have never gone back. Graves played no part in our Swedenborgian family, with my father's trust in celestial reunions and my oblivious selfishness. Now after thirty-eight years I go back in spirit, I kneel at the graveside, I offer my testimony: this I have done, Mother, with your gift; this I have failed to do. Your hope, all that was left, you placed in me: I should outshine the neighbors' children, grow up to be admired,

154 / AMERICAN have worldly possessions too. Those were modest aims you gave me, Mother; I have achieved them all A wife you might have chosen for me, but I chose her first; a son to bear my father's name; an unmortgaged house and a mowed lawn. The banker squeezes my hand; the neighbors beam at me, each knowing I will not wound his self-esteem. You would have liked that, Mother. "Oh, Doctor," you might have said, "we have a good son." Good, good. There was a time I called myself a bad son, but a poet. "My world has deeper colors than yours," I boasted, "and the words will come to match the colors." Looking for words as for horses loose in the back pasture, I saddled and bridled them, rode off with a tight rein at a steady trot, came back one day and paid my debts, survived. Now I am older than you were ever to be, deaf as a gravestone, weak knees, a faltering walk; at night lying awake with borborygmus, by day farting and fiddling among papers; I have outlived most of my great coevals; now I write epitaphs for the dead lions. Does that make me a jackal? Sometimes lying awake I think of Ora Newton, an orphan, yellow-skinned, always looking half-grown, who served our family for how many years and was paid three dollars a week and saved all three. She loved me in a tolerant, half-resentful fashion.

WRITERS

Once, long after she was married, she wrote that the mortgage was being foreclosed, but her little farm might still be saved. She needed money, not much, but I didn't have it then and I told her so, if warmly and at length. She didn't answer my letter. I don't know when Ora died. I think of that equivocating letter; it is what I haven't done that tortures me at night —rumbles of gas, rumbles of guilt. Stephen, that just man who helped me often —we sat together mornings in the smoking car; he listened, gave sound advice, then turned to his crossword puzzle— Stephen dying of cancer forty miles away; I went to his house when it was too late. Is there a circle of thorns around the dying? a circle of ice around the aged, ice at the center too? I can be kind at easier moments. "Don't be unfair to yourself," I say; "don't forget the unpaid days, the uncredited work for the craft, for brilliant youngsters, for the town, or the yearlong struggle to make the words come right." Yes, I remember the good things too. Trust me to be here, not complaining, not making excuses, not letting my envy speak, not ever slipping a knife in the back. In other things don't trust me too far. There in the last grave in the unvisited family plot, smile up at me through the earth, Mother; be jubilant for what you achieved in me. Forgive my absences.

MALCOLM COWLEY / 155

Selected Bibliography WORKS OF

MALCOLM COWLEY The principal collection of Cowley papers is at the Newberry Library in Chicago. Blue Juniata. New York: Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith, 1929. Revised and reissued as Blue Juniata: Collected Poems. New York: Viking Press, 1968. "The Poet and the World." New Republic 70:30305 (April 27, 1932). Exile's Return: A Narrative of Ideas. New York: W. W. Norton, 1934. Revised and reissued as Exile's Return: A Literary Odyssey of the Twenties. New York: Viking Press, 1951. After the Genteel Tradition: American Writers Since 1910. New York: W. W. Norton, 1937. Revised and reissued as After the Genteel Tradition: American Writers 1910-1930. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1964. (Cowley's chapters in this book, which includes "Dos Passes: Poet Against the World," constitute nearly half of the text, of which he is editor as a whole; other contributors are Lionel Trilling, Newton Arvin, and John Peale Bishop.) "Unshaken Friend." New Yorker 20:28-32, 35-36 (April 1, 1944); 20:30-34, 36, 39-40 (April 8, 1944). The Portable Hemingway. New York: Viking Press, 1944. (Edited by Cowley.) The Portable Faulkner. New York: Viking Press, 1946. Rev. ed., 1967. (Edited by Cowley.) The Portable Hawthorne. New York: Viking Press, 1948. Rev. ed., 1969. (Edited by Cowley.) Stories ofF. Scott Fitzgerald. New York: Scribners, 1951. (Edited by Cowley.) The Literary Situation. New York: Viking Press, 1954. "Sociological Habit Patterns in Linguistic Transmogrification." Reporter 15:41-43 (September 20, 1956). Walt Whitmans Leaves of Grass: The First Edition. New York: Viking Press, 1959. (Edited by Cowley.) Black Cargoes: A History of the Atlantic Slave Trade. New York: Viking Press, 1962. (With Daniel P. Mannix.)

The Faulkner-Cowley File: Letters and Memories, 1944-1962. New York: Viking Press, 1966. Think Back on Us: A Contemporary Chronicle of the 1930s, edited by Henry Dan Piper. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967. A Many-Windowed House: Collected Essays on American Writers and American Writing, edited by Henry Dan Piper. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1970. Lesson of the Masters: An Anthology of the Novel from Cervantes to Hemingway. New York: Scribners, 1971. (Edited by Cowley with Howard E. Hugo.) A Second Flowering: Works and Days of the Lost Generation. New York: Viking Press, 1973. "The Greene-ing of the Portables." Book World (Washington Post) 7:332-54 (April 29, 1973). —And I Worked at the Writers Trade: Chapters of Literary History, 1918-1978. New York: Viking Press, 1978. "Prayer on All Saints' Day." Sewanee Review 86:563-65 (Fall 1978). "Remembering Allen Tate." Georgia Review 34:710 (Spring 1980). The Dream of the Golden Mountains: Remembering the 1930s. New York: Viking Press, 1980. The View from 80. New York: Viking Press, 1980.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Bergonzi, Bernard. "Malcolm Cowley." Contemporary Poets, edited by James Vinson. 2nd ed. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1975. Eisenberg, Diane U. Malcolm Cowley: A Checklist of His Writings, 1916-1973. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1975.

SECONDARY SOURCES Aaron, Daniel. Writers on the Left. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1961. Aldridge, John W. "The Case of Malcolm Cowley." The Nation 180:162-64 (February 19, 1955). . "Malcolm Cowley at Eighty." Michigan Quarterly Review 18:480-90 (Summer 1979). Blackmur, R. P. The Double Agent. New York: Arrow Editions, 1935. . Language as Gesture. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1954.

156 I AMERICAN WRITERS Burke, Kenneth. The Philosophy of Literary Form. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1941. . "I Dipped My Finger in the Lake and Wrote." New York Times Book Review, November 17, 1968, pp. 8, 76. Guth, Dorothy Lobrano, ed. Letters ofE. B. White. New York: Harper and Row, 1976. Hoffman, Frederick, Charles Allen, and Carolyn F. Ulrich. The Little Magazine. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1946. Jarrell, Randall. Poetry and the Age. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953. Kazin, Alfred. Starting Out in the Thirties. Boston: Little, Brown, 1965. Kriegel, Leonard. "Art and the Book Reviewer." The Nation 204:732-33 (June 5, 1967). O'Connor, Flannery. Mystery and Manners, edited by Sally and Robert Fitzgerald. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969. (Includes "The Fiction Writer and His Country.") Poirier, Richard. "The Difficulties of Modernism and the Modernism of Difficulty." Images and Ideas in American Culture, edited by Arthur Edelstein. Waltham, Mass.: Brandeis University Press, 1979. Rubin, Louis D., Jr. The Curious Death of the Novel. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1967. Sheaffer, Louis. Interview of Marshall A. Best. Columbia University Oral History Interview 6 (April 22, 1976). Pp. 213-18. (Written only; not on tape.) Sheehy, Carolyn. Sharing the Literary Feast: A Por-

trait of Malcolm Cowley. Chicago: Newberry Library, 1979. Simpson, Lewis P. "Malcolm Cowley and the American Writer." Sewanee Review 84:221-47 (Spring 1976). . "The Decorum of the Writer." Sewanee Review 86:566-71 (Fall 1978). Stegner, Wallace. The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Bernard De Voto. New York: Doubleday, 1974. Styron, William. "That Extraordinary Company of Writers Ironically Known as the Lost Generation." New York Times Book Review, May 6, 1973, pp. 8, 10-12. Tate, Allen. "A Regional Poet." New Republic 60:51-52 (August 28, 1929). . Memoirs and Opinions: 1926-1974. Chicago: Swallow, 1975. Thorpe, Willard. American Writing in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960. Weinstein, Allen. Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978. Wilson, Edmund. Letters on Literature and Politics: 1912-1972, edited by Elena Wilson. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977. Young, Philip. "For Malcolm Cowley: Critic, Poet, 1898-." Southern Review, n.s. 9:778-95 (Autumn 1973). Zwick, Edward, ed. Literature and Liberalism: An Anthology of Sixty Years of "The New Republic." Washington, D.C.: New Republic Book Company, 1976. —GEORGE CORE

W. E. B. Du Bois 1868-1963

J

UST as the outstanding black American figure of the nineteenth century was Frederick Douglass, so the outstanding black American figure of the twentieth century was William Edward Burghardt Du Bois. In both lives skin color and racial prejudice were decisive forces. Douglass and Du Bois devoted their strength and brilliance to the termination of racism, which influenced every aspect of American life and much of international affairs. Du Bois' life began during the presidency of Andrew Johnson and ended during the last days of the vice-presidency of Lyndon Johnson. But astonishing longevity was one of the least remarkable features of his achievement. With his Renaissance sweep, Du Bois was involved in all phases of domestic American life from the 1890's to the 1960's; and when racism, colonialism, and imperialism affected lives in other countries, he was deeply involved there too. The height of his influence lasted from about 1910 (when the power of Booker T. Washington and Tuskegee Institute waned) to about 1934 (when he resigned from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People [NAACP] and from the editorship of the Crisis). During that time no other figure spoke so completely for millions of black Americans; never before or since has such near unanimity existed among blacks for a comparable span of time.

In working to create an egalitarian, humane, abundant, and fruitful life for all people, Du Bois endured conflict, sacrifice, insult, and physical danger. This essay will focus on his voluminous writings, into which he put so much of his energy. But we must remember that they constitute only one part of his life, which falls naturally into six main divisions. Du Bois' student years began in public school in his native Great Barrington, in southwestern Massachusetts, where he graduated from high school in 1884. After an undergraduate career at Fisk University, in Nashville, Tennessee, where he received a B.A., Du Bois entered Harvard as a junior, on scholarship, in 1888. He graduated with another B.A., cum laude, in 1890 and did postgraduate work at Harvard on a fellowship, receiving his M.A. in history in 1891. He spent the years 1892-1894 at the University of Berlin on a Slater Fund Fellowship; this allowed him to travel through Europe undeterred by racism. In 1895 he received the Ph.D. from Harvard, the first black person in American history to obtain a doctorate in a secular subject. His dissertation, The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America, 1638-1870, was the first publication of the Harvard Historical Series and marked the beginning of the scientific study of black history.

757

158 I AMERICAN This first phase of preparation was followed by his early years as a teacher-scholar, from 1894 through 1910. Once he returned, via steerage, from Europe (with some $25 to his name), Du Bois applied for teaching positions, in those days necessarily at black schools only. He received offers from Wilberforce University in Ohio and from Tuskegee Institute in Alabama (where it was suggested that he teach mathematics, a subject not dear to his heart). The offer from Wilberforce arrived first, suggesting that Du Bois teach "the classics," and he accepted. From 1894 through 1896 he was professor of Greek and Latin, at a salary of $800 a year. He offered to teach German and sociology as well, but the first subject was regarded as of doubtful utility and the second as possibly subversive; Du Bois was confined to Vergil and Aristophanes. His agnosticism did not please the administration, nor did his successful opposition to the appointment of the university president's unqualified relative to a professorship. For Du Bois, the rigidity and remote location of Wilberforce, combined with his diminishing enthusiasm for the subjects he taught and his difficulty in extracting the agreed-upon salary from the administration, led to mounting discontent. One glorious experience sustained him: it was at Wilberforce that Du Bois married Nina Gomer, a student from an Iowa farm and the daughter of a black father and a white, German-born mother. Nina Gomer was to be his companion in struggle for over fifty years (until her death in 1950). They had two children, Burghardt Gomer, who died in infancy, and Nina Yolande. Soon an offer arrived from the University of Pennsylvania asking Du Bois to undertake— under its auspices and those of the Philadelphia Settlement House—a thorough study of the Philadelphia black community. At a salary of $900 a year, in a large modern city, the work would engage contemporary life and issues, not

WRITERS

antique languages. In those days, the university could not offer Du Bois a faculty appointment; but since he held a doctorate from Harvard the title of mere "fellow" was thought inappropriate. As a compromise Du Bois was called "assistant instructor in sociology," but he was not listed in the university catalog and was not assigned to teach any classes. His task was purely research. Out of that in 1899 came Du Bois' second book, The Philadelphia Negro, a trailblazing work in what is now called urban sociology. After the year of work in Philadelphia, Atlanta University (which then taught gradeschool, high-school, and college students) offered Du Bois an appointment as professor of economics and history, at another slight increase in salary. The subjects were congenial, and it was understood that Du Bois would take over a fledgling effort, begun in 1896, to organize annual conferences of specialists on "Negro Problems." From 1897 to 1910, Du Bois served on the faculty, directed the conferences, and edited their proceedings for publication. The third phase of Du Bois' life, that of organizer and agitator, began when he joined the executive board of the newly launched NAACP and became editor of its organ, the Crisis. Du Bois edited the Crisis from its first number, November 1910, until the issue of July 1934. When relations within the NAACP became intolerable, he accepted an offer from the president of Atlanta University, his dear friend John Hope, to return to that campus full-time. (Du Bois had already offered a summer course there in 1933 on "Karl Marx and the Negro," perhaps the first course of its kind in an American university.) Du Bois remained in Atlanta for a decade, and in this fourth phase of his career resumed his scholarly activities with undiminished vigor. He founded and edited the quarterly Phylon, served as chairman of the department of soci-

W.E.B.DUBOIS I 159 ology, taught a full load of classes, and produced his monumental Black Reconstruction, published in 1935. That book was followed by an ambitious effort to convey the essential history of African and African-derived peoples: Black Folk, Then and Now: An Essay in the History and Sociology of the Negro Race (1939). At almost the same time he published his first major effort to assess the significance of his own life, Dusk of Dawn. An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept (1940). In 1944 Du Bois was asked to return to the NAACP as director of special research, with particular responsibility in the areas of colonialism and Africa. This return to organizational activities marks the fifth phase of his life. Du Bois was then in his mid-seventies, and it is quite likely that the NAACP board considered this appointment a kind of honorific retirement for a founder of the association whose name had been synonymous with it for so many years. If so, they underestimated Du Bois, whose health was excellent and whose vigor was that of a person thirty years younger. He insisted on playing an active role, and in 1948, when differences with the board again arose, he resigned to work for the Council on African Affairs, the Peace Information Center, and political causes—including, when he was eighty-two, his own vigorous campaign for U.S. senator from New York on the Progressive party ticket. He received over 200,000 votes. Du Bois' last twelve years were devoted mainly to three enterprises. First was a massive historical novel, first conceived in the 1930's, published as a trilogy by Mainstream Publishers. The Black Flame (1957-1961) contains some thousand pages and tells, as only Du Bois can, what it meant to be a black man in the United States from 1876 to 1956. While there was much autobiographical material in the trilogy, Du Bois also worked on a more formal autobiography during the years 1959-1961. In 1966 the manuscript of this

work was taken out of Ghana, where he had gone five years earlier at the request of President Kwame Nkrumah, after the coup overthrowing the government, and gotten to the present writer, who edited it. It was published with an introduction in 1968 by International Publishers. Du Bois' third major undertaking, in his ninth decade, was the production of an encyclopedia of African history and cultures. He had originally projected such a work in 1909, but lack of funding made its realization impossible. When Nkrumah, a devoted follower of Du Bois', became Ghana's first prime minister (1957-1960) and then its president (19601966), Du Bois was invited by him to come to Ghana and organize the encyclopedia. For this reason, mainly, Du Bois went to Ghana in 1961, organized an international secretariat, and worked on the project until his death. The effort itself was abruptly terminated with the 1966 coup. Virtually throughout his life, regardless of his other activities, Du Bois worked as writer, editor, and scholar. He began writing for newspapers while still in high school. In April 1883 he served as western Massachusetts correspondent for the New York Globe (later The Freeman), an influential black newspaper; at least twentyseven columns, signed by him and edited by the militant T. Thomas Fortune, were published between April 1883 and May 1885. He wrote not only on the comings and goings of black people in the area but also about literature, social reform, and politics. From 1884 through the summer of 1885, he contributed occasionally to the Daily Republican of Springfield, Massachusetts. While at Harvard he wrote articles for the Boston Courantt a black weekly newspaper. Early in 1891 the Courant published his 8,500word essay (originally delivered before the National Colored League in Boston in March 1891) entitled "Does Education Pay?" To this question he not only replied with a vigorous yes

160 I AMERICAN but also insisted, contrary to the arguments of Booker T. Washington (who had not yet captured a national audience), that black people should have a full academic education. He held that limiting them to vocational education was degrading and that nothing was more fully "practical" than the best academic training. It is here that Du Bois first voiced an idea that was to reappear in his writing for decades: "Never make the mistake of thinking that the object of being a man is to make a carpenter—the object of being a carpenter is to be a man." Du Bois contributed regularly to newspapers from 1927 to 1961. His columns appeared in the New York Amsterdam News from the 1920's to 1944; the Pittsburgh Courier in the mid-1930's; the Chicago Defender from January 1945 through May 1948; Adam Clayton Powell's People's Voice in 1947 and 1948; the Chicago Globe in 1950; Paul Robeson and Louis Burnham's Freedom from 1951 through 1954; and in the left-wing weekly National Guardian from November 1948 until May 1961, shortly before Du Bois left for Ghana. In his columns Du Bois treated a range of national and international affairs, the arts, and current questions in social sciences—notably economics, psychology, and history. Du Bois also had an impact on the thinking of his time through his work as an editor, which began in 1885, when he worked for a year on the staff of the Fisk Herald, the university's monthly magazine. From late 1886 until October 1887, he served as a cultural editor and then as editor in chief from November until his graduation the following June. Two articles stand out from the rest of his work for the Fisk Herald. They describe his experiences in the mountain regions of Tennessee, where he had lived among poor black farming families during the summer of 1886. His intended purpose was that of a teacher, but he became a student as well: "Whatever the pupils

WRITERS

have gained, it was little to what I acquired." He was to write of this with great pathos in one of a collection of essays, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), where his description of the staunch, lovely Josie, with whose family Du Bois lived that summer, is not easily forgotten. The magazine also published "Tom Brown at Fisk," his first effort at writing a novella. Its significance lies in its autobiographical content rather than in its artistry. In it a young woman student goes off to teach in the mountains of Tennessee. Du Bois writes in the opening paragraph, "It's hard to be a woman, but a black one—!!" Du Bois' editorials are worth noting as hints of his own growing convictions. In November 1887 he urges that education at Fisk should depend not on the gifts of northern philanthropists but, rather, on the contributions of black people themselves; in the same issue he laments that the United States does not "protect the rights of those we educate!" Du Bois early showed his concern for the rights of women and especially the dignity and equality of women. Commenting in December 1887 on a meeting of women held in Nashville, he writes: "The Age of Woman is surely dawning." In the Fisk Herald of November 1887 he describes Afro-American music as "the strangest, sweetest" in the world and urges "the Negro race... to build up an American school of music which shall rival the grandest schools of the past." His essay on the spirituals, later published in The Souls of Black Folk, is the first serious examination of that remarkable genre. In April 1888, preparing for his own graduation, he asks: "Why isn't there a Fisk student at Leipzig, or a Fisk metaphysician at Berlin?" In his final editorial for the Fisk Herald, in June 1888, Du Bois wrote on behalf of the five graduates (three of whom were women) in his class: "We can look back with grateful hearts and forward with renewed zeal for the great

W.E.B.DUBOIS I 161 work before us." The gratitude was genuine, and to the end of his days Du Bois remained a fervent partisan of Fisk; the "zeal for the great work" inspired him throughout the next seventy-five years. The years at Harvard, beginning in the fall of 1888, were marvelously enriching. Du Bois had the good fortune to study under William James, Josiah Royce, and George Santayana in philosophy; Edward Channing and Albert Bushnell Hart in history; Barrett Wendell in English; and Francis Greenwood Peabody in ethics. In political economics he studied with Frank William Taussig, and in the natural sciences with Nathaniel Southgate Shaler. Justin Winsor, the university librarian, and Charles Eliot Norton, professor of art history, influenced the young Du Bois. Of these scholars James and Hart were of the most consequence to him; not only splendid teachers, they became his friends and regularly invited him to their homes. In later years, they followed his work. Laden with academic honors, Du Bois was chosen a commencement speaker in 1890. A young black man speaking on such an occasion received nationwide notice, especially addressing his chosen topic: "Jefferson Davis as a Representative American." Du Bois' point was that Davis' aggressiveness, physical bravery, and imperious will were human characteristics that could promote either social progress or its opposite. He suggested that Africa had something of a salutary value to offer America: the concept of service—of unselfish help to others. Sacrifice and service were more than words for Du Bois: with his energy and his genius he made them his legacy. Du Bois now embraced scholarship and under Hart's supervision spent more than two years examining contemporary sources and the few secondary accounts that treated the African slave trade and efforts to suppress it in the United States. In 1891 he presented the results

of his work to Hart's seminar and received his M.A. With Hart's support, Du Bois spoke at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association in Washington, D. C., in December 1891. His paper, "The Enforcement of the Slave-Trade Laws," anticipated his dissertation five years later. A young black man reporting on any subject before a group of white scholars in the nation's capital was unprecedented. More extraordinary, he described the realities of the slave trade and the complicity of the highest U.S. government officials in violating the law, and concluded: If slave labor was an economic god, then the slave trade was its strong right arm; and with Southern planters recognizing this and Northern capital unfettered by a conscience it was almost like legislating against economic laws to attempt to abolish the slave trade by statutes. Northern greed joined to Southern credulity was a combination calculated to circumvent any law, human or divine. The response of the audience was polite, here and there strained. Two of the leading historians present, Herbert Baxter Adams (the secretary of the association), of the Johns Hopkins University, and Edward G. Bourne, of Adelbert College in Michigan, published discerning and laudatory accounts of Du Bois' paper in national magazines. Adams made no mention of Du Bois' color, referring only to his "scholarly" paper and his Harvard connection; Bourne could not resist asking, "What would Southern teachers of history within the lifetime of many readers . . . have thought of going to Washington to listen, among other things, to a paper on the Enforcement of the Slave-Trade Laws by a colored man, the holder of a fellowship at Harvard University?" Despite the politeness of the assemblage and the appreciative comments, no institution represented at the meeting offered Du Bois a post.

162 I AMERICAN As a book, Du Bois' dissertation on the suppression of the African slave trade was widely and favorably reviewed. Some commentators were disturbed by the author's "use of a few adjectives here and there that characterized the advocate rather than the historian.'' On this question Du Bois' view was clear and unchanging: history and advocacy were inseparable but not identical. In applying for his fellowship at Harvard he had made plain that he sought to master scholarship to better serve his people; in Berlin, in 1893, he confided to his diary that this was his purpose and that, though it might cost him his life, he would fulfill it. The commitment to serve his people informed his own approach to history and his judgment of the works of other historians. In the closing chapter of Black Reconstruction, Du Bois wrote that in reading Charles A. and Mary R. Beard's The Rise of American Civilization one had "the comfortable feeling that nothing right or wrong is involved." Two differing social systems develop in the North and South, and "they clash, as winds and water strive." The Beards' mechanistic interpretation fails because human experience is not mechanistic. Furthermore, in such a presentation There is no room for the real plot of the story, for the clear mistake and guilt of building a new slavery of the working class in the midst of a fateful experiment in democracy, for the triumph of sheer moral courage and sacrifice in the abolition crusade; and for the hurt and struggle of degraded black millions in their fight for freedom and their attempt to enter democracy. Can all this be omitted or half suppressed in a treatise that calls itself scientific? The reader of Du Bois' writings—creative or scholarly—cannot mistake that the author's judgment of right and wrong, bringing forth "the hurt and struggle" of his people, is pre-

WRITERS

cisely his contribution to human knowledge. In the preface to The Suppression of the African Slave Trade the reader is told of the author's hope that the book will represent "a small contribution to the scientific study of slavery and the American Negro." Du Bois thought the absence of such a study bespoke racism and that the publication of his book was part of the struggle to overcome the "hurt." It followed that his book was the first to treat its controversial subject; it has not been supplanted. Du Bois' pioneering book explores the economics of slavery and the slave trade, and the militancy of the slaves, pointing up the significance of Toussaint L'Ouverture and the Haitian revolution (in which the peasants resisted for several months the French troops under Charles Leclerc). He examines in detail the place of slavery in national politics, especially in the political climate of the revolution (and its effect abroad), and in the formation and adoption of the Constitution. He also provides the first discussion of the movement in the South to legalize the slave trade: the reasons for it, the arguments against it, and the politics of legalization leading up to the Civil War. Du Bois' analysis of the roots of the Civil War in the tenth chapter of The Suppression of the African Slave Trade has not been surpassed by contemporary scholarship. His concept of the war as an attempted "political coup d'etat" by a desperate slaveholding oligarchy still has much to teach historians. Du Bois states repeatedly and courageously that acts to inhibit or to outlaw the slave trade "came very near being a dead letter" in Washington, D. C.; that "the execution of the laws within the country exhibits grave defects and even criminal negligence"; and that "the efforts of the executive during this period [the 1850's] were criminally lax and negligent." One must recall that Du Bois' book appeared

W.E.B.DUBO1S I 163 in 1896—when George Bancroft's concept of the divinity of the Founding Fathers and the Constitution held sway—to properly appreciate the daring of his observation that No American can study the connection of slavery with United States history, and not devoutly pray that his country may never have a similar special problem to solve, until it shows more capacity for such work than it has shown in the past. It is neither profitable nor in accordance with scientific truth to consider that whatever the constitutional fathers did was right, or that slavery was a plague sent from God and fated to be eliminated in time. Du Bois demonstrates that the enslavement of black people vitiated the quality of life in the United States as a whole. The controversy surrounding enslavement led to a war that threatened the very existence of the republic and that took half a million lives. The practices that sustained slavery have not yet been extirpated, and the question of their elimination "sometime must be fully answered," Du Bois warned. The second book that Du Bois wrote as a young scholar-teacher was at the request of a newly organized movement to reform the ills of urban slums. The College Settlements Association was formally established in May 1890 by representatives from Wellesley, Vassar, Smith, and Bryn Mawr. Toynbee Hall, founded in London in 1884, had a similar purpose and sponsored studies such as Charles Booth's Life and Labour of the People in London (18891897). Beatrice Potter (Mrs. Sydney Webb) was one of Booth's closest co-workers and a friend of Jane Addams, who visited the hall and inspected its work during the 1880's. From these visits came some of the inspiration for Addams' own Hull House in Chicago. Others associated in settlement work were such re-

markable people as Vida Scudder, Isabel Eaton, Lucy Maynard Salmon, Ellen Gates Starr, Samuel McCune Lindsay, Robert Archey Woods, and Susan P. Wharton. In the 1890's a reform movement that aimed at ousting political bossism was abroad in Philadelphia. The black ghetto tended to favor the city machine, since it provided some jobs and was responsible for the appointment of the first black policemen in the city. The settlement movement was predominantly the work of wealthy people who thought that a study of the actual conditions in the ghetto might assist both settlement work and the reform effort. The result was Du Bois' The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study. Isabel Eaton, who worked for the settlement, wrote a lengthy appendix on domestic servants and assisted Du Bois in gathering data for the book. To appreciate The Philadelphia Negro one must bear in mind not only the reformist and upper-class auspices under which it was produced, but also the period in which it appeared: lynchings were commonplace, Jim Crow laws were on the rise in the South, and "scientific" racism—in history, psychology, anatomy, and anthropology—was being widely promulgated. Du Bois' basic argument is that black people are fully human and entitled to all the dignity and benefits of American citizenship. The word "Negro," he says, should be capitalized "because I believe that eight million Americans are entitled to a capital letter." Du Bois attacks the commonplace idea—still prevalent, if not dominant—that poor people are poor because they are poor, that is, unworthy. He does not deny the deficiencies of black people in Philadelphia and in the nation, but his whole emphasis is on the social, economic, and political causes of their impoverishment. The ghetto is symptomatic of the deficiencies of the society; crime is a social phenomenon, and

164 I AMERICAN the idea of "Negro criminality" is a piece of racist slander. The high mortality among blacks is not a racial characteristic but a reflection of socioeconomic hardships. Du Bois' arguments ran counter to those in the dominant literature and to the received ideas about the black American population. As for the privations of immigrants in general, Du Bois points out fundamental differences between the situation of European immigrants and of the blacks coming into the cities and into the North—a point still not grasped by some sociologists. Du Bois' rejection of social Darwinism—a doctrine then all but unquestioned—is explicit. He insists that "in the realm of social phenomena the law of survival is greatly modified by human choice, whim and prejudice. And consequently no one knows when one sees a social outcast how far this failure is due to deficiencies of the individual, and how far to the accidents or injustice of his environment. This is especially the case with the Negro." Scattered throughout the book are suggestions, some only now being developed, about the black family, children, and the church. Above all, the idea that differences existed among blacks as among any people was new. In The Philadelphia Negro Du Bois fully documents for the first time the realities of racism: its effect on jobs, dignity, and the "sheer question of bread and butter." Racism involves "matters of life and death"; what is at stake for black people are "their homes, their food, their children, their hopes." Although he led struggles for civil rights, Du Bois insisted that they were not the heart of the problem. Unless one understands this position it is not possible to understand Du Bois' differences with the board of the NAACP in later years. In politics during this turn-of-the-century period, Du Bois rejected the path of radicalism and socialism. But if those who had financed his project hoped it would confirm the idea that

WRITERS

Philadelphia's political troubles stemmed from ghetto support of the machine, they obtained no comfort from Du Bois' findings. "How long," he writes in one of several cries from the heart, "can a city teach its black children that the road to success is to have a white face? How long can a city do this and escape the inevitable penalty?" For racism to pervade the city "is morally wrong, politically dangerous, industrially wasteful, and socially silly. It is the duty of the whites to stop it, and to do so primarily for their own sakes." The existing situation, he wrote, "is a disgrace to the city—a disgrace to Christianity, to its spirit of justice, to its common sense." It is a battle for humanity and human culture. If in the hey-day of the greatest of the world's civilizations, it is possible for one people ruthlessly to steal another, drag them helpless across the water, enslave them, debauch them, and then slowly murder them by economic and social exclusion until they disappear from the face of the earth—if the consummation of such a crime be possible in the twentieth century, then our civilization is vain and the republic is a mockery and a farce. Du Bois later criticized The Philadelphia Negro in the Crisis (March 1932) for a certain "provincialism." He had examined the oppression of black people "from the point of view of religion, humanity and sentiment" instead of socioeconomic facts and class alignments. There is validity to his hindsight; yet The Philadelphia Negro remains a classic not only for breaking new ground—for the abundance of its data and the scrupulousness of its research— but also because it is a passionate work of humanistic science. That the University of Pennsylvania turned to Du Bois to undertake the study was natural. He alone among black scholars held a doctorate from a renowned university; his dissertation had

W.E.B.DUBOIS I 165 been published as an important work of scholarship; and his postgraduate study in Germany was considered valuable for any American scholar. But the collaboration of a black man and a white woman—the black man being the senior author—can be seen as unusual then and now. Its success appears in the work and in the fact that Du Bois and Eaton remained friends until Eaton's death thirty-five years later. On November 19, 1897, Du Bois delivered a paper in Philadelphia to the forty-fourth meeting of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. He had now finished the research for The Philadelphia Negro (the writing was done the next year, at Atlanta University). Speaking on "The Study of the Negro Problems," he urged the establishment in a southern black university of "a centre of sociological research" into these problems, supported by such universities as Harvard, Columbia, Johns Hopkins, and Pennsylvania. He noted that Tuskegee Institute and Hampton Institute sponsored conferences on "practical" matters that touched only rural populations. In 1896 Atlanta University had begun to organize the national center for black research that he described, but support was hard to come by: " . . . it is certainly to be desired that Atlanta University may be enabled to continue this work " Du Bois concluded: Finally the necessity must again be emphasized of keeping clearly before students the object of all science, amid the turmoil and intense feeling that cloud the discussion of a burning social question. We live in a day when in spite of the brilliant accomplishments of a remarkable century, there is current much flippant criticism of scientific work; when the truthseeker is too often pictured as devoid of human sympathy, and careless of human ideals. We are still prone in spite of all our culture to sneer at the heroism of the laboratory while we cheer

the swagger of the street broil [brawl]. At such a time true lovers of humanity can only hold higher the pure ideals of science, and continue to insist that if we would solve a problem we must study it, and that there is but one coward on earth, and that is the coward that dare not know. None of the universities named by Du Bois— nor any other except his own Atlanta University—acted upon his suggestion. Du Bois was convinced that oppression of black people persisted in the United States because educated, influential people did not know the facts. If the facts could be shown, he thought, racism would be vanquished. This vision powered his exhausting work on the Atlanta University Conferences for the Study of the Negro Problems, which he directed—with a budget that never exceeded $5,000 annually—for the next thirteen years. The purpose of the conferences, especially as conceived by the university president, Horace Bumstead, and a banker-trustee, George Bradford, was to focus annually on the problems of urban southern blacks. The first such gathering had been held in 1896 and was summarized in Mortality Among Negroes in Cities (1896), published as Atlanta University Publication No. 1; the next year, the proceedings of the second conference were issued as Social and Physical Condition of Negroes in Cities (1897). When Du Bois was offered an appointment as professor of economics and sociology in 1897, it was understood that he would also be responsible for organizing the annual conferences and supervising publication of the proceedings. From 1897 through 1910 he did both, with Augustus G. Dill of the Atlanta sociology department as his fellow editor of publications. Under Du Bois' guidance, the conferences were to study many aspects of black urban life, with the assistance of experts throughout the

166 I AMERICAN country. Each subject would be reexamined every ten years to see what changes had occurred and why, and what to do about them. (The conference of 1902 investigated "The Negro Artisan"; that of 1912 updated and analyzed findings on the same subject.) Among the speakers who addressed these gatherings were such nationally known figures as Franz Boas, Booker T. Washington, Jane Addams, Mary White Ovington, Monroe Work, Washington Gladden, Franklin B. Sanborn, Florence Kelley, and Walter F. Willcox. In scope, seriousness, and effect, nothing approached the Atlanta conferences. It was one of Du Bois' keen disappointments that they did not survive after his move to the NAACP. He tried to revive them in the 1940's, after his return to Atlanta as head of the sociology department; the twenty-sixth conference, "Conference of Negro Land Grant Colleges for Coordinating a Program of Cooperative Social Studies," was held in 1943. But in 1944 Du Bois became director of special research for the NAACP, and the conferences once again ceased. The experience of researching and writing The Philadelphia Negro and the persuasion of Willcox brought Du Bois to undertake several studies of the South for the federal government. The first of these was issued as part of the Department of Labor Bulletin (January 1898) and entitled "The Negroes of Farmville, Virginia: A Social Study." Du Bois had discovered that many of the migrants to the ghetto of Philadelphia had come from Farmville, and he spent July and August 1897 in the town and "lived with the colored people, joined in their social life, and visited their homes." Three-fifths of the population in this seat of Prince Edward County, Virginia, was black. Du Bois wrote that his study had "but the one object of ascertaining, with as near an approach to scientific accuracy as possible, the real condition of the

WRITERS

Negro." His method was heavily statistical and examined the demography and sociology of the black population, especially education, occupations, and family conditions. He also studied the nearby community of Israel Hill, founded by freed slaves of the John Randolph family; at the time of Du Bois' researches 123 black descendants and one white family lived there. In his conclusion, Du Bois remarked on "the growing differentiation of classes among Negroes," a phenomenon few others had noticed. He thought Farmville typical of "the condition of the Virginia Negro" at the time, but added that only further study could say for sure. He found in the community of black people "a peculiar hopefulness" and a belief "that one day black people will have all rights they are now striving for." Another study by Du Bois appeared in the Department of Labor Bulletin (May 1899): "The Negro in the Black Belt: Some Social Sketches." These "sketches" were "based mainly on seminary notes made by members of the senior class" (their names were given in a footnote) of Atlanta University. The students were "born and bred" in the areas described, which included one town in Alabama and five in Georgia. The conclusion indicates the limits of Du Bois' analytical scope at the time: he suggests that, among the people studied, those who had managed to acquire some property, married with care, and provided education for their children "represent, so far as they go, a solution of the Negro problem." "In them," Du Bois went on, "lies the hope of the American Negro, and—shall we not say—to a great extent, the hope of the Republic." A final study by Du Bois for the Department of Labor was published in its Bulletin of July 1901. After a brief examination of the policy on land for the landless black people during and just after the Civil War, the task of this study

W.E.B.DUBOIS I 167 is placed: "To make clear the steps by which 470,000 black freedmen and their children have in one of the former slave States [Georgia] gained possession of over a million acres of land in a generation, the value of this land and its situation, the conditions of ownership, and the proper interpretation of these statistics as social phenomena." The precise method of the study is explained: examination of printed and manuscript sources and inquiry on the ground. The history of Georgia is sketched; the black population is mapped by county, for each decade since the census of 1790; and the occupations and incomes as of 1900 of Georgia's black people are presented. The history and current conditions of landholding by black people in the state are given in detail with an account of tenant farming, sharecropping, and the role of the merchant. The actual economic conditions of black people in every county are tabulated, and the text often gives salient bits of history; for example, that Liberty County "voted solidly against secession" and why. The final two studies by Du Bois, done directly for the federal government, were undertaken for the Bureau of the Census. Bulletin No. 8 included "The Negro Farmer" (1904), a statistical study of every category of black farmer throughout the United States—owners, renters, sharecroppers, and tenants. It offers details on acreage, products, and values, and then shows the percentage of total farm production that comes from black people. Among the special reports issued by the Bureau of the Census in 1906 was Supplementary Analysis and Derivative Tables, Twelfth Census of the United States, with a chapter called, again, "The Negro Farmer." This reprinted the earlier bulletin, but added thirty-seven pages of supplementary analysis containing elaborate tables that compared average expenditures of

black and white farmers in 1900 and giving data on Indian and "Mongolian" (meaning Asian American) farmers throughout the country. During the summer of 1906 Du Bois lived in Lowndes County, Alabama, where, at the request of the Bureau of the Census and at considerable personal risk, he directed a careful study of the working and living conditions of black tenant farmers and sharecroppers. This was duly delivered to the bureau in Washington, but publication was withheld. Years later when Du Bois tried to retrieve the manuscript, he was told that it had been burned. He believed that the study had been suppressed for its unsparing criticism of the atrocious conditions endured by the black farmers. In connection with Du Bois' detailed studies of the living conditions of southern blacks, the point suggests itself that although he was born in Massachusetts and spent most of his life outside the South, he lived in Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia for about twenty-eight years and visited the region regularly throughout his life. His extensive personal experience and his studies of the history and conditions of the area gave Du Bois expertise in the sociology of the South. The point is important biographically, for it refutes claims made by his opponents—notably Booker T. Washington—that Du Bois was a northern intellectual who knew very little about black people in general and about southern black people in particular. This is sheer nonsense. While Du Bois was teaching at Atlanta, directing the Atlanta conferences, and producing government-sponsored studies, he was carrying his crusade into the pages of national magazines. The first such article was "Strivings of the Negro People" in the Atlantic Monthly (August 1897). Later included in somewhat re-

168 I AMERICAN vised form in The Souls of Black Folk, it is the source of Du Bois' often quoted lines: ... 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 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. One ever feels his two-ness,— an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. "A Negro Schoolmaster in the New South," which describes his teaching experience in Tennessee, was also published first in the Atlantic Monthly (January 1899) and later in The Souls of Black Folk. For the mostly white readers of the magazine, these two essays must have been ennobling—or jarring—experiences. Certainly nothing like them had been published in such a forum before. At about the same time, Du Bois' writings began to appear in the Independent, a New York weekly that was widely read among Protestant clergymen; in the Nation, later owned by Oswald Garrison Villard (who, in part because of Du Bois, moved away from the Tuskegee movement to become a founder of the NAACP); and in Harpers Weekly, Colliers, Outlook (Theodore Roosevelt's favorite magazine), and the Hearst-owned World Today. These articles treated questions of black crime, education, struggles, and organizations, and brought what were then the radical views of a black intellectual before hundreds of thousands of white readers. Du Bois continued to contribute scholarly articles to learned journals during this period; his essays and reviews appeared in the American Historical Review and the Annals

WRITERS

of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.

And during these years he continued to write for black publications, notably the 15,000-word study "The Problem of Housing the Negro," which was published in six issues of the Hampton Institute's Southern Workman between June 1901 and February 1902. He also wrote for Jesse Max Barber's militant Atlanta-based monthly, Voice of the Negro, which in 1905 published his four-part article on the history of serfdom and ancient and modern slavery. The September 1906 pogrom in Atlanta resulted in the destruction of the publication's press and editorial offices, and Barber himself fled to Chicago. Du Bois continued to write for the journal during the year it survived in the North; most important was his writing on the Niagara movement, the all-black predecessor of the NAACP that he founded with William Monroe Trotter. In this period Du Bois also contributed reviews to the Dial, the Chicago literary journal. In the issue of April 16, 1901, he mounted a slashing assault on The American Negro, a cynical, hateful attack on black people written by a black author, William Hannibal Thomas. Another of his reviews, "The Southerner's Problem" (May 1,1905), attacks two books by leading white southern writers of the period: Thomas Nelson Page's The Negro: The Southerner's Problem and William Benjamin Smith's The Color Line. Page was a kind of benevolent racist; Smith, a brutal and vindictive one. Du Bois took each of them apart. This, too, was new fare in a journal with nationwide circulation and largely white readers. It was in the Dial (July 16, 1901)—not in The Souls of Black Folk, as is generally asserted—that Du Bois first publicized his opposition to Booker T. Washington. The essay, in modified form, later provided the basis for the historic chapter "Of Booker T. Washington and Others" in The Souls of Black Folk. Written as

W.E.B.DUBOIS I 169 a review of Washington's autobiography, Up from Slavery, the essay dissented from that work with great respect and extreme tact. Du Bois makes the point that Washington is the black leader designated by dominant whites: Among the Negroes, Mr. Washington is still far from a popular leader. Educated and thoughtful Negroes everywhere are glad to honor him and aid him, but all cannot agree with him. He represents in Negro thought the old attitude of adjustment to environment.... Naming black leaders such as Charles Waddell Chesnutt, Kelly Miller, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Archibald and Francis Grimke, all of whom spurned the Tuskegee movement, Du Bois added that while they had no common program, all . . . seek nevertheless that self-development and self-realization in all lines of human endeavor which they believe will eventually place the Negro beside the other races They believe, therefore, also in the higher education of Fisk and Atlanta Universities; they believe in selfassertion and ambition; and they believe in the right of suffrage for blacks on the same terms with whites. The single most effective and most widely reproduced essay from this period was Du Bois' "Credo," first published in the Independent (October 6, 1904). This 500-word prose poem seeks to bestow on black people peace, justice, equality, endurance, ultimate optimism, and pride. It was reproduced in full in the Literary Digest the week after it first appeared, published in poster form and hung on the walls of black homes across the country, and reprinted in most states—including some in the South. At least one periodical, the British Friend (published by the Quakers in London), picked it up. With this widespread attention to the "Credo" and the appearance in 1903 of The Souls of

Black Folk, Du Bois' stature as a black leader, second only to Washington, was established. Du Bois' speeches and writings became increasingly militant after the explicit break with the Tuskegee movement that The Souls of Black Folk represented and also in response to accumulating racist assaults on black people both in the streets and in print (during this time Thomas Dixon, Jr., began his career as author of such best-sellers as The Clansman, upon which the film Birth of a Nation was based). Typical of the change was his speech "Caste in America," delivered many times in city after city, beginning in February 1904 before the Twentieth Century Club in New York City. This frontal assault on racism, elitism, and class oppression in the United States (Du Bois' words) was printed in full or in substantial part in at least eleven newspapers. Such extensive notice was unusual for any speaker and unprecedented for a black militant. Another speech, "The Negro in Large Cities," which discussed the necessity and propriety of decent education, jobs, and housing for black people, was published in two Brooklyn newspapers and the New York Herald Tribune on September 29, 1907, and in the New York Evening Post the next day. Acknowledgment of Du Bois' leadership came when he, not Washington, was asked by the New York Times to survey the fifty years since the execution of John Brown in December 1859. This was published as "Fifty Years Among the Black Folk" on December 12,1909. Du Bois emphasized the need for self-realization on the part of his people: they were "girding themselves to fight in the van of progress" not only for themselves but for "the emancipation of women, universal peace, democratic government, the socialization of wealth, and human brotherhood." It is not surprising, given only the achievements mentioned here, that the convention in 1909 that organized what was to become the

770 / AMERICAN NAACP unanimously decided to offer Du Bois a position on the NAACP executive board. He was put in charge of the research and publication department and was assigned the central responsibility of editing the Crisis. Before we move to the next phase (19101934), that of the activist Du Bois, a look at his masterwork and the other late fruits of the previous, scholarly period is in order. The appearance in 1903 of The Souls of Black Folk marked not only a milestone in Du Bois' life but also a landmark in American history and literature. The remarkable book on the black experience in America, received no less remarkably by the public, has been a recurrent phenomenon—one thinks of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), Richard Wright's Native Son (1940), Lillian Smith's Strange Fruit (1944), Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952), James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), and Alex Haley's Roots (1976). Indeed, just as one could well use the black experience as the focus for a history of the nation, so one might use its literary expressions to illuminate all American literature. In each case the artistry, the mood, and the historical moment come together to produce not only a book but also a social explosion. The Souls of Black Folk—issued by a relatively minor house in Chicago, A. C. McClurg & Co.—was reviewed promptly, widely, and on the whole enthusiastically. A surprising number of reviewers described it as the kind of book that came once in a generation and predicted that it would last—that in fact it was a classic. And surely, after almost a century, it has earned that status. Several of the fourteen chapters of the book had been published earlier in different form, but five were entirely new: "Of the Wings of Atalanta," "Of the Passing of the First-Born," "Of Alexander Crummell," "Of the Coming of John," and "Of the Sorrow Songs." The book

WRITERS

as a whole is redolent of Du Bois' loving pride in his people and his belief that they have an ennobling mission to perform for mankind out of their oppressed condition and their great artistry. The volume affirms the centrality of the so-called Negro question to American history and society. It also reflects a kind of national awareness characteristic of Du Bois' mind and a premonition of the impact upon black Americans of the new turning of the United States toward imperialism—what he called "the recent course of the United States toward weaker and darker peoples in the West Indies, Hawaii, and the Philippines." Each essay shines, but the ones in which he describes the wonderful Josie, his pioneering study of the spirituals, his loving portrait of Alexander Crummell, and the excruciatingly intense essay on the death of his son, Burghardt Gomer, are examples of magnificent prose. Even the title of the book is important. Just as Du Bois in his study of black Philadelphians was careful to say in his preface that he was writing of blacks as people, so Souls proclaimed itself at a time when black people were all too commonly reckoned not merely inferior but subhuman. The timeliness of the book no less than its impressive content explains the force felt by the more sensitive of Du Bois' white readers, such as Ovington, Gladden (then an influential Christian reformer), and Henry James. At the same time the genius of the work and its militancy (extraordinary in its day) also moved tens of thousands of black people. Eugene Gordon, the black author and journalist, remarked to this writer that when he had been a schoolboy in the South, just before World War I, his teacher read the book to the class and that no other experience had been so inspiring to him. The poet Langston Hughes wrote to Du Bois on May 22,1956: "I have just read again your The Souls of the Black Folk—for perhaps the tenth

W.E.B.DUBOIS I 171 time—the first time being some forty years ago when I was a child in Kansas. Its beauty and passion and power are as moving and as meaningful as ever." In general, the period from about 1890 to 1910 has been aptly characterized by Ray ford W. Logan as the post-Civil War nadir for blacks in America. In that twenty-year period, disfranchisement was completed—in Mississippi (1890) and in Oklahoma (1910); the Populist movement was crushed; lynching became an established and recurring practice, claiming some 2,000 victims in those two decades; and Jim Crow was legalized in every southern state and in Washington, D. C. With these racist practices went the promulgation of racist ideas—the misuse of intelligence tests, faked experiments that contrasted the brains of black and white people (notably by Robert Bennett Bean at the Johns Hopkins University), the racist anthropology of Madison Grant, and racist historiography (such as the studies by William Archibald Dunning and his disciples at Columbia University, in the early 1900's). The commercial newspapers and magazines were filled with racist stories and "jokes," and runaway best-sellers in fiction were coming from the likes of Thomas Dixon, Jr., who wrote about the "horrors" of Reconstruction as black rabble ruled and ruined the prostrate South. Illustrating the concern among blacks over racist historiography was a letter of July 12, 1909, to Du Bois from James R. L. Diggs, president of the Virginia Theological Seminary and College in Lynchburg. Diggs proposed that black people write accounts of Reconstruction in each of the southern states. "We must get our views of that period before the public," he wrote. "The series of works by southern writers presents our white brothers' side of the question but I do not find the proper credit given our people for what good they really did in those trying days." In December, Du Bois delivered his sec-

ond (and last) paper before the American Historical Association in New York City. Entitled "Reconstruction and Its Benefits," it was published in the American Historical Review in July 1910. Thus began a revision in thought among historians of this crucial subject that was to culminate twenty-five years later in Du Bois' magnum opus, Black Reconstruction. Du Bois had already published his biography of John Brown in 1909, to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Brown's martyrdom. The idea originated when Ellis P. Oberholtzer, editor of the American Crisis Biographies series, invited Du Bois to contribute one among some twenty-five volumes planned, each a biography of a leading figure in American history. It was suggested that Du Bois do a biography of Frederick Douglass, and he accepted; but the publisher learned that Booker T. Washington wished to write Douglass' life. Du Bois graciously agreed to do another assignment, proposing at first Nat Turner, a subject declined by the publisher, and finally settling on Brown. In his preface to the biography, Du Bois observes that "the only excuse for another life of John Brown is an opportunity to lay new emphasis upon the material which they [other biographers] have so carefully collected, and to treat these facts from a different point of view." That he does, and "the man who of all [white] Americans," as he wrote, "has perhaps come nearest to touching the real souls of black folk" is seen anew and with sympathy by one such soul. The book does contain a number of factual errors—Du Bois tended to be rather careless in such matters—and later research has added significantly to our understanding of Brown and his efforts. But on Brown's overcoming of racism, his identification with black people, and the consequent sacrifice of his own life in an effort to end their enslavement, no book has supplanted Du Bois' and few have approached it.

772 / AMERICAN WRITERS In John Brown, Du Bois insists that "the cost of liberty is less than the price of repression, even though that cost be blood." He emphatically reaffirms that idea in the pages added to the 1962 edition, pointing to the revolutions in Russia and China as confirming his view. He once told this writer that of all his books John Brown was his favorite; it was a great joy to him that he lived to see the 1962 edition. From 1910 to 1934 Du Bois gave himself chiefly to tasks of organization, agitation, and propaganda. By 1910 he had concluded that he had been mistaken in believing that racism persisted because white people of influence and culture did not know enough about it. He and others had devoted many years to putting the truth before the public in works that were fully documented and incontrovertible. But racism had not disappeared, either in ideology or in practice; if anything it seemed more pervasive than it had twenty years earlier. Du Bois decided that, although scholarship was useful in fighting it, collective, organized agitation and propaganda were needed to effect political change. This transition from scholarship to activism had its roots in many of Du Bois' preoccupations before 1910; the divisions of his life indicated here were not clear-cut but represent gradual changes in emphasis. Thus in the period from 1896 to 1910, working mainly as a scholar-teacher, Du Bois had also been the main organizer of opposition to the Tuskegee movement. In 1905 this opposing group organized the Niagara movement, which was dedicated to the achievement of full equality for black people in the United States and which rejected what its members saw as acceptance of second-class education and employment by the Tuskegee movement. Also during this period Du Bois founded the Moon, an illustrated weekly magazine published in Memphis, Tennessee, from December 1905 to July 1906. Only three issues are known

to have survived. Most of its content—brief editorial commentary on matters of direct concern to blacks—came from Du Bois' pen. Then, with Freeman H. M. Murray and Lafayette M. Hershaw, Du Bois produced the Horizon, the monthly organ of the Niagara movement, from January 1907 to July 1910. For his part Du Bois called attention to articles and books of interest to black people and expressed brief opinions on politics, the women's movement, and the labor movement. Occasionally he would make his point with a short story such as "Principles," a satire on a white "do-gooder" who urges patience among black people; or "Constructive Work," an attack on the pusillanimous and compromising "race leaders." Both stories appeared in the December 1909 issue. Du Bois' sheer energy and capacity for work had earlier led him to assume the responsibilities of secretary of the Pan-African Congress meeting in London in 1900. For it he wrote "To the Peoples of the World," which called for some modicum of justice for the darker peoples. This meeting marked the beginning of the PanAfrican movement, to be revived by Du Bois in 1919. The Niagara movement, in its break with the Tuskegee group, merged with white organizations seeking the same ends, resulting in the NAACP. Among them were anti-imperialist groups, notably the American Anti-Imperialist League, whose president was Moorfield Storey, formerly Senator Charles Summer's secretary and by this time a leading attorney. Storey became the first president of the NAACP. The movement also received support from radicals, many of them active socialists, such as William English Walling, Mary White Ovington, Charles Edward Russell, and Florence Kelley. Others came out of the abolitionist tradition and retained strong progressive outlooks, such as Oswald Garrison Villard, the grandson of William Lloyd Garrison. The socialist component in the founding membership of the

W.E.B.DUBOIS I 173 NAACP was not, of course, exclusively white. Du Bois certainly thought of himself as a socialist by 1907 and joined the party in 1911. The outstanding black figure was Du Bois. He was a distinguished author, a man of uncommon learning, and had been tried and proven as an effective editor and public speaker. Taking their futures into their hands, the Du Boises decided to accept the invitation to move to New York and lead in the publication and research work of the fledgling NAACP. The president and trustees of Atlanta University, though greatly admiring Du Bois, did not raise objections to his leaving, for—as Du Bois understood—his militancy was not helping the university attract funds from wealthy donors. For almost twenty-five years after the move, Du Bois stood at the center of the struggle for the freedom of black Americans and for a loosening of the bonds on colonial peoples throughout the world, especially in Africa and the West Indies. The first issue of the Crisis, dated November 1910, numbered 1,000 copies. Under Du Bois' editorship the circulation soon reached 20,000 and continued to spiral upward until, by the end of World War I, the magazine had 100,000 subscribers. The vast majority of readers, like the membership of the organization, were black. When one recalls that blacks in the United States numbered some ten million in this period, about 75 percent of them functionally illiterate and 80 percent of them living in the South (where receiving the magazine was dangerous), the growth of the Crisis from its shoestring beginnings is one of the impressive success stories in the history of American journalism. Of course, this success corresponded to the growth of the liberation movement among black people as a whole, but the magazine encouraged and to some extent directed the movement. Du Bois was a fine editor, prompt and painstaking, and the Crisis boasted attractive layouts, excellent photography, extensive coverage of na-

tional and international events, and informed attention to the arts. The editorials were short, direct, and witty; the articles, brief and clear. For years, black families and friends gathered in their homes early each month, and one among them would read the Crisis, especially Du Bois' "Along the Color Line" or "Opinion" or "Postscript"; for a generation scores of thousands asked "What did the Doctor say this month?" Du Bois' audience was worldwide. His writings helped educate a generation of Africans, such as Jomo Kenyatta, Kwame Nkrumah, and Benjamin Nnamdi Azikiwe; in Asia, Ho Chi Minh commented on the writings in the Crisis. Du Bois made the magazine a leader in the Black Renaissance of the early 1920's. He ran poetry, short-story, and drama contests, and published the first works of Arna Bontemps, Langston Hughes, and Gwendolyn Brooks. Jessie Fauset served as literary editor, and her own writing often appeared in the magazine, along with that of Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, and Jean Toomer. Aaron Douglas, Richmond Barthe, and Elizabeth Prophet were among the artists Du Bois encouraged. The genius of Paul Robeson, Roland Hayes, and Marian Anderson was first called to the attention of black America in the Crisis. In this same decade, Du Bois founded a theater movement for black writers and performers in Harlem and spoke out for the need of black artists and writers to create honestly—neither hiding nor prettifying their experience. He believed that all literature of any consequence partook of social or moral advocacy, and he urged black artists to use their art to liberate their people. Du Bois also helped to put Eugene O'Neill, Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, and the publishers Alfred Harcourt, Horace Liveright, and Alfred A. Knopf in touch with black artists and the black experience. Through the Crisis

174 I AMERICAN and through private efforts, he similarly informed Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Albert Einstein, Albert Schweitzer, and Clarence Darrow, while introducing them to readers of his magazine. Du Bois even started a children's magazine, The Brownies' Book, which in its short life (January 1920 to December 1921) carried brief editorials and stories by Du Bois and others, including Effie Lee Newsome. Throughout his twenty-four years at the Crisis, Du Bois was in demand as a lecturer, especially to college and church audiences both black and white. He spoke in every state and in hundreds of cities. His style was restrained; he almost always read from a manuscript; his voice had great resonance; and his appearance was dignified. One of the subjects Du Bois frequently lectured on was the need for a black university system unfettered by religious, political, or financial obligations—a view he continued to express long after the death of Booker T. Washington in 1915. In action, too, Du Bois was unremitting in his insistence on educational excellence: his effort to cleanse Fisk University of a racist administration forced the resignation of its president in 1926. Having suggested Du Bois' intense activism as an editor and lecturer during these years, we must defy neat categories and acknowledge his writing of this period. A paper written when he attended the First Universal Races Congress of 1911 in London, "The Economics of Negro Emancipation in the United States," reflected his shift from moralistic to materialistic arguments, in accordance with his deepening socialistic commitment. Du Bois now felt that emancipation would have to come through the economic system, and he viewed the future with confidence on three counts: that the interests of the white working people favored black emancipation; that the dogged "determination" of

WRITERS

the black American could not be thwarted forever; and that courageous white people—he mentioned Jane Addams and John Dewey— were increasingly moving to end racial discrimination. The problem, Du Bois insisted, was worldwide and derived from the determination of those in power "to reduce human labor to the lowest depth in order to derive the greatest personal profit." In a shorter essay, "The Rural South" (1912), Du Bois analyzed the region's economic plight, calling attention to the existence of peonage on a mass scale (despite its illegality under federal law), the almost total disfranchisement of black people, and the dire effects of all this on the South. Another short essay, "The Negro in Literature and Art" (1913), discussed such literary figures as Paul Laurence Dunbar and Charles Waddell Chesnutt. Du Bois described how racism impoverishes a culture; but he predicted that from the rich "mass of material" by then extant, a veritable renaissance in black art would soon take place, as indeed in the 1920's it did. As a lifelong advocate of political independence, Du Bois early supported Woodrow Wilson's New Freedom and thus helped to bring about the first substantial departure of the black vote from the Republican party, which aided Wilson's narrow victory over Charles Evans Hughes in 1916. But Du Bois broke bitterly with Wilson over the racism in his administration and over American military intervention in Mexico and Haiti. Du Bois published two penetrating analyses of the war in Europe shortly before the United States entered it in April 1917. "The African Roots of War" (1915) preceded the writings of both John Hobson and Lenin on imperialism and its part in the origins of that war. The article was one of Du Bois' most influential and was reprinted in many newspapers. It is reformist in nature, appealing for "clean hands and

W.E.B.DUBOIS I 175 honest hearts." But the view that racism and the colonial system were fundamental to an understanding of what was going on in Europe was new. Du Bois also called attention to the "awakening leaders" of China, India, and Egypt, and suggested that the black American may be duty-bound to help awaken the African continent—a hint at the major Pan-African movement he would soon organize. In "Of the Culture of White Folk" (1917) Du Bois points to his earlier warnings that persistent racism would so eat away the character of white people that they would descend to massacring each other. He also advances the idea that if colonialism and racism survive World War I, they will induce an even greater slaughter in the future. Du Bois supported the entry of the United States into World War I. He thought at the time—especially because the February Revolution in Russia in 1917 had forced the czar to abdicate—that the Allied powers represented a less retrogressive force than the Central Powers of Imperial Germany, the Empire of AustriaHungary, and Turkey. He also accepted Wilson's slogans about self-determination and fighting for democracy. Then too, he thought that resistance to the war by black people—assuming it could be brought about—would prove suicidal. Indeed, realizing its need for black labor and soldiers, the nation perhaps would be moved to concede to blacks a new measure of social equality and dignity. It was one of Du Bois' most bitter disappointments to find that he had been wrong about Wilson's purposes and about the true, imperialist nature of the war. Scarcely was the armistice signed before assaults on black communities were launched from Washington, D. C, to Texas and lynchings increased. After the war, Du Bois' major project became the building of a strong Pan-African movement, work supported in the early organiz-

ing years (1919-1921) by the NAACP and the British Labor party. But that support evaporated as the leadership of the NAACP turned inward and became more conservative. During the war Du Bois had also exposed racism in the armed forces. For that and his Pan-Africanism he came to be considered a seditious influence by federal authorities, and secret orders for his surveillance were issued. The Crisis began to have trouble with the Post Office, and Du Bois was denounced by such "patriots" as Congressman James F. Byrnes of South Carolina, who later became governor of South Carolina, U.S. senator, secretary of state, and associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. The Pan-African movement was part of a postwar surge of nationalist organization; PanSlavism, the Ataturk movement in Turkey, the growth of the Congress movement in India, and the rise of Zionism are other examples. Du Bois did not think of Pan-Africanism itself as exclusionary; rather, he believed it should seek an end to colonialism not only in Africa but throughout the world and give support to all democratic influences, particularly those directed at raising up the working class. In this respect Du Bois' Pan-Africanism was quite different from Marcus Garvey's movement "for return to Africa." At first the Garvey group had been anti-imperialist and fostered pride in black ability and accomplishment—positions Du Bois had held for decades. But soon he expressed concern about the business methods of the group, and when it became ultranationalistic and irrational, Du Bois became strongly opposed to it. He did not, as is often said, seek Garvey's imprisonment, and he opposed Garvey's deportation following his release. The change in Du Bois' thought after World War I is signaled by his article "Worlds of Color" (1925), in which he reexamines his statement of twenty-five years earlier that "the problem of the Twentieth Century is the prob-

176 I AMERICAN lem of the color line." Now he writes that the problem "is what we call Labor"; but he goes on to say that "England, France, Germany, America and Heaven" are all controlled by one oligarchy, which secures its control by its exploitation of colonial peoples. In this sense, then, "the Color Line" remains central to humanity's problems. Expanding the article for publication in The New Negro (1925), a book edited by Alain Locke, Du Bois points out the failure of European unions and labor parties to intervene in the exploitation of colonial workers. Postwar travel abroad greatly increased Du Bois' firsthand knowledge of black peoples and leaders. In 1923-1924, he attended the third Pan-African Congress. On the same journey, as special envoy with ministerial rank, he represented President Calvin Coolidge at the inauguration of President Charles D. B. King of Liberia in 1924. Du Bois conferred with leading figures on both occasions, but the second afforded his first experience of Africa, specifically West Africa, where he traveled widely. Promptly from this experience came three articles: the ironically titled "The Primitive Black Man," "Britain's Negro Problem in Sierra Leone," and "What Is Civilization? Africa's Answer." Impressed as he was with the organizational quality of African life and the dignity of the Africans, Du Bois saw too a powerful drive toward self-rule. Indeed, he ended "Britain's Negro Problem" by saying: "Black British West Africa is out for self-rule and in our day is going to get it." In his day—thanks to his longevity—they did. Du Bois' second trip abroad during this period was a two-month visit in 1926 to the Soviet Union, which was still recovering from the devastations of World War I, the civil war, the attempted Polish conquest of the Ukraine, and the fourteen-nation intervention (Japan had been driven out only two years before). For all

WRITERS

the impoverishment he saw about him, Du Bois was deeply impressed with the high morale and the commitment to education and science of so diverse a people. Soviet socialism would, he said, succeed. For the eleventh anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution he was invited to contribute to the Labor Defender, an organ of the International Labor Defense; he hailed the attempts of the new Russia and described it as "a victim of a determined propaganda of lies." Feeling that he lacked reliable information, Du Bois had initially responded cautiously to the Bolshevik Revolution. But by 1920 he clearly sided with it, although not uncritically. This partisanship was strengthened by his Soviet sojourn in 1926. From then on his support of the Soviet Union—the "most hopeful country in the world," as he was to call it in 1949— never wavered. Although Du Bois spent the quarter-century from 1910 to 1934 chiefly as a publicist, agitator, and organizer, he also wrote his first novel, albeit a novel designed to influence public policy. The critical and commercial success of The Souls of Black Folk had led his publisher to suggest to him in 1906 that a novel dramatizing the "Negro problem" might attract even more readers than Souls. Du Bois had agreed but was then deep in work at Atlanta University, directing the Niagara movement, editing the Horizon, and writing John Brown. It was in 1909 that he turned to the creation of what became The Quest of the Silver Fleece. Before the spring of 1910, he had sent the manuscript to the McClurg firm; the book appeared in October 1911. The climate seemed auspicious for one central theme of Du Bois' novel: the life of the cotton fields and the cotton trade. Extraordinary sales had been achieved by Frank Norris' The Octopus (1901) and The Pit (1903), novels about the wheat trade; by James Lane Allen's

W.E.B.DUBOIS I 177 The Reign of Law, a Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields (1900); and by Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906), about meatpacking. Within this same genre, the muckraking journalist David Graham Phillips had published The Cost (1904) and The Deluge (1905), which were novelistic exposes of banking, and Light-Fingered Gentry (1907), a novel on dishonesty in the insurance industry. Indeed, one of Phillips' novels was called Golden Fleece (1903); Du Bois' original title had used that phrase but was changed because of the Phillips novel. Another hopeful sign: the publishers Dodd Mead and Houghton Mifflin had had success publishing fiction by the black authors Paul Laurence Dunbar and Charles Waddell Chesnutt. But far and away more successful among recent works on the theme of race had been the fiercely racist novel of Thomas Dixon, Jr., The Leopard's Spots: A Romance of the White Man's Burden (1902). The tremendous popular success of Dixon's novel tells much about the American temper at the beginning of the twentieth century and the substance of the novel compares strikingly with that of Du Bois'. Dixon argues for the wholesale removal of the black man—women were not yet in question—from politics and seeks to show that educating black people in what is referred to as a "classical institution" "spoils" them and leads to "open demands for the recognition of the economic, social and political equality of the races"—almost verbatim the position of the Niagara movement as formulated in 1906 by Du Bois and implicit in his own novel. Dixon's book celebrates the suppression of black people as an occasion for unity among the "best" white people, in the North as well as in the South. Conversely, Du Bois' novel aims to disunite white opponents of black liberation and to promote understanding of the need for black dignity and freedom if the letter of the Declaration of Independence is to be realized. As

Dixon's novel ends, the hero tells the heroine that his strength and wisdom derive entirely from her; but she denies it, insisting that his virtues are his own and that she has no wish but to serve him as a dutiful wife. By contrast, Du Bois ends his novel with the hero praising the heroine's strength and wisdom, qualities that she does not deny at all; whereupon she asks him to marry her. The heroine, Zora, embodies Du Bois' own powerful pride in being black. She senses "the vast unorganized power in this [black] mass." When a black youngster resists a lashing and fights back, the author writes that it is just such righteous resistance that swells the "crime" statistics in the reports of the so-called experts. In this novel Du Bois continues his insistence that black people need full education, not just enough to make a living but enough to make a life. Linking real education with true democracy, he even suggests that such education might well be subversive, "too socialistic." Even the urban black defection from the Republican party figures in the novel; the author writes that there are "five hundred thousand or more black voters in pivotal Northern States, you know, and they're in revolt." So too does the theme of Du Bois' Harvard commencement address appear in the sermon that so transforms Zora. To live for the welfare of others and, if one is black, to work for the liberation of one's own people is to live well and joyfully. "In your dark lives," cries the minister, "wAo is the King of Glory? Sacrifice." By 1911, when The Quest of the Silver Fleece appeared, Du Bois had joined the Socialist party. Accordingly, the novel dramatizes class as well as racial oppression, argues the commonality of interests among all who work, and envisions a unity among workers that will make way for a new social system. A propertied white man is made to say: "This system can't last always—sometimes I think it can't last long. It's

178 I AMERICAN wrong, through and through. It's built on ignorance, theft and force." A white woman worker on strike, seeing a manacled black youth brought into court, is moved to exclaim: "Durned if I don't think these white slaves and black slaves had ought ter git together." Du Bois also shows the need for planters and speculators to corrupt leadership, to "separate the leaders, the talented, the pushers, of both races from their masses, and through them rule the rest by money." In making the black Zora the moral beacon of the book, Du Bois showed himself to be an early and ardent advocate of the emancipation of black women—and of all women. The Quest of the Silver Fleece was not widely reviewed and did not sell well. Nor did Du Bois turn his hand again to the novel form for almost two decades. But he did produce other books in a popular vein with a view to advancing his ideas. The first of these came out of an invitation from the editors of the Home University Library of Modern Knowledge, a series presenting the latest findings by internationally known scholars in diverse areas of world history. Du Bois was asked to provide a 75,000word account of the history and present condition of the African and African-derived peoples. The result was The Negro (1915). Du Bois had not yet visited Africa but had read widely its literature, visited the West Indies, and at the Universal Races Congress in 1911 met numerous African leaders. He had also studied the work of Franz Boas of the United States, Leo Frobenius of Germany, and Harry H. Johnston of Great Britain. But in his preface Du Bois pointed out that research on the black peoples remained insufficient, that he himself knew no African languages, and that brevity of format precluded definitive treatment. Yet he hoped his attempt would "enable the reader to know as men a sixth or more of the human race."

WRITERS

The Negro is a pioneering effort at depicting the broad history of black peoples, and as such has stood well the test of time, as George Shepperson writes in his introduction to the 1970 edition. The sweep of the work is remarkable. No similar effort was made until 1939, when Du Bois himself published Black Folk, Then and Now, a much expanded and revised version. Toward the end of World War I, the publisher Alfred Harcourt expressed interest in bringing out a new collection of Du Bois' essays and sketches. Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil (1920) consists of previously published, but considerably revised and expanded, material from the Crisis, Independent, Atlantic Monthly, and other periodicals. The book received much attention and sold well; most white reviewers in the United States remarked on the author's intensity of feeling, militancy, and hatred of racism. Two of the chapters attracted special attention. "Of the Ruling of Men" speaks of the Soviet Union and condemns the rich who "fly to arms to prevent that greatest experiment in industrial democracy which the world has ever seen." Du Bois closes by saying that "perhaps the finest contribution of current socialism to the world is neither its light nor its dogma, but the idea back of its one mighty word—Comrade!" This chapter and a passionate one on "The Damnation of Women," which excoriates the treatment of black women by whites, led Congressman Byrnes again to denounce Du Bois, calling him a "Bolshevik agent." Du Bois' next book was written under the surprising sponsorship of the conservative Catholic organization the Knights of Columbus. Alarmed at the growing strength of the Ku Klux Klan and the passage of immigration laws in the 1920's that penalized Irish and southern European peoples as well as "colored" folk, the Knights undertook publication of a series of volumes under the general title "Racial Contribu-

W.E.B.DUBOIS I 179 tion Series." Three such books were published: one on the Jews, another on Germans, and the third The Gift of Black Folk: The Negroes in the Making of America (1924). The first five chapters drew heavily on Du Bois' previously published work, but the last four were fresh, especially "The Freedom of Womanhood," which summarizes the contributions and tribulations of black women. Other chapters treat the work of black people in music, painting, and literature, and the place of religion and the church among black Americans. Here Du Bois returns to his recurrent theme of the compassion and service that characterize an especially tormented people. From the other end of the political spectrum came the next book offer a few years later. The Kansas publisher Emanuel Haldeman-Julius, who issued generally radical works—the socalled Little Blue Books, costing five cents and selling by the millions—suggested that Du Bois write two booklets on, respectively, the geography and history of Africa. These were published in 1930 as Africa, Its Geography, People, and Products and Africa, Its Place in Modern History. The former, in addition to detailing the continent's geography and natural resources, also offers an account of its religions and languages. The latter draws much on The Negro but concentrates on Africa in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It places Africa within the context of European power politics and imperialism, and pays considerable attention to mounting African resistance and counterinitiative. During his first period of service with the NAACP, Du Bois wrote two particularly distinguished essays, the first of which was a great favorite of its author: "Georgia: Invisible Empire State" was written as a chapter for the twovolume These United States (1924), edited by Ernest Gruening. The essay is a lyrical and profound study of the state, its history, its peoples,

its trials, and its promise. Du Bois takes the occasion to examine Henry Grady's idea of a "New South." He also demonstrates the success of racism in dividing the state's working people, locates the motives for lynching and terrorism, and analyzes the character of the Ku Klux Klan. He ends by envisioning a coming unity among those who labor—black and white. In December 1928, a National Interracial Conference was held in Washington, D. C., sponsored by sixteen organizations. The purpose was to inquire into the prevailing state of knowledge about black life and the uses that such knowledge might serve. Here Du Bois presented a paper on "The Negro Citizen," later published in The Negro in American Civilization (1930), edited by Charles S. Johnson. In this paper Du Bois issues a prophetic call for what became known as black power some thirty-five years later. In the past, he says, the question was whether black people could survive outside of slavery; but that was no longer the question. Then arose the question of whether they could be educated; and that too was no longer the question. Now the question had become whether black people could attain political power, how they should do so, and what use they would make of it. Their lack of it vitiates the quality of life for everyone in the United States. Interracial meetings are well and good, he concludes, but they will prove useful only when they "attack the main problem, which is and has been the question of political power for the Negro citizens of the United States." But for all the ambition of his didactic writings in the 1920's, an even larger theme—that of world revolution—had gripped Du Bois' imagination. Its promptings arose from the real world, but its embodiment was to be another novel, Dark Princess: A Romance, published in April 1928. Its subject is a conspiracy promoting a worldwide uprising of colored peoples in

180 I AMERICAN Asia, Africa, the West Indies, and the United States. Positions ranging from terrorism to pacifism are represented. The leader is a woman, a princess of a state in India; and although the plot moves from continent to continent, most of the action takes place in the United States, in the South, New York City, and Chicago. In a description of the work that Du Bois sent to the publisher for possible use in advertising, he noted that the ... deeper aim of the book is to outline the reaction of the difficulties and realities of race prejudice upon many sorts of people—ambitious Black American youth, educated Asiatics, selfish colored politicians, ambitious self-seekers of all races. The book is thus a first-hand frank and sincere study of human characters both sides of the color line. Du Bois was no stranger to dreams of black revolution and black statehood. At the First Pan-African Congress of 1900 (and the Universal Races Congress of 1911 as well) he had traded ideas with people from every corner of the world. A black seaman, Harry Dean, had told him in 1900 of his plan "to lead a black army across the straits of Gibraltar"; Du Bois ciould appreciate its motive but doubted its practicality. In 1899 the novel Imperium in Imperio, by the black author Sutton Griggs, took as its theme an elaborate and nationwide black conspiracy to establish a black-ruled state in Texas—a scheme reminiscent of actual movements in the 1890's to carve a black state out of what is today Oklahoma. One of Griggs's main characters, Bernard Belgrave, is a brownskinned Harvard graduate who has first attracted national attention with a commencement address—surely a fictional portrait of Du Bois. As for actual advocates and prophets of a liberated Africa, Du Bois knew the ideas of virtually all of them, from Alexander Crummell to

WRITERS

Henry M. Turner, Edward W. Blyden, Joseph Booth, Casely Hayford, and, of course, Marcus Garvey. According to George Shepperson and Thomas Price, in 1912 Du Bois had discussed with Booth, during one of Booth's periodic visits to the United States, "the possibility of a native revolt in the South and Central African regions." Du Bois followed with care all the news of strikes and uprisings in Africa and the rest of the colonial world, and after the end of World War I his work with the Pan-African Congress kept him in constant communication with African leaders and peoples. By 1906, in his Niagara movement address, Du Bois had written: "The Slav is rising in his might, the yellow millions are tasting liberty, the black Africans are writhing toward the light, and everywhere the laborer, with ballot in his hand, is voting open the gates of Opportunity and Peace." By the end of World War I he was writing with his own italics in Darkwater: What, then, is this dark world thinking? It is thinking that as wild and awful as this shameful war was, it is nothing to compare with the fight for freedom which black and brown and yellow men must and will make unless their oppression and humiliation and insult at the hands of the White World cease. The Dark World is going to submit just as long as it must and not one moment longer. By 1924 Du Bois was writing of a "tremendous and sometimes almost fanatic increase of race pride" that "white people do not sense" and suggesting that this is the breeding ground not only for hatred of whites but for open war. He continued, in "The Negro Takes Stock" (1924): ... it is impossible for twelve million men to fight a hundred million—but can they not hate the harder for their very impotence? Whether they migrate, die or live, can they not add the red flame of their bitter hatred to all the mount-

W.E.B.DUBOIS I 181 ing bill of deviltry which the dark world holds against the white? No—there's no hurry; it will not happen in our day. No. But it will happen. In words like these one can see the theme of Dark Princess: A Romance forming, as well as the character of Pergigua, the fictional terrorist. Frequently in the Crisis Du Bois cataloged quotations from the world press on a single subject. Introducing in the March 1926 issue a collection that he entitled "The Hegemony of Race," he wrote: "It is gradually being borne in upon our whiter brethren that this matter of ruling the colored races is not going to be the same easy parade in the future that it has been in the past." It was followed by an extract from an article by David Lloyd George, the former British prime minister, reading in part: In Asia the brown and yellow races are seeking to throw off the dominion or domination of the pale-faced foreigner. In India there is undoubted unrest. In Africa a formidable war is even now in process between invading Europeans and the native.... The popular magazine Liberty was quoted: "China and India are rising. North Africa is in arms ... Soviet Russia is the enemy of every white government." Similar reports from the Irish and South African press were quoted along with one from the marquess of Willingdon, formerly governor of Madras: "There can be no question that, for the first time in human history, this cry of the dark against the pretentions of the white is an organized and practical determination. Once it was a mere protest, now it is a crusade." It was out of this climate that Dark Princess was written. Into it Du Bois put such fictionally transformed incidents as the altercations that took place in the United States during and after World War I between Indian immigrants and local authorities, the former agitating for their homeland's independence from Great Britain.

The central role of black Pullman porters in the novel reflects the efforts to unionize those workers that were then going forward under the leadership of A. Philip Randolph. As for the rising political strength of the black urban population in the North, a significant strand in the novel, that was something Du Bois had been reporting in the Crisis. The account in the novel of the first black congressman to be elected from Chicago preceded by months the actual election of Oscar DePriest in 1928. The optimism, the affirmation of rational struggle, and the dream of a decent global society that permeate Dark Princess were not the themes of the leading white American novelists and playwrights in the 1920's. The themes of the "lost generation" writers are absent in the work of Du Bois and Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and Claude McKay. Despair appears and reappears in literature, and the best of this literature endures. But the need for emancipation persists, and works proclaiming it have a way of remaining always contemporary, however dated in form. Du Bois' view of the role of art is fundamental to an appreciation of his fiction. He expressed this view in "Criteria of Negro Arts," which he delivered at the 1926 annual meeting of the NAACP. The artist, he said, must serve truth; in serving that he serves beauty, and in serving both he also serves justice. Thus all Art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy. I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda. The reviews of Dark Princess in the white press were mixed. Those in the New York Post and the New York Times were hostile and chauvinistic. The anonymous Times reviewer regretted that Du Bois did not use "his talent"

182 I AMERICAN to portray another Porgy, and the Post reviewer—the twenty-two-year-old Tess Slesinger—was surprised that Du Bois thought the "natives of India" were colored people. The southern press, when it noted the book at all, condemned it as fanatical; black commentators liked it. The most thoughtful review came from Alain Locke, who with Du Bois and James Weidon Johnson formed a triumvirate of leadership among the American black intelligentsia. Locke's long review in the New York Herald Tribune (May 20, 1928) read in part: ... we must thank the talented author of this book for breaking ground for this skyscraper problem novel of the Negro intellectual and the world radical. Chiefly because of the still latent possibilities of the theme it is to be regretted that, as a novel, "Dark Princess" is not wholly successful. As a document, however, it should be widely read. Locke concluded that, though "half spoiled by oversophistication, [the novel] will be interesting and revealing reading to the white reader who has yet few ways of looking into the many closed chambers of Negro life or of seeing into the dilemmas of the intellectual Negro mind and heart." For black readers, the novel would be "an intriguing problem study of the cross currents and paradoxes of the thinking Negro who to-day faces the problems of two worlds and two loyalties." Dark Princess was, among all his books, one of Du Bois' favorites. It appeared soon after his sixtieth birthday, and conveyed—as its final sentence states—both his "Dream of the Spirit" and "the Pain of the Bone." In June 1934 Du Bois resigned from the NAACP and returned to his first love, teaching and scholarly enterprise. At Atlanta University he taught graduate students in sociology and economics and headed the sociology depart-

WRITERS

ment. With some difficulty he persuaded the university authorities to fund a scholarly literary quarterly, which he called Phylon, Greek for "race." As the editor he opened its first number, early in 1940, thus: We seem to see today a new orientation and duty which will call not simply for the internal study of race groups as such, but for a general view of that progress of human beings which takes place through the instrumentality and activity of group culture We shall usually proceed from the point of view and the experience of the black folk where we live and work, to the wider world. Du Bois remained the editor through the second number of the fifth volume (1944) and contributed the department "A Chronicle of Race Relations." He also wrote more than a dozen book reviews and contributed articles on Aleksander Pushkin, Robert Moton of Hampton and Tuskegee, and the slave uprising aboard the Amistad in 1841. His most important work during this second tour at Atlanta was Black Reconstruction: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880 (1935). Du Bois had been thinking about this book since the close of the nineteenth century, and in the course of its almost 750 pages he revolutionizes American historiography of the Civil War period. For in this great work he shows in detail the positive, democratic strivings of southern black people in the decade after the surrender at Appomattox—and the terror, propaganda, and fraud with which these efforts were undone. He argues mostly from official documents. His final chapter, "The Propaganda of History," remains a classic condemnation of the white chauvinism of American historiography, a charge not altogether outdated. Du Bois does acknowledge the earlier and

W.E.B.DUBOIS I 183 significant works on Reconstruction by John R. Lynch, Alrutheus A. Taylor, and Carter G. Woodson, as well as those by Frederic Bancroft, John Eaton, Charles Edward Russell, and Augustus F. Beard. He notes that for a variety of reasons—including the fact that at times major southern libraries and archives have been closed to black scholars—there are documentary sources he has not examined. But he states his conviction that the story as he has told it is substantially true. The work of succeeding generations has amply vindicated him. At the time the leading professional journal, the American Historical Review, did not review the book, yet elsewhere it found wide and, on the whole, quite favorable notice. It sold better than Du Bois expected, especially after World War II. With this considerable success, Du Bois persuaded Henry Holt, publisher of The Negro, to bring out the revised and much expanded edition he had hoped for since 1915. This appeared in 1939 under the title Black Folk, Then and Now: An Essay in the History and Sociology of the Negro Race. As he writes in the preface, some of The Negro has been incorporated, but the later volume "for the most part is an entirely new production." Its 391 pages comprise sixteen chapters and an extensive bibliography. The first nine chapters offer a history of the early African civilizations, of the slave trade and of modern slavery, and of the movements for the abolition of both. Two chapters treat the present conditions of black people in the United States and in Europe; and four chapters deal with modern Africa, examining especially landownership, the conditions of the working masses, and systems of education and political control. The final chapter, "The Future of World Democracy," explores little-known African uprisings and a major strike in the first thirty years of the twentieth century. It concludes:

The proletariat of the world consists not simply of white European and American workers but overwhelmingly of the dark workers of Asia, Africa, the islands of the sea, and South and Central America. These are the ones who are supporting a superstructure of wealth, luxury, and extravagance. It is the rise of these people that is the rise of the world. The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line. With the coming of his seventieth year, Du Bois produced a major autobiographical work. In 1938-1939, with the encouragement of his friend Alfred Harcourt, he worked on Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept (1940). As Du Bois says in the "Apology," he wishes to trace the development of his ideas more closely than the unfolding of a life. His Souls of Black Folk and Darkwater, he remarks, "were written in tears and blood," but this one, though "set down no less determinedly," is written "with wider hope in some more benign fluid." His biographical data are duly set forth, but so too is a kind of spiritual and ideological memoir, often beautifully written. During this same period Du Bois' outlook was generally socialist but antagonistic to the Communist party of the United States; yet his view of the Soviet Union remained warm and hopeful. On the final page there is a particularly self-revealing paragraph: Perhaps above all I am proud of a straightforward clearness of reason, in part a gift of the gods, but also to no little degree due to scientific training and inner discipline. By means of this I have met life face to face, I have loved a fight and I have realized that Love is God and Work is His prophet; that His ministers are Age and Death. Reaching one's seventh decade is old age, no doubt, and with that come thoughts of death.

184 I AMERICAN WRITERS But Du Bois had another two decades remaining to him, and into them he put the equivalent of a lifetime. When he returned to Atlanta University in 1934, at the urging of John Hope, he had expected to end his days there. The reality was otherwise. Within two years of Du Bois' return Hope died, and the new president, Rufus Clement, thirty-two years Du Bois' junior and of rather provincial background and bureaucratic training, proved uncongenial to him. The older man's international stature, his plans for work, and his radicalism led to mounting clashes with Clement and members of the board of trustees. Du Bois was forcibly retired— rather to his surprise—in 1944. At the urging of both Walter White and Arthur Spingarn, he returned to the NAACP as director of special research, with particular responsibility for the subjects of colonialism and African affairs. Quite likely some of those who invited him back thought Du Bois, at seventy-six, would pursue a leisurely course. They were wrong, and his return to agitation and propaganda marked a period of great activity, even for him. He wrote a weekly column, "The Winds of Time," in the Chicago Defender from January 1945 to May 1948; he published articles in many periodicals, especially left-wing journals such as New Masses; he made several speaking tours throughout the country; he wrote essays and reviews for the New York Post, the New York Herald Tribune, the New York Times, the American Journal of Sociology, the Nation, and Scientific Monthly; and he took part in cultural and scholarly meetings in Haiti at the invitation of the Haitian government. In 1945 he represented the NAACP at the founding of the United Nations in San Francisco, where he warned that to neglect serious consideration of the problems of colonial peoples would be fatal to the preservation of peace. In 1945 and 1946 he edited a volume documenting the oppression of black Americans, which was to be presented

as a petition for redress to the United Nations on behalf of the NAACP. Entitled An Appeal to the World, it was published by the NAACP in 1947. It received worldwide attention, but the U. S. delegation to the UN prevented its official consideration in that body. While with the NAACP, Du Bois also produced two books in his area of special research. In 1945 Harcourt, Brace published Color and Democracy: Colonies and Peace. The premise of this volume is that after World War II . . . the majority of the inhabitants of the earth, who happen for the most part to be colored, must be regarded as having the right and the capacity to share in human progress and to become co-partners in that democracy which alone can ensure peace among men, by the abolition of poverty, the education of the masses, protection from disease and the scientific treatment of crime. Du Bois observes that "colonies are the slums of the world" and that the slum dwellers are in righteous rebellion. If the slums are not replaced, the rebellions will give way to "recurring wars of envy and greed because of the present inequitable distribution of gain among civilized nations." By their own words, Du Bois observes, the Western allies have shown their indifference to the question of colonialism and liberation: "so long as colonial imperialism exists, there can be neither peace on earth nor good will toward men." Du Bois hails the Soviet Union for having released the energies of the masses and for facing squarely the problem of poverty. "It has not, like most nations, without effort to solve it, declared the insolubility of the problem of the poor, and above all, it has not falsely placed on the poor the blame of their wretched conditions." The second volume written during his final tenure with the NAACP was The World and Africa: An Inquiry into the Part Which Africa

W.E.B.DUBOIS I 185 Has Played in World History (1947), published shortly before his seventy-ninth birthday. In the preface Du Bois refers to The Negro and Black Folk, Then and Now, and observes that the world has so changed in the past decade that it seems useful to attempt "a history of the world written from the African point of view." He pays tribute to related work by Robert Briffault, George Padmore, Anna Graves, E. D. Moore, Rayford Logan, and William Leo Hansberry, and adds: "I have also made bold to repeat the testimony of Karl Marx, whom I regard as the greatest of modern philosophers, and I have not been deterred by the witch-hunting which always follows the mention of his name." The World and Africa begins with a consideration of World War II, goes on to analyze the effects of two centuries of European colonialism, especially in Africa, and concludes with an essay on "the future of the darker races." Their coming liberation is "indispensable to the fertilizing of the universal soil of mankind." His closing thought: "There can be no perfect democracy curtailed by color, race, or poverty. But with all we accomplish all, even Peace." We glimpse here two determinants of Du Bois' last years: the witch-hunt that dogged him and his dedication to the achievement of peace on earth. While the U. S. Navy, no less, had purchased copies of Du Bois' Color and Democracy: Colonies and Peace, the ideas in this later volume brought about another break with the NAACP leadership, which now endorsed the cold war. In 1948 Du Bois left the NAACP and joined the Council on African Affairs, through which Paul Robeson and W. Alphaeus Hunton were working to end colonialism. From this time on Du Bois identified himself with the worldwide, generally Left-led movement of peace councils in the effort to halt the arms race and the cold war.

It was in this cause that Du Bois joined the presidential campaign of Henry Wallace in 1948 and continued in the ranks of the Progressive party. Under its banner, at the age of eighty-two, he campaigned for U. S. senator from New York in 1950. He also served as director of the Peace Information Center, through whose effort the signatures of some 2.5 million Americans were obtained for the Stockholm Peace Pledge, which asked for an end to atomic weapons. The inevitable result— given the climate of McCarthyism—was the indictment of Du Bois and four codefendants as "unregistered foreign agents" under the McCormick Act. Du Bois was arraigned and fingerprinted in February 1951, tried in November 1951, and acquitted that same month in one of the earliest victories against government witch-hunting. The entire story of this episode was told in detail, with supporting documents, in his In Battle for Peace: The Story of My 83rd Birthday (1952). Du Bois' efforts to persuade leading publishers to issue this work were in vain; several did not even answer his letters. The Left's magazine Masses & Mainstream published the book in 1952, and 10,000 copies were sold. In the mid-1950's, with scarcely diminished energy, Du Bois undertook to create a vast fictional work that would try to describe what it had meant to be a black person in the United States from the closing years of the nineteenth down to the middle of the twentieth century. By 1956 he had substantially finished this work, and it was published in three volumes (and running to over 1,000 pages) under the title The Black Flame: The Ordeal of Mansart (1957), Mansart Builds a School (1959), and Worlds of Color (1961). As a survey of black life from 1876 through 1956, there is no more comprehensive single work than this trilogy. As a portrayal of Du Bois' life these volumes are more revealing than his avowed autobiographies. Yet,

186 I AMERICAN doubtless for political reasons, the trilogy went unmentioned in the conventional reviewing media. Through word of mouth and the efforts of the Left's periodicals, about 10,000 sets were eventually sold. Du Bois' last book in his lifetime appeared in July 1963, one month before his death. On a visit to the German Democratic Republic in 1960 he was asked by Gertrude Gelbin, the editor of Seven Seas Books (an English-language publisher in East Berlin), to select some of his very brief published pieces about race. Du Bois did so, but the manuscript that he mailed from New York did not reach Berlin. In 1961 he assembled another selection of his writings and, on his way to Ghana, mailed the manuscript from London; this time it reached its destination. The book, An ABC of Color: Selections from Over a Half Century of Writings, had an introduction by Kay Pankey. The selections were mainly from the Crisis, with a few of his writings from the 1950's. John Oliver Killens later wrote an introduction to the posthumous American edition of 1969. To date, three books by Du Bois have been published since his death, all of them edited by the present writer. The first, The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois: A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century (1968), was being written in draft during 1958-1959; Du Bois revised it during the next two years and took it with him to Ghana. After the coup there in 1966, the manuscript finally reached the editor, and it was published two years later. This volume is more fully autobiographical than Dusk of Dawn, and the works overlap only slightly. The later book tells much about the period from Du Bois' return to the NAACP to the completion of his journey to the Soviet Union and China. There are also details of his decision in 1961 to join the Communist party of the United States, a step he saw as logical in his political evolution. The second posthumously published volume

WRITERS

is The Education of Black People (1973); the bulk of it had been tentatively approved for publication in 1940 by the University of North Carolina Press, which then withdrew, citing lack of funds. On his departure to Ghana in 1961, Du Bois entrusted the manuscript to the present writer, who added three essays on education that Du Bois had written in the 1950's and in 1960. Prayers for Dark People (1980) began as jottings on scraps of paper in 1909 and 1910, short prayers and sermons to be read to his students at Atlanta University. These writings touch on diverse aspects of life and preach service, work, learning, courtesy, and, above all, dedication to the enhancement of the life of black people in the United States. They are informed by a religious sense that Du Bois never lost. Being agnostic, he detested institutionalized religion and dogma, but an unformulated belief in spirituality stayed with him until his death. Having chosen to join the Communist party shortly before leaving for Ghana in 1961, Du Bois was liable to unusual restrictions under American law. When he sought to renew his passport at the U. S. consular office in Ghana in 1962, he was told that he was guilty of a crime in having used it to go there and that he should return to the United States forthwith. He and his second wife, Shirley Graham Du Bois (whom he married in 1951), then asked President Kwame Nkrumah if they could become citizens of Ghana; Nkrumah remarked that America's loss was Africa's gain and that Ghana would be honored. Du Bois died on August 27, 1963, the day before the civil rights march in Washington, D. C., and his death was announced to the assembled multitude by Roy Wilkins (then the executive secretary of the NAACP). All present on that occasion knew that the slogans on their banners had in effect been written years before by Du Bois.

W.E.B.DUBOIS I 187 He died without pain and was fully lucid to the last. Characteristically, he had prepared what he called his "last message," dated June 26,1957. At the state funeral in West Africa— from which centuries before his ancestors had been brought to the New World in chains— Shirley Du Bois read the brief text: It is much more difficult in theory than actually to say the last good-bye to one's loved ones and friends and to all the familiar things of this life. I am going to take a long, deep and endless sleep. This is not a punishment but a privilege to which I looked forward for years. I have loved my work, I have loved people and my play, but always I have been uplifted by the thought that what I have done well will live long and justify my life; that what I have done ill or never finished can now be handed on to others for endless days to be finished, perhaps better than I could have done. And that peace will be my applause. One thing alone I charge you. As you live, believe in life! Always human beings will live and progress to greater, broader and fuller life. The only possible death is to lose belief in this truth simply because the great end comes slowly, because time is long. Good-bye.

Selected Bibliography WORKS OF W.E.B.DUBOIS BOOKS

The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America, 1638-1870. New York: Longman, Green, 1896. The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study. Philadel-

phia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1899. (With Isabel Eaton.) The Souls of Black Folk: The Negroes in the Making of America. Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1903. John Brown. Philadelphia: G. W. Jacobs, 1909. Reprinted New York: International Publishers, 1962. The Quest of the Silver Fleece. Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1911. The Negro. New York: Holt, Rinehart, 1915. Reprinted New York: Oxford University Press, 1970. Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920. The Gift of Black Folk: The Negroes in the Making of America. Boston: Stratford, 1924. Dark Princess: A Romance. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1928. Africa, Its Geography, People, and Products. Girard, Kans.: Haldeman-Julius, 1930. Reprinted in 1 vol. with Africa, Its Place in Modern History. Millwood, N. Y.: KTO Press, 1977. Africa, Its Place in Modern History. Girard, Kans.: Haldeman-Julius, 1930. Reprinted (see above). Millwood, N. Y.: KTO Press, 1977. Black Reconstruction: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1935. Black Folk, Then and Now: An Essay in the History and Sociology of the Negro Race. New York: Holt, Rinehart, 1939. Dusk of Dawn. An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1940. Color and Democracy: Colonies and Peace. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1945. The World and Africa: An Inquiry into the Part Which Africa Has Played in World History. New York: Viking, 1947. In Battle for Peace: The Story of My 83rd Birthday. New York: Masses and Mainstream, 1952. The Ordeal of Mansart. New York: Mainstream, 1957. Mansart Builds a School. New York: Mainstream, 1959. Worlds of Color. New York: Mainstream, 1961. The Black Flame. New York: Mainstream, 19571961. (A trilogy containing the three works immediately above.)

188 I AMERICAN WRITERS An ABC of Color: Selections from Over a Half Century of Writings. Berlin: Seven Seas, 1963. Reprinted with introduction by John Oliver Killens. New York: International Publishers, 1969. The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois: A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century, edited by Herbert Aptheker. New York: International Publishers, 1968. The Education of Black People, edited by Herbert Aptheker. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1973. The Complete Published Works of W. E. B. Du Bois, edited and with introduction by Herbert Aptheker. 40 vols. projected. Millwood, N. Y.: KTO Press, 1973The Correspondence of W. E. B. Du Bois, edited by Herbert Aptheker. 3 vols. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1973-1978. The Book Reviews of W. E. B. Du Bois, edited by Herbert Aptheker. Millwood, N. Y.: KTO Press, 1977. Prayers for Dark People, edited by Herbert Aptheker. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980. SELECTED ARTICLES

"Tom Brown at Fisk." Fisk Herald, 5, no. 3:5-7 (November 1887); 5, no. 4:6-7 (December 1887); 5, no. 6:5-7 (February 1888). "The Enforcement of the Slave-Trade Laws." Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the Year 1891. Washington, D. C, 1892. Pp. 161-74. "Strivings of the Negro People." Atlantic Monthly, 80:194-98 (August 1897). "The Study of the Negro Problems." Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 11:1-23 (January 1898). "The Negroes of Farmville, Virginia: A Social Study." Bulletin of the Department of Labor, 3, no. 14:1-38 (January 1898). "A Negro Schoolmaster in the New South." Atlantic Monthly, 83:99-104 (January 1899). "The Negro in the Black Belt: Some Social Sketches." Bulletin of the Department of Labor, 4, no. 22:401-17 (May 1899). "The Problem of Housing the Negro." Southern Workman (June 1901-February 1902). "The Evolution of Negro Leadership." Dial, 31:5355 (July 16, 1901).

"The Negro Farmer." Negroes in the United States (U. S. Bureau of the Census Bulletin no. 8). Washington, D. C., 1904. Pp. 69-98. An expanded version was published in Supplementary Analysis and Derivative Tables, Twelfth Census of the United States (Special Report of the U. S. Bureau of the Census). Washington, D. C., 1906. Pp. 511-79. "Credo." Independent, 57:787 (October 6, 1904). "The Southerner's Problem." Dial, 38:315-18 (May 1, 1905). "Fifty Years Among the Black Folks." New York Times, sec. 6 (December 12, 1909), p. 4. "Reconstruction and Its Benefits." American Historical Review, 15:781-99 (July 1910). "The Economics of Negro Emancipation in the United States." Sociological Review, 4:303-13 (October 1911). "The Rural South." Publications of the American Statistical Association, 13:80-84 (March 1912). "The Negro in Literature and Art." Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 49:233-37 (September 1913). "The African Roots of War." Atlantic Monthly, 115:707-14 (May 1915). "Of the Culture of White Folk." Journal of International Relations, 7:434-47 (April 1917). "The Negro Takes Stock." New Republic, 37:14345 (January 2, 1924). "The Primitive Black Man." Nation, 119:675-76 (December 17, 1924). "Britain's Negro Problem in Sierra Leone." Current History, 21:690-700 (February 1925). "What is Civilization? Africa's Answer." Forum, 73:178-88 (February 1925). "Worlds of Color." Foreign Affairs, 3:423-44 (April 1925). "The Negro Citizen." In The Negro in American Civilization, edited by Charles S. Johnson. New York: Holt, Rinehart, 1930. Pp. 461-70.

BIBLIOGRAPHIES Aptheker, Herbert. Annotated Bibliography of the Published Writings of W. E. B. Du Bois. Millwood, N. Y.: KTO Press, 1973. Partington, Paul G. W. E. B. Du Bois: A Bibliography of His Published Writings. Whittier, Calif.: Paul G. Partington, 1977.

W.E.B.DUBOIS I 189 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL STUDIES Belser, Stephen G. "W. E. B. Du Bois: The Argument on the Immortal Child." M.A. diss., San Jose State University, 1971. Broderick, Francis L. W. E. B. Du Bois, Negro Leader in a Time of Crisis. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1959. Du Bois, Shirley Graham. His Day Is Marching On. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1971. Rampersad, Arnold. The Art and Imagination of

W. E. B. Du Bois. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976. . "W. E. B. Du Bois as a Man of Literature." American Literature, 51:50-68 (March 1979). Rudwick, Elliott M. W. E. B. Du Bois: A Study in Minority Group Leadership. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1960. Woodard, Frederic. "W. E. B. Du Bois: The Native Impulse. Notes Toward an Ideological Biography, 1868-1897." Ph.D. diss., University of Iowa, 1976.

—HERBERT APTHEKER

Paul Laurence Dunbar 18^2—1906

T

manticism undertook the impossible task of defining what was real in the world and harshly criticized human behavior that did violence to conscience, ignored the ties that linked people, or displayed ignorance of the potential for spiritual development that existed in everyone. The ideas, shunted aside by genteel critics, made a renaissance in American literature that extended from the 1830's through the 1860's. Robinson, in order to save himself as a poet, and as a man who was early overwhelmed by domestic tragedy, returned to the older romanticism, from which he received the power that flows from his early poems. Dunbar, on the other hand, knew it only superficially and turned, rather, to the tradition of English romantic poets, from Robert Burns and John Keats to Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Algernon Charles Swinburne, which did not inspire him to dig deeply in the matter of his own existence or that of others. Despite the cultivation of impressive skills, rarely do Dunbar's poems in conventional English triumph over the derivative forms, a rigidly proper poetical language, and a set of ideas that in general passes for poetical pieties. Although nature and the redemption of man never stirred Dunbar deeply, two other subjects did. One was the struggles of the black race; the other, the agony of composition: what to put in

HE JL HI

1890's was a bleak time for the debut of a black poet, as Paul Laurence Dunbar quickly discovered. Indeed, it was a bleak time also for a serious white poet, as Edwin Arlington Robinson eloquently testified in his poems and correspondence. Both poets had something in common. They opposed the pursuit by many Americans of mere "things," material possessions; the corruption of all values by commercialism; and the vulgar displays in housing and in entertainment. Robinson learned his opposition to a crass material culture, in part, from his instruction at Harvard (where he was a special student), from Charles Eliot Norton especially. Dunbar acquired his, no doubt, from the sermons that he heard in a black church in Dayton, Ohio, and from the early development of the instinct of a true poet. Neither Dunbar nor Robinson could express an easy allegiance to romantic idealism and look with great comfort on a world controlled by businessmen and industrial tycoons. But the genteel tradition, the most powerful force in American letters from 1870 through the 1890's, could. It had adopted a convenient form of romanticism, a truncated and modified version that stressed ornamental devices, precision of form, and exotic and historical references, but deplored any substantial contact with the real world. An older and more vigorous ro-

797

792 / AMERICAN a poem, how to write it, and especially how to phrase it so that it would be acceptable to a largely white audience. The constraints sound very genteel. Indeed they are, since such periodicals as Century, Harper's, Scribner's, and Atlantic applied inflexibly the standards of a limited romanticism in the hope of pleasing a large new audience that technological advances in printing had made it possible to reach since 1870. A case can be made that the true bastions of gentility in American literature from the 1870's to the 1890's were these magazines, with their demands for acceptable, salable material, and not the critics of gentility like Edmund Clarence Stedman, Charles Warren Stoddard, or Thomas Bailey Aldrich. Dunbar made his escape from the prison of gentility in a manner rather different from Robinson's. There were ways to do this. Robinson, as noted before, became a thoroughgoing idealist, not a halfhearted one, and advanced to the point of treating idealism in dramatic frames that questioned and parodied, through irony, romantic belief. Captain Craig (1902) represents fully this development in Robinson's art. George Santayana and Trumbull Stickney relied upon the classical, not the English, tradition. The consequence is an economic art, frequently on enduring classical themes, free of the cant, artificiality, and poetical debris that a century of romanticism, despite its glories, had accumulated. Another form of escape from a stifling poetic influence was more domestic and more immediate. James Whitcomb Riley, Frank L. Stanton, William Henry Irwin, and others turned to dialect verse. The advantage of doing so is quite obvious—a fresh language closer to real speech and the likelihood of discovering a poetic matter of importance and accessibility, not the tired conventional themes inherited from romantic verse. There were hazards too. By the time that Dunbar discovered dialect verse through Riley,

WRITERS

it already had conventions of its own, among them established comic verbal devices, suggesting that making an audience chuckle rather than accuracy of presentation was the more important consideration. It took a keen ear and a responsible sensibility to winnow a true voice out of the "dese's" and "dose's" of black dialect verse, and the same can be said for excursions into Hoosier and German dialects. Dunbar— not unexpectedly, given his background— brought skill to an accurate recording of both black and white dialects, though the black bears a special resonance from his living in a black community and exposure to black folk and historical traditions. Another danger for the writer employing dialect is sentimentality, not the well-worn apostrophes and cliches of romantic verse, but the equally deplorable, complacent, and simplistic distortions of mundane existence. The proposition that daily life had a sweetness, order, and amusing quaintness was no more satisfying or useful in the 1890's than was the idea of life as concentrated in moments illumined by contacts with the ideal, as far removed as possible from the grubbiness of the real world. In black dialect verse the simplifying and reductive influence came from the plantation tradition, the southern wing of the genteel, which was nourished in part by the efforts of many southerners, and northerners too, to heal the wounds inflicted by decades of conflict and a devastating Civil War. It is no accident that Joel Chandler Harris, the author of tales about Uncle Remus, was a staff writer on the Atlanta Constitution, the strong supporter if not the shaper of the New South. Henry W. Grady journeyed north to convince businessmen that the South was a fertile area for investment, while Harris made a winning appeal to the North and to the South as well, suggesting that slavery was not so bad—indeed, quite charming in some of its aspects. Though he is rather too distant from the clank of chains of the slave cof-

PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR / 193 fle or the crack of the overseer's whip, Harris did reveal to the nation in the 1880's the power of the black folk tradition. Dunbar was saved, in general, from the excesses of the plantation tradition by his deep consciousness of being black, though other black writers of dialect were not so fortunate. One sobering reality was the fact that his parents were ex-slaves. Matilda (Glass) Murphy Dunbar was a slave freed by the Emancipation Proclamation; Joshua Dunbar, a plantation plasterer. He had escaped by the Underground Railroad to Canada and later returned to join the 55th Massachusetts Infantry, the second black regiment to be organized in the Union Army. Dunbar could not avoid hearing in some detail about the repressive and cruel aspects of slavery. Such a young man, born less than a decade after the end of the war, was not likely to accept willingly the saccharine portraits and narratives of the plantation apologists. The dialect tradition in verse prospered, in part because of its close association with journalism. In addition to Harris, many others, both black and white, had turned their hands to dialect, usually with much less success. The role of the journalist here is not accidental. No doubt, what is involved is a familiarity with the talk of ordinary people, especially those with little education, and a remarkable opportunity to hear stories and verse from provincial regions still untouched by the explosive expansion of the cities. Dunbar was strongly attracted to journalism; and his first published poems, "Our Martyred Soldiers" and "On the River," appeared in the Dayton Herald in 1888. "Lager Beer," his first dialect poem, was written in German dialect, not in the broken, colorful language of the southern black, and appeared in December 1890 in the Dayton Tattler, which Dunbar published and edited for the black community. "Lager Beer" followed the precedent established in the "Hans Breitmann" dialect

ballads by Charles Leland. Though Dunbar's admiration for Riley sparked a serious commitment to dialect verse, Dunbar, through his early journalistic ambitions, knew of many poems by journalists in a number of different forms of dialect. As dialect was nurtured by journalists in the 1880's and 1890's, so the southwestern humor tradition, with its many forms of dialect, from folk talk in Mississippi and Arkansas to the notorious expression of the pike character (an amoral, profane, comic character best represented by Huck's father) in Missouri and points west, was cultivated by editors, feature writers, and reporters for newspapers. Among these writers was Mark Twain. The reference to Mark Twain is a reminder that both verse and prose works use dialect. Dunbar's interest was essentially in its application to poetry, though he did employ it in narratives that relied upon the plantation tradition. But it is the verse that reflects his serious experimentation in dialect, marking his work as the most successful achievement in America in dialect verse, surpassing the worthy efforts of both James Russell Lowell and James Whitcomb Riley. Charles Waddell Chesnutt, rather than Dunbar, displayed the power of dialect in narrative in The Conjure Woman (1899), and he too was troubled by the restraints of genteel literary principles. Never in The Conjure Woman does the full force of the black folklore touch the reader. Always there is a literary frame provided by an educated observer, who tempers and mutes the energy of the wild black tales. Though Dunbar was to make a substantial contribution to fiction, he did so within the contemporary conventions that governed the prose narrative, which, with the emergence of naturalism, were undergoing considerable critical examination in the 1890's. Toward the end of his career, Dunbar was preoccupied with developing his ideas about the novel, particularly evident in The Sport of the Gods\ and it was

194 I AMERICAN this interest, rather than his outstanding work in poetry, that led him into the twentieth century. This work of 1902 foreshadows in theme, point of view, scene, and craft the rich development of the modern black novel that received its next advance in Autobiography of an ExColored Man, published by James Weldon Johnson a decade later. A black writer in the 1890's could hope for little support from the general social climate, not simply from the uninspiring literary context. This was the nadir in the post-Civil War history of blacks, as the distinguished black historian Rayford Logan has said. Southern states completed the process of disfranchising blacks, using devices unheard of before in American politics. Blacks suffered from gross discrimination in education, in money appropriated, and in facilities, and Senator J. K. Vardaman of Mississippi in the early 1890's announced his opposition to the support of vocational instruction for blacks, not to mention any vestige of a liberal education. The same bleak situation existed in public accommodations and transportation. The effect upon the black economy was drastic too, with a loss in the South of jobs traditionally held in barber shops, blacksmith shops, stables, and catering establishments. The North was no easy haven for ambitious blacks since it too acted to eliminate political appointments and restrict employment, public accommodations, and housing. When Dunbar graduated from Central High School in 1891, after acquiring honors of various kinds, he could secure, after a desperate search, only a job as elevator operator in the Callahan Building in Dayton. A coincidence that only hindsight finds significant is the title of his last poem published in the High School Times: "Melancholia." The racial crisis of the 1890's did not inhibit advancement on several fronts by blacks. Black business in the South and the North underwent

WRITERS

unprecedented expansion, partly because whites pursuing institutional purity ignored the black market. Insurance companies, retail stores, and real estate agencies emerged and prospered. More pertinent is the fact that the crisis stimulated writers who responded in various ways to the new repression. Not since the 1840's and the 1850's, when slavery provoked the writing of an endless number of slave narratives, sermons, and tracts of protest, had black writers appeared in such abundance. Thus Dunbar faced a cultural environment that was both hostile and challenging. The 1890's concluded one of the least rewarding periods of American literature, though there were evidences of constructive ferment in the interest in real talk rather than the language of the poetical, in the imaginative interpretation of classical themes without the ornate diction of the late romantics, and in the counterromanticism of Robinson, which involved the use of standard romantic themes as opportunities for irony and parody. Dunbar was born in an age committed to business and industry, and little else, one that cried out for opposition by contemporary artists, as if that mattered. Meanwhile business tycoons raided Europe for paintings, sculpture, furniture, stairways, parts of cathedrals, and designs for town houses in New York and Chicago and summer residences at Newport. In Dayton, Dunbar was hard put to sustain his writing and to support his mother; and the generosity of white friends like James Newton Matthews, Charles Thatcher, and Henry A. Tobey meant much to him. His situation was not unique: Robinson nearly starved to death in New York at the turn of the century, and he too owed his ability to devote his energies totally to poetry to generous benefactors. Dunbar bore bruises from the tide of opposition to blacks in America. When success finally came, he was viewed as the black exception, as a model for

PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR / 195 his race, or as a primitive whose talent came from instinct alone and not from wide reading or experimentation. Cultural obstructions for Dunbar should not hide the view of the challenge coming from American society. The most provocative stimulus for Dunbar was the new racial repression emanating, but not confined to, the South, which produced and inspired many black writers. There were two basic ways for a black writer to express his reaction to his hostile environment. He could directly protest the status of blacks, citing the violation of civil law and the Constitution, the denial of human rights, and the betrayal of blacks in light of their support of the Union in both the Civil War and Reconstruction. Or he could make a case for the black cultural tradition, tracing its roots to a noble heritage in Africa; investigating the rich folk background in song, tale, jokes, boasts, and artifacts; providing evidence of a rewarding community life despite the blight of slavery; and celebrating heroes like Frederick Douglass and valuable white associates like John Greenleaf Whittier. Although Dunbar did write some important articles that dealt directly with racial oppression, he tended to restrict his interest in the race problem to exploring and using the black cultural tradition, a more indirect response but equally as important as the frontal attack. There was never any question about Dunbar's commitment to the welfare of black people or his pride in black achievement, though there were persistent rumors in polite black society in Washington and New York that he hated his blackness and sought to achieve a reputation as a writer that was without a racial label. Some truth may exist in the charge, since all great artists seek universal recognition, but none lies in the more personal part of it. It is a comment, rather, on Dunbar's social environment. Its source is complicated, involv-

ing deficiencies in upper-middle-class black society at the turn of the century. In northern cities this society was dominated by mulattoes, some of whom noted with a lack of charity that Dunbar had married a very fair wife, Alice Nelson. Others resented the fact that a "pure" black had been the first of the race to achieve national eminence as a poet, and all knew of Dunbar's growing distaste for the limitations placed on him by publishers and of his deepening conviction after 1896 that he had to write dialect verse in order to be read at all. Dunbar emerged as a writer in a difficult and demanding time and achieved an important place in American literature. What must be considered now is how he approached his writing and what his art means in terms of a developing Afro-American literary tradition. An important problem for every writer is finding his own voice. Voice, roughly defined, is a consistent way of speaking and a powerful instrument in giving a work of art unity and intensity. It involves diction, manner of addressing an audience, range of reference, and ultimately values in describing or weighing reality. Voice has significance in both fiction and in nonfiction and is absolutely indispensable in good poetry, in which every phrase must contribute to a developing structure. A writer cannot create a voice out of nothing; it represents, rather, a summary of a life, including the trials of day-to-day experience and reading. Long after he has read a work of genuine artistic merit, a reader will remember the voice that has spoken to him. The determination is a particularly trying matter for a black writer, principally because of the duality in black life. W. E. B. Du Bois pointed to the reality among blacks of a double consciousness and to the two cultures, one black and one white, existing within a single black body; and he held that the problem for blacks

196 I AMERICAN was to integrate the two constructively. This is easier said than done, and many black writers have wasted too much of their energy in resolving this dilemma. Though one black writer may lean more toward the white side of the tradition he shares and another toward the black, some sort of resolution is necessary before a voice emerges to order the confusion and to speak with force. Dunbar's problem in discovering an appropriate voice, one that he was never to solve with total satisfaction, stems from his life. That life exposed him almost equally to the black and white aspects of his southern Ohio culture. Such a double exposure was shared with the same even distribution of experience by a few other blacks at the time, notably Du Bois, whose early years were spent in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Dunbar's black credentials are considerable. His parents were black without visible intermixture of white blood, a fact that William Dean Howells was to note about the poet in his influential introduction to Lyrics of Lowly Life (1896). Born in 1872, not quite a decade after the Emancipation Proclamation, Dunbar learned about slavery from his parents and their friends. His mother talked to him more than his father, and from her the boy picked up an early exposure to poetry, as well as accounts of happy moments in the slave quarters in addition to its repressive side. From his father Dunbar heard only bitter memories. No doubt in the early years much of his absorption of this background before the Civil War was unconscious. But once Riley, whose poems Dunbar had analyzed with care, had made him aware of the use of dialect, and once Charles Henry Dennis, managing editor of the Chicago Record, had suggested that he accept the model provided by the poetry of Robert Burns and apply it to the black experience, the young poet talked with more purpose to his mother's friends and neighbors, probing

WRITERS

them for details of their life in slavery and recording not only their tales but also their manner of telling them. Dunbar could scarcely discover more authentic sources, short of being a slave himself in Ol' Kentuck. A member of the black community in Dayton, Dunbar attended the Eaker Street Methodist Church, where he gave his first public reading, "An Easter Ode," in 1885. A few years later, as a member of the Knights of Pythias, Gem City Palace Lodge Number Two, he saw an all-black minstrel troupe perform at the Park Theater. He organized his own black dramatic group, the Philodramian, which presented, among other productions, "The Stolen Calf," a play written by him. In his last year of high school, he began publishing a black newspaper, the Dayton Tattler, an ambitious effort sustained largely by his own fiction as well as poetry. What began with questionable promise on December 13, 1890, expired after no more than eight issues. The Tattler is chiefly useful not for "The Gambler's Wife," a serialized western play, or "His Bride of the Tomb," a romance, but for the demonstration of Dunbar's persistent interest in contributing to the advancement of his race. A mature assertion of his commitment to black culture occurred when Dunbar moved to Chicago in 1893 at the time of the World's Columbian Exposition. There he met black leaders Ida B. Wells, Hallie Q. Brown, Mary Church Terrell, and, most important, Frederick Douglass, who offered him a place in the office of the Haiti Pavilion. Of greater significance was the fact that he met black artists actively involved in creative activities. He discussed the problem of writing dialect verse with James Corrothers, a journalist and the author of Black Cat Club (1907), and James Edwin Campbell, coeditor of Four O'Clock Magazine and author of Driftings and Gleanings (1888) and Plantation and Elsewhere

PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR / 197 (1895), both of whom were published poets, but rather closer to the tradition as influenced by plantation pieties than was Dunbar. He met the black violinist Joseph Douglass, a grandson of Frederick; Harry Burleigh, the composer and singer; the budding dramatist Richard B. Harrison, who later played De Lawd in The Green Pastures (1930); and the composer Will Marion Cook. With Cook's encouragement, Dunbar recited his ode "Colored Americans" at Colored Americans' Day. All of these associations point to the discovery of a poetic voice that was essentially black. The best evidence of its shaping is to be found in those dialect poems that deal with serious problems, like the lack of freedom or the unequal distribution of the world's goods, and in those that display dramatic complexity, frequently tapping rich folk material in music, dance, and narrative. These developments in art required the presence of an intelligent, sensitive, tolerant, speculative observer or commentator committed to humane values and their universal application. Such a voice need not be confined to dialect verse. It appears, though not in its fully developed state, in "Frederick Douglass," which suffers somewhat from the imposition of eighteenth-century rhetoric. Dunbar's finest volume of poems, Lyrics of Lowly Life, which consolidated and confirmed the promise of Majors and Minors (1896), contains two poems that display qualities of his developing voice: "Accountability" and "Frederick Douglass." The emerging voice was never to issue forth fully and with an enduring resonance because Dunbar was attracted to many ways of speaking, not simply that which was reinforced by his black experience. In his early years Dunbar achieved general success in Dayton society, apart from the black community. The focus of his accomplishment is to be found in the schools that he attended, all

overwhelmingly white. There were few traumas during these years, according to his biographers, and his progress resembles that of any talented white scholar. Dunbar attended district schools in Dayton during the elementary years and wrote his first poem at the age of seven. Although he was the only black in his class at intermediate school, he had little difficulty making white friends and race posed no barrier to close association with Orville Wright. Dunbar encountered his first great teacher here, Samuel Wilson, who read poetry to his class. Dunbar entered Central High School in 1886 and accumulated an impressive set of honors. He achieved distinction in debating and composition and published poems in both the High School Times and the Dayton Herald. Election to the exclusive literary society, the Philomathean, confirmed his high status, and serving as editor in chief of the High School Times seemed clearly appropriate for a scholar so distinguished as he. Though discrimination prevented Dunbar from finding a suitable job after graduation, it did not deter him from pursuing his interest in poetry. Legend has it that the black elevator operator at the Callahan Building always had a book in his hand. Dunbar's primary literary conditioning in high school gave great importance to romantic verse. This is evident in his early poems in proper English where there are echoes of William Wordsworth, John Keats, Alfred Tennyson, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, as well as of Edgar Allan Poe, James Russell Lowell, and John Greenleaf Whittier. Dunbar studied with particular care the successful white practitioners in dialect: Ella Wheeler Wilcox, Eugene Field, Sam Walter Foss, James Russell Lowell, and James Whitcomb Riley. Riley made such a strong impression that Dunbar imitated him in such early poems in dialect as "The Ol' Tunes," "A Banjo Song," "The Old

795 / AMERICAN WRITERS Apple-Tree," "The Old Homestead," and "An Old Memory." This collection of "Old's" points directly to Riley. But perhaps the most explicit example of such imitation is "A Drowsy Day," written from the point of view of meditative old age and, indeed, using Riley's Hoosier idiom. Dunbar directly expressed his admiration for Riley in "James Whitcomb Riley (From a Westerner's Point of View)," apparently never published during Dunbar's lifetime. White literary associations, publishers, benefactors, and authors were major influences in promoting Dunbar's career. Perhaps the first opportunity for him to acquire a reputation, extending then not much beyond the Dayton city limits, was provided by a meeting of the Western Association of Writers. His reading of poems to the convention in June 1892 attracted the attention of James Newton Matthews, who became a much-valued benefactor. Certain newspapers were especially interested in Dunbar's work, notably the Chicago News-Record and the Toledo Bee. One of Dunbar's most significant white benefactors was the foreman of the printing department of the Press of the United Brethren, who accepted Oak and Ivy, Dunbar's first volume of poems, without any financial guarantee from the author. The volume appeared in December 1892, just in time to be a Christmas present for his mother, to whom it was dedicated. Other committed white supporters included Matthews, who wrote a letter about Dunbar to Riley and sent complimentary letters and notices to newspapers; Charles Thatcher, a lawyer in Toledo, who offered to send Dunbar to college; and Dr. Henry A. Tobey, who did the same, specifying Harvard as the preferred institution, and who with Thatcher sponsored Dunbar's second vqlume of poems, Majors and Minors. Nor were white writers indifferent to his talent. Riley wrote to him in 1892, "Already you have many friends and can have thousands

more by being simple, honest, unaffected, and just to yourself and the high source of your endowment." Riley raised here the problem of voice, though his terms were moral rather than literary. George Washington Cable, the shortstory writer and novelist famous for his portrayal of the Creoles in Louisiana, praised Dunbar's work and commented on his pure African descent, which had a special meaning for a Presbyterian surrounded in New Orleans by vestiges of African culture. Robert Green Ingersoll, the well-known orator and essayist, expressed appreciation for Dunbar's poetry, especially for six poems, all written in conventional English. James A. Herne, the author of Shore Acres (1892) and other plays exhibiting the first evidences of substantial realism in the American theater, was the channel to Dunbar's most influential white supporter in the world of American letters. This was William Dean Howells, whose review in Harper's Weekly gave Dunbar a national reputation. Concerned as well about the problem of voice, Howells sought to define the literary approach that seemed to him to be immensely impressive in Dunbar's verse. The poet, Howells wrote, was "the first man of his color to study his race objectively, to analyze it to himself, and then represent it as art as he felt it and found it to be, to represent it humorously, yet tenderly, and above all so faithfully " Howells preferred the dialect poems in Dunbar's collection (the "Minors," as Dunbar described them), suggesting problems about the poet's attitude toward the use of dialect that later emerged more fully. Howells was particularly impressed by "The Party," which opened "vistas into the simple, sensuous, joyous nature of his [the Negro] race." One can hardly blame Howells for his choice, but "The Party," though "sensuous," is not "simple," and its dramatic complexity denies that all is joy in Dunbar's heaven of fine food and extraordinary entertainment. Howells offered Dunbar the

PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR / 199 opportunity that he yearned for and, in addition, some good advice that the poet in subsequent years had difficulty accepting. The dilemma of one black poet seemed clear in 1896. Dunbar was the product of many experiences, one merging into another, perhaps without great differentiation. But in his creative world he made a sharp distinction between what was black and what was white. Experience determines in large measure voice, and Dunbar's had exposed him to black and white associations, manners, and values. This liberal spread is not of much help in arriving at a unique and memorable way of speaking. Dunbar never understood fully that he had to make a decision, though he did agonize about what seemed to be restrictions imposed by his audience. The choice of voice is finally an act of will, and it requires a sense of where a poet's greatest strength lies. William Butler Yeats turned to Ireland to discover it; T. S. Eliot to a decadent England, full of intimations of cultural collapse, with a few strands of hope resting in vestiges of Christian doctrine; Robinson and Robert Frost to New England. And where would Dunbar turn? His direction was not clear in 1896, possibly because his choices were so many and he felt no pressure really to sort them out. Dunbar's options were formidable. The black tradition presented two. The first is the poetry of high rhetoric about noble black themes. In Lyrics of Lowly Life two excellent examples are "Frederick Douglass" and "Ode to Ethiopia." Such a rhetoric is almost impenetrable to the insertion of anything natural, least of all a voice, but Dunbar deserves credit for bringing his own values to the tribute to Douglass. Then there is dialect verse, more accessible to the creation of a natural voice. But dialect has its unnatural dangers. One is the language itself, the temptation to follow slavishly the minstrel or the plantation traditions. Dunbar offered eloquent testimony on this point, moved, perhaps,

by his own involvement with Will Marion Cook's musical show, Clorindy (1898): "The outlandish, twisted mispronunciations of minstrel darky talk had none of the musical cadence of real Negro speech; it kept the Negro character a clown and a scamp." The second part of Dunbar's statement involves the matter of substance as well. The plantation tradition did not give black people minds worth reckoning with. Black characters were loyal servants, obedient to the very end; self-indulgent darkies who longed for corn pone and possum and were not above stealing a pig from the tolerant white man in the big house; clowns delighted to engage in antic routines for the amusement of a white audience; and lifelong children without any age of maturity, who required guidance and assistance, never a corrupting formal education. Though there were only two black options, many more came from the white tradition. One hears echoes of an ode by Keats in "Ere Sleep Comes Down to Soothe the Weary Eyes," a Wordsworthian exercise in morality in "The Lesson," a tale of mystery within a strangely animate nature by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in "The Rising of the Storm," memories of a sonnet by John Milton, stressing endurance and patience, in "Not They Who Soar." And the list includes poems that also owe much to the late English and American romantics. In this area the opportunity to choose overwhelmed Dunbar, and few poems display any imprint of a personal touch that is special and unique. Those that do are worth noting in Lyrics of Lowly Life: "The Poet and His Song," "The Mystery," "Unexpressed," "Religion," "The Dilettante: A Modern Type," and "We Wear the Mask" offer much more than the reverberations of a lament by Poe in "Dirge" and "lone," or the rhetoric of Lowell in "Ode for Memorial Day" and "Columbian Ode," or the sensuous language of the late romantics in "Song," or the numerous pious expressions of the homeside

200 I AMERICAN poets, Whittier and Longfellow, in "The Master Player." Dunbar in a half dozen poems in the Lyrics seeks a more personal way of talking, probes the experience that he knows, and produces finished, sharply focused statements. The search for the natural voice appears easier for Dunbar in dialect verse, and the evidence of successful achievement is far richer. A moment when the natural voice emerges with great clarity and power is in "When Malindy Sings." Here the narrator expresses his appreciation for the talent, the aspirations, and the sensitivity of black people, and demonstrates their unique way of acquiring dignity and spiritual satisfaction. It is a voice grounded in the real experience and speech of blacks, displaying understanding, not condescension; compassion rather than a preoccupation with what is merely amusing: Who dat says dat humble praises Wif de Master nevah counts? Heish yo' mouf, I hyeah dat music Ez hit rises up an' mounts— Floatin' by de hills an' valleys, Way above dis buryin' sod, Ez hit makes its way in glory To de very gates of God! The search is clearly not so easy or productive in conventional English verse, and what appears in the Lyrics is largely imitative, well done, and sufficient to establish the reputation of a lesser poet in the genteel tradition, but, in the final analysis, only imitative. Dunbar did not make the decision that would enhance his stature as a poet. He could not bring himself to perform the act of will, to concentrate upon his strengths and to create the geography, the psychology, and the imagery that must accompany a fundamental artistic decision of this kind. His poetic development ends with Lyrics of Lowly Life, though he

WRITERS

would continue to write poems and to publish three major volumes of verse. Dunbar devoted his energy increasingly to fiction after 1896, but the problem of voice, now a narrative voice, still haunted him. The Uncalled (1898), his first novel, was begun in England and finished in the home of Professor Kelly Miller, an outstanding black essayist, at Howard University in Washington, D. C. The novel seems promising because it employs the background of southern Ohio, which Dunbar knew, and centers on a young man who rejects the "call," the divine command to become a minister of God, in favor of a more generous and more human form of Christianity without the authority of the cloth. The plot is sufficiently close to incidents in Dunbar's life to capture a few overtones from it, but it is clearly not the story drawn from the author's life, as his wife, Alice Moore Dunbar, once claimed. The conflict is far too simple, the sense of a rich town or city life absent, and the approach to a point of view, uncertain and fuzzy. The novel has only white characters who act from a superficial or pious motivation, suggesting that the proper tradition of the work was to be found in the religious line in sentimental fiction. The novel for Dunbar was only a beginning, and he would move, though sometimes in a wayward fashion, toward the discovery of a more rewarding matter and a more sophisticated way of approaching it. He succeeded in part in The Sport of the Gods (1902) in a manner more convincing, perhaps, than is to be found in any of his poems. Dunbar did not solve the problem of voice in either poetry or fiction, but he nevertheless succeeded in creating a body of work that commands high respect and careful critical attention. What he achieved also requires consideration of the cultural environment of the 1890's from which his work emerged.

PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR / 201 Dunbar wrote poems, novels, short stories, articles, dramatic works, and lyrics. Because it is not possible to do justice to all of his talents, it makes sense to concentrate upon those areas of the canon that would establish his reputation as a writer: the poetry and the fiction. The poetry comprises verses written in dialect and a greater number written in conventional English. The fiction includes both novels and short stories, with the burden of experimentation located in the novels. Because the short stories essentially document Dunbar's interest in exploiting the plantation tradition and represent a phase in his general development as a writer of fiction, they do not deserve consideration apart from the novels. Dialect verse is a topic that still inspires mixed feelings in black intellectuals, despite the black consciousness-raising of the 1960's. The reasons are not hard to find. For years dialect was used to derogate and ridicule black people. The problem now is not simply a matter of the plantation tradition and the minstrel stage but the flow of such characters as Stepin Fechit, Sunshine Sammy, and Al Jolson in black face continuing into the twentieth century, insulting misrepresentations sprung from the nineteenth. This sad history makes a critic doubt that serious art can come from a language so consistently employed for one purpose. But the black novelist, poet, diplomat, and political activist James Weldon Johnson thought not. Though he had used dialect in song lyrics presented on the musical stage in New York, he refused to use it in his poetry. He insisted that dialect, though colorful and musical as he well knew, had too many limitations be^ cause of its unfortunate history. According to Johnson, black dialect invited two well-established reactions, the pathetic and the humorous, and neither was appropriate for serious art. In God's Trombones (1927), those artistic render-

ings of black folk sermons, he did not use dialect; he restricted himself rather to occasional touches of the colloquial and to imitations of the syntax and the imagery of the black exhorter. The result is not wholly reassuring, because Johnson's work lacks the exhortative power and energy of a genuine black folk preacher who had never heard of literary reservations about the language that he used and would care little if he had. His responsibility was to his congregation and to God, to whom he spoke directly in moments of spiritual frenzy. The decision to concentrate upon dialect was not an easy one for Dunbar, given the pressures from black society and interested white readers. Johnson could not make it and Dunbar was reluctant to do so, though his ear for language was much superior. If a decision was hard in the 1920's, it was much harder in the 1890's, when the plantation tradition occupied a central place in contemporary sentimental literature and the minstrel stage was a staple of American entertainment. Dialect verse first appeared in the work of southern white writers who achieved humorous effects by using it in light verse or in reproductions of folk narratives. Foremost among them were Irwin Russell, whose poems were published posthumously in 1888; Joel Chandler Harris, who achieved fame for the Uncle Remus tales; Thomas Nelson Page, author of In Ole Virginia (1887), and ambassador to Italy from 1913 to 1919; and Armistead Churchill Gordon, coauthor with Page of Befo' de War: Echoes in Negro Dialect (1888). Black writers moved into the field too, though often with feelings of ambivalence. The truth is that black writers were at the point of making a commitment to dialect at least a decade before the works of white writers appeared. Frances E. Watkins Harper, a black poet, offered the substance and the structure of

202 I AMERICAN a typical dialect poem in "Learning to Read" (1872); the only thing lacking is the dialect. The voice is that of an old freed slave, Aunt Chloe, who reminisces about a small triumph; the scene is the "little cabin," the conventional place of happy times on the old plantation. There are the expected references to the southern black cuisine, "pot liquor," for example, and to black character, noting that stealing is an established practice. Aunt Chloe, herself, is excessively pious, and her small triumph is the acquisition of glasses without being able to read. She does so because she wants to read the Bible on her own, and she realizes her ambition. All of the elements of a typical dialect poem are here: the sincere and simple narrator; the locale; the jaundiced, tolerant view toward black character; the sentimental wish that is acted upon; the food; and the pervasive sense of Christian piety—but not the language, except in touches of dialect. Harper's poem is clearly not high art, nor are almost all of the poems in the dialect tradition. But Johnson was wrong. High art could and did come from black dialect, but only under certain conditions imposed by a sophisticated poetic intelligence. Dunbar made high art from dialect, as did a few of his contemporaries, though most turned to more elaborate versions of the Harper formula. Dunbar, though the master of his special craft, was not alone in practicing it with an amount of distinction. James Edwin Campbell, a black journalist who had received his education at Miami College (now Miami University of Ohio), had some of Dunbar's ambitions. Much of his dialect verse follows the usual pattern, but "Ol' Doc' Hyar" does not. It is a beast fable that has a strange toughness. Instead of possessing a pervasive sentimentality and an abiding Christian piety, the world of "OP Doc' Hyar" is amoral, if not immoral, offering a climate for trickery, if not for downright malevolence. Doc' Hyar

WRITERS

practices a form of quack medicine, and Mistah B'ar is his unfortunate victim. The final stanza expresses Doc' Hyar's attitude toward his inadequacies as a physician: But de vay naix day Mistah B'ar he daid; Wen dee tell Doc' Hyar, he des scratch he haid; "Ef pashons git well ur pashons git wu's, Money got ter come een de OP Hyar's pu's; Not wut folkses does, but fur wut dee know Does de folkses git paid"—an Hyar larfed low, Dis sma't OP Hyar What lib up dar Een de mighty fine house on de mighty high hill! The lesson that "OP Doc' Hyar" teaches the critic is that dialect verse acquires a new power and a distinctive racial energy as it approaches the folk tradition. This is one of the ways by which a routine dialect exercise can become art. Gone are the artificial conventions of the sentimental and the familiar locale with all of its expected associations. Instead there is a fresh, serious view of human behavior (though in beasts) that raises uneasy reservations about the drift and the values of current society. The energy emanating in the nineteenth century from a black folk culture, infinitely richer than the formal tradition, was not lost upon Dunbar, though he could employ the conventions of ordinary dialect verse with a skill that no other writer of dialect possessed. Johnson maintained that "When De Co'n Pone's Hot" was superior to Riley's "When the Frost Is on the Punkin," and he is unquestionably right. Johnson points to a superior delicacy in handling nuances of sentiment, a more musical lilt, and the use of a more deft and economic technique. But the poem is, nonetheless, thoroughly within the mainstream of conventional dialect

PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR / 203 verse. The subject is food, good eating southern style. The basic emotion is an excess of sentiment lavished upon a familiar and modest object. The manner is that of high rhetoric: "Tek away yo' sody biscuit," and the overriding atmosphere is that of Christian piety. What gives this ordinary dialect poem distinction is the swing of the heptameter couplets and the economic technique, both mentioned by Johnson. In addition there is imaginative imagery, unusual in dialect verse, based upon incongruous juxtapositions:

substance of the poem is the retelling of the story of the liberation from Egypt of the children of Israel. The complexity of telling is described by the narrator as "a-preachin' ancient" and "talkin' 'bout to-day." The trouble is that one line of discourse keeps slipping into another at strategic intervals, requiring continuing admonition from the minister to his congregation: "Now don't run an' tell yo' mastahs / Dat I's preachin' discontent." At the same time the opportunities for a relationship to "to-day" abound, extending from:

Dey is times in life when Nature Seems to slip a cog an9 go, Jes' a-rattlin' down creation, Lak an ocean's overflow; When de worP jes' stahts a-spinnin' Lak a picaninny's top,

Dey kin fo'ge yo' chains an' shackles F'om de mountains to de sea; But de Lawd will sen' some Moses Fu' to set his chillun free.

When de oven do' is opened, An' de smell comes po'in' out; Why, de 'lectric light o' Heaven Seems to settle on de spot There is substantial hope for a young poet who can offer such startling images. "An Ante-Bellum Sermon" is another matter. Dealing with a serious topic, freedom from slavery, it employs the framework of a folk sermon preached to a congregation still enslaved. Dunbar uses his form with great skill, staying close to the traditional movement in such a sermon, which is a progress toward truth-telling and the revelation of the words and wisdom of God. Another characteristic of the folk sermon is the primitive reconstruction of familiar stories in the Bible. In general, what is lost in Accuracy is more than compensated for by the awesome power that God has assumed and the crushing consequences of his acts. For a short period the cosmos is located in a shabby cabin a convenient distance from the big house. The

to: Fu' de Bible says "a servant Is a-worthy of his hire." An' you cain't git roun' nor thoo dat, An' you cain't get ovah it, and:

We will praise de gracious Mastah Dat has gin us liberty The "gracious Mastah" is clearly not the one in the big house, who is not prepared to make slaves "citiz'—," the word that the minister cannot finish since it would place him in great danger. Though he pretends not to, he makes a clear case for a lack of justice in his own day; "preachin"' is more powerful than "talkin'," and ends on a triumphant note with a reference to the inevitable coming of Moses. A demonstration of how dialect verse can become high art In the hands of a master, "An Ante-Bellum Sermon" has a serious theme treated with dramatic complexity and subtlety. It relies upon the authority of a folk form, using its particular defining characteristics. It has the

204 I AMERICAN benefit of a delicate correlation of dramatic and intellectual movements, and it has the advantage of a narrator whose point of view is apparently objective but who speaks naturally and effectively through character, background, and dramatic movement. "Accountability" is another demonstration of the successful treatment of a serious idea. The subject matter here is contemporary rather than eternal. Determinism was much on the minds of intellectuals in the 1890's, and as Dunbar wrote this poem Frank Morris and others were constructing narratives alleging that a form of natural determinism was the essential reality of existence. Determinism in "Accountability" is pushed to a humorous and ironic conclusion. The point, in fact, is the irony: a serious world view seen in the perspective of a chicken yard. The poem begins with a tribute to the greatness of God, who does not neglect the "alleys" and displays concern for nature, the city, differences in human nature, and all of the happenings in the world. God's omnipotence must also include the capture by the narrator of "one o' mastah's chickens." Revealed in the poem are the limits of determinism, a reservation of intellectual significance, and a disposition by human beings to rationalize their behavior. "Accountability" has the qualities of "An Ante-Bellum Sermon": it is serious and humorous; it has a dramatic complexity provided by the presence of two value systems, and it has the advantage once more of an intelligent, speculative narrator who orders naturally and without contrivance the movement in the poem. The result is a dialect poem full of somber implications and informed by a meaning that could come only from the common sense and practical wisdom of an oppressed people. "A Negro Love Song" is on its face a superficial lyric without the probing of accepted assumptions and the dramatic complexity found

WRITERS

elsewhere in the Dunbar canon. It does contain one innovation of Dunbar's that deserves comment, since it enlivens the verse and appears in more highly developed poems. The routine expression of love is placed within the context of what appears to be a dance, and the refrain "Jump back, honey, jump back" reminds the reader of this possibility. This repeated phrase has another use; it serves to cut the sentiment, which would otherwise be cloying. Much to be admired too, but not unusual in Dunbar's poems, is the clarity of structure. It consists of the memory of a man's encounter with a lady, a record of her impression upon him, and a declaration of love followed by an overly economic response. The attempt to limit an excess of sentiment represented by the repetition of "Jump back, honey, jump back" is echoed by a conclusion something less than reassuring for the lover: Love me, honey, love me true? Love me well ez I love you? An' she answe'd, "'Cose I do"— "When Malindy Sings" is more complex than it appears. Its power comes from the ultimate frame into which Malindy's music fits, and the strength of her talent is enhanced by comparisons and sacrilegious domestic distractions: Towsah, stop dat ba'kin', hyeah me! Mandy, mek dat chile keep still.... Sacrilege is the correct term for these apparently harmless family activities, for Malindy has the power of the folk preacher, for whom, at high points in his sermon, nothing stands between his voice and God's. The folk tradition of black people once again intrudes here as it does in "An Ante-Bellum Sermon." It affirms that in a special black cosmos, which is both awesome and personal, there can be direct transfers of glory, in word and in song. Not frequently, it is

PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR / 205 true. But every time Malindy sings, the faithful and the knowing respond, just as they did when God sent Moses to liberate the Israelites, establishing an expectation in the congregation that he will do so again when sufficiently provoked. Malindy's song transcends earth and provides an intimation of the eternal life, though the channel of connection is not educated or sophisticated but, rather, simple, intense, and touched by otherworldly power: Who dat says dat humble praises Wif de Mastah nevah counts? Heish yo' mouf, I hyeah dat music, Ez hit rises up an' mounts— Floatin' by de hills an' valleys, Way above dis buryin' sod, Ez hit makes its way in glory To de very gates of God! Though the poem's great power rests in the folk connection with God within a clearly defined black cosmos, the poem has other virtues that are dramatic and thought-provoking. What we hear is one side of a conversation, presumably with Mandy, who lacks the narrator's faith, experience, and perception. Though another voice never breaks the flow of the monologue, Mandy—if she hears at all—acquires an education about the organization of the cosmos, learning how close God is to faithful blacks: Let me listen, I can hyeah it, Th'oo de bresh of angels' wings, Sof' an sweet, "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot," Ez Malindy sings. The comparisons have Dunbar's shrewdness in selection, including white Miss Lucy with her music book and devotion to practice. She is the only representative from the world of written notes and polite society. The other comparisons are from nature, and these representatives, more sensitive and more understanding than Miss Lucy, simply stop their music when Mal-

indy sings. Fiddlin' man, robins, la'ks, mockin'bird, and "Folks a-playin' on de banjo" appear in the poem with a lack of differentiation in nature between what is human and what is not. "When Malindy Sings" calls upon Dunbar's full power: his reliance upon the black folk tradition, his dramatic skill, and, above all, the thoughtful, speculative, humane presence that hovers above the narrator's voice. Dunbar's virtuoso poem in dialect is "The Party." This may be the most popular poem in black dialect ever written, and an ear attuned to distances can still hear "Dey had a gread big pahty down to Tom's de othah night" floating from high school auditoriums all over America. "The Party" lacks the serious, compelling ideas that inform Dunbar's very best dialect poems, unless one considers the cultivation of envy in an enchanted listener a great idea. Great or not, it has a long tradition, originating, no doubt, with Satan. The poem is an extraordinary collection of all of the technical devices in Dunbar's arsenal, and he would never again display his many skills in black dialect with such brilliance and abundance. "The Party" contains all of the elements of a typical dialect poem: the good times on the old plantation; the humorous antics of blacks as they imitate their masters; the exaggerated and distorted movements associated with the minstrel stage; the emphasis upon simple emotions of hunger, jealousy, pride—all fallible; the racial vulnerability of the preacher, in regard to food and dancing; the broad rhetoric; and the food: white bread, egg pone, roasted shoat, ham, hot chitterlings, sweet potatoes—the entire southern black cuisine. More important in generating excitement is the dramatic frame. The narrator tells his story to someone who has not been lucky enough to be at the party. Since he clearly wishes to arouse the appetites and to encourage envy and frustration, he may not be above exaggerating

206 I AMERICAN WRITERS what he has seen, heard, and tasted—perhaps not even above departing from the truth. The reader senses the mounting excitement in the captivated listener and also the narrator's developing involvement in his tale. Excitement, indeed, is not doubly but triply compounded if the reader's reaction is counted. "The Party" offers Dunbar's most skillful use of the dance in his poetry. The movements of the dance and the lyrics both appear here. Their relationship is curious, since the lyrics come from a high culture not available to the blacks who are dancing and singing. This incongruity is functional, since much of the poem deals with the efforts of the blacks to imitate their white superiors in both dress and manners. The dance routines appear twice; the most revealing sequence is the second, in terms of the basic comparison of white and black societies: You know when dey gits to singin' an' dey comes to dat ere paht: "In some lady's new brick house, In some lady's gyahden. Ef you don't let me out, I will jump out, So fa' you well, my dahlin'." Den dey's got a circle 'roun' you, an' you's got to break de line.... This sequence suggests a problem beyond imitation. It is the effort of an outsider to join the circle that has been defined wholly in terms of white gentility. Scott Thomas was so anxious to do so that he "lit head-fo' most in de fiah-place right plump." The suggested moral here is about racial dignity and pride and the temptations to abandon these virtues for immediate success in white terms, but this matter should not be pushed too far. What has been presented is the range in form, idea, and technique of Dunbar's best dialect poems, works of art that require no condescending introductions. What is the best in dialect verse is the best in Dunbar's whole po-

etic canon. Nowhere else does he display such diversity of technique, subtlety of form, command of folk sources, and sense of authority over poetic movement. The demanding ordering principle that makes all this possible is voice, and the pity is that Dunbar chose to yield to it so infrequently. Although all of Dunbar's poems in dialect have his music and acute sense of what is dramatically appropriate, none has the power or provides the tug on the imagination of these examples of his highest art. None of the poems in conventional or literary English approaches the magnificence of the great dialect poems, despite Dunbar's mounting reservations after 1896 about the publication of dialect verse. The consequence of the refusal to recognize the sources of his greatest strength appears in Lyrics of the Hearthside (1899), Dunbar's first volume after the Lyrics of Lowly Life. Though his technical competence is much present, the volume is dominated by poems written in the high romantic style that the poet admired so much. The verses devoted to humor and dialect, which appear at the back of the volume, lack the force of the earlier poems in dialect. Certainly "Little Brown Baby" does. Dunbar appears to have made his decision about where he should place his poetic energies and talents, and it is, for many critics, the wrong one. The clearest statements of Dunbar's unhappiness about being identified as a dialect poet are in his conversations with Johnson. One exchange occurred in 1901, and Johnson, who had reservations also about the "possibilities of stereotyped dialect," reports: He said, "You know, of course, that I didn't start as a dialect poet. I simply came to the conclusion that I could write it as well, if not better than anybody else I knew of, and that by doing so I should gain a hearing, and now they don't want me to write anything but dialect."

PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR / 207 Johnson also records in his autobiography, Along This Way (1933), that five years later Dunbar's attitude remained unchanged and that he commented in the year of his death, "I've kept on doing the same things, and doing them no better. I have never gotten to the things I really want to do." What those things were are unknown, but Johnson guesses that they were long poems, perhaps of epic length, about blacks. This speculation has a relationship, possibly, to The Sport of the Gods, which has some of the qualities of a prose epic. Dunbar's poems in literary English usually have one praiseworthy quality: they are touched by his remarkable skill in metrics and versification. His prosody absorbs with ease complicated metrical structures found in English literature from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries. These poems comprise three categories. What may be called "imitations" is the first. The term is not quite fair, because in the very best of his verses that derive from English and American practice Dunbar has innovations of substance that are his own. Certainly this is true in "Ere Sleep Comes Down to Soothe the Weary Eyes," the first poem in Lyrics of Lowly Life, and in "The Haunted Oak," which first appeared in Century magazine in December 1900. A second category is a set of heroic poems that are either tributes to the black race or to individual leaders like Douglass or Alexander Crummell. A good example of the formal salutation to the race is "Ode to Ethiopia," an early poem that appears in Lyrics of Lowly Life. "Alexander Crummell—Dead" is an eloquent memorial for the black clergyman whose religious endeavors touched America, Europe, and Africa, and it was published by the Boston Traveler on March 22, 1899. A third form is the personal account of Dunbar's struggle with writing, acceptance, distortions of meaning, and frustration. These poems have great economy

and make up for their compression by displaying unusual force. These are unquestionably some of the most moving of all his poems. "We Wear the Mask" and "The Poet" fall here, the former from Lyrics of Lowly Life and the latter in Lyrics of Love and Laughter (1903), where it seems somehow out of place. "Ere Sleep Comes Down to Soothe the Weary Eyes" has every appearance of being one of Keats's journeys of the imagination to a realm of peace and overwhelming, sensuous beauty, a place of abundance and satisfaction haunted only by the near presence of death. The difference in Dunbar's poem is that the journey is through a form of purgatory, not an adventure carried by the hedonistic impulse alone. Instead of a draft of cool wine from the South, the narrator discovers a "base witch's caldron," and the pilgrim is overwhelmed by "griefs and heartaches we have known" that "Come up like pois'nous vapors that arise / From some base witch's caldron. ..." As if the memories of the past are not appalling enough, the poet's fancy projects his spirit to a world not known but offering little comfort: To lands unspeakable—beyond surmise, Where shapes unknowable to being spring. . . . Neither past nor future offers the^balm, satisfaction, and peace that he seeks. He is reduced to his naked, unflattering self in the twilight world: But self exposes unto self, a scroll Full writ with all life's acts unwise or wise, In characters indelible and known. ... Not until the "awful self alone" is viewed does sleep come. It is not a sating of the senses but a relief from "sad world's cries," from probing "th' eternal mystery," and from fretting with frustration and unsuccessful attempts to penetrate the surrounding gloom. Sleep is a release

208 I AMERICAN and blessing and a condition more firmly attached to death than what is revealed in an ode by Keats. Dunbar has drastically altered the substance of the journey of the imagination, though he does not go quite so far as Poe does in "DreamLand" (1844), in which the narrator finds satisfaction in an underworld less than life, full of distortions and phenomena enduring a minimal existence in a twilight world. "The Haunted Oak" is equally fascinating with its use of the form of a border ballad to record the lynching of an innocent black man. The oak responds to the hanging from one of its boughs by rejecting life for the blameless bough that has participated in this atrocity: And never more shall leaves come forth On a bough that bears the ban; I am burned with dread, I am dried and dead, From the curse of a guiltless man. The machinery of the border ballad is abundantly displayed: the familiar metrics, the repetition of phrase, the curse, the ominous and knowing nonhuman phenomena like trees and birds, the violence, and the sense of betrayal. The border ballad is admirably suited to document a lynching; it has done justice to many a violent deed occurring on the boundary between England and Scotland. One innovation in "The Haunted Oak" is the use of a tree to tell the brutal story. It is a witness tree in the true sense, in that it declares that the souls of all of the apparently respectable participants—the judge, the doctor, the minister, and the minister's eldest son—are in mortal danger: And ever the judge rides by, rides by, And goes to hunt the deer, And ever another rides his soul In the guise of a mortal fear. Like "Ere Sleep Comes Down to Soothe the Weary Eyes," "The Haunted Oak" makes im-

WRITERS

pressive use of derivative forms. Old vessels are filled with new wine, and the new is almost as good as the old. "Ode to Ethiopia" is one of Dunbar's heroic pieces designed to instill pride and dignity in black people. It employs a pattern of references that comes from the black nationalism of the late nineteenth century, which centered on Ethiopia as the motherland of the race. This form of nationalism, a predecessor in some ways to the New Negro Renaissance, stressed a noble African past and expressed confidence in the continuing rise of the black race within the family of nations. The sole reference to an ancient and noble past is fairly general: Be proud, my Race, in mind and soul; Thy name is writ on Glory's scroll In characters of fire. The immediate past was Dunbar's more pressing concern: "When Slavery crushed thee with its heel, / With thy dear blood all gory." He emphasizes the survival of the race during slavery and the display of humanity and tolerance that blacks exhibited after securing their freedom. The final stanza is a rousing affirmation of a glorious future for black people, powerful enough to stir the emotions of all members of the race: Go on and up! Our souls and eyes Shall follow thy continuous rise; Our ears shall list thy story From bards who from thy root shall spring, And proudly tune their lyres to sing Of Ethiopia's glory. "Alexander Crummell—Dead," a moving tribute to a black leader, presents two contrasting attitudes toward his death. The first is the strong statement that Crummell has deserved his rest because of his many services to his fellow man:

PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR / 209 Back to the breast of thy mother, Child of the Earth! E'en her caress can not smother What thou has done. The second is an uncertainty about the leadership for black people as a consequence of Crummell's following "the trail of the westering sun." A set of disturbing questions is posed: Who shall come after thee, out of the clay— Learned one and leader to show us the way? Who shall rise up when the world gives the test? No answer is given to these queries, reflecting a decision about the conclusion, which gives unexpected strength to the poem. An average tribute would point inevitably to the new heroes who are inspired to follow CrummeH's inspiration. Here there is only the wise advice to the reader—and amazingly to Crummell: Think thou no more of this— Rest! "Ode to Ethiopia" and "Alexander Crummell—Dead" explore two forms of heroism. One involves assurance that the black race has done well so far and has every reason to be proud of its history and humanity, and it expresses confidence in a bright future and in a sure path to glory. The second is a more subtle performance. "Alexander Crummell—Dead" accepts the death of a great man, as the title implies, and offers questions about the future. What is impressive is the tough-mindedness of the speaker, who points in a general way to Crummell's holiness and his achievements despite opposition, but who offers no assurances about what will follow him. An approach to the future, the poet says, begins with awareness of loss and shouldering responsibility. "Ode to Ethiopia" glorifies the past and future; "Alex-

ander Crummell—Dead" stresses, rather, the challenge of the present day. It is probably a mistake to describe "We Wear the Mask" and "The Poet" as personal poems, for they are much more. They describe the problems of a black artist, and these may be projected to define a more general condition shared by many aspiring artists in an unfriendly world. The "mask that grins and lies" is surely, first, the property of an artist, deriving, no doubt, from the use of masks by actors in classical drama. It hides "torn and bleeding hearts" because exposing an artist's inner reality to a world governed by "human guile" would be pointless, perhaps humiliating. The artist has pride and refuses to stoop to test the questionable response of an unsympathetic and unappreciative audience. Christ offers an avenue of last appeal, but the artist fails to receive either hope or balm from divinity. The only sure realities dwindle down to three basic facts: "We sing," because true artists have to, no matter what the world says; "the clay is vile," projecting an unchanged world in which "guile" still governs; "long the mile," suggesting that the time during which this alienated state must be endured is long, very long. But what remains for the artist is his talent and his pride: But let the world dream otherwise, We wear the mask! The poem applies with special force to Dunbar, dramatizing not only the attachment to dialect verse, which he was just beginning to resent, but his attendant roles as a skilled reader of his own poetry and as a model for the race. The pronoun used in the poem is "we," and the poet conceivably here identifies with all black artists performing in vaudeville or minstrel shows, writing for these theatrical productions, or turning out verse and narratives that are acceptable to a genteel audience.

210 I AMERICAN WRITERS A second level of meaning suggests the participation of the race. All blacks, to survive in society, must conform to standards of which they do not necessarily approve and learn to play the games and assume the masks that will ensure protection and, occasionally, advancement. A further extension of meaning involves everyone. All people living in a shallow and pretentious society, an expression of gentility in an extreme state, wear masks. No one fully reveals his inner reality to another, for the reasons that Dunbar has stated. It is no wonder that "We Wear the Mask" is Dunbar's best-known poem in literary English. It is a poignant cry of distress calling attention to a pathological condition for which there is no immediate remedy. It has meanings on many levels, ranging from the definition of a personal problem to the inadequacies of the entire society. The particular dilemma becomes, without strain, the property of all readers. A comparison of "We Wear the Mask" and "The Poet" is revealing. Both deal with the same general subject matter: the failure of the world to recognize a distortion of talent—a "mask," in short—and its patent disinterest in the whole body of the poet's achievement or, indeed, the life and the psyche of the artist. "The Poet," however, suffers from the contraction of meaning and reference that characterizes so much of Dunbar's verse after 1896. "We Wear the Mask" offers meaning on many levels, but "The Poet" does not. The poem is plainly what it is, with little possibility for extension of reference. The poet's preferred subject matter is recorded in the poem, though admittedly in terms that are a little vague. All of them bear the imprint of the ideals of nineteenth-century romanticism, with no reference to the contemporary pessimism, which Dunbar's poem "The Mystery" reflects. The subjects listed are " . . . life, serenely sweet, / With, now and then, a deeper note"; " . . . the world's absorbing beat," which

the poet knows, in some mystical way; and " . . . love when earth was young, / And Love, itself, was in his lays." These are general topics—too general, and one cannot blame the public for desiring something more specific, since it was sated with romantic lays about life, the world, and love. The poet suffers when " . . . the world, it turned to praise / A jingle in a broken tongue." The application to Dunbar could not be more precise, though the poem underestimates his contribution to literary English in order to exaggerate the world's rejection. What is also clear is that Dunbar has come, in the later years of his career, to place a low value upon his dialect verse. "The Poet" is a specific statement that has intensity and pathos, but its application is limited, primarily to an assessment of Dunbar's own achievement, and not broad with a cluster of implications and rich associations that touch the world. Dunbar's verse in conventional or literary English, though varied in quality, offers moments of excitement and power surpassed only by the master poems in dialect. The poems examined here suggest the wide range in his literary interests, and though individual poems are memorable and moving, there does not seem to be any focus in the poems in literary English. True, Dunbar did not attain the highest levels possible for him in the area of his greatest strength and in forms making demands upon the full powers of his fertile imagination, but he accomplished a great deal toward destroying stereotypes about black intellectual capacities and appealing to a large audience, both black and white. Dunbar is the first great black poet in America, a fitting pioneer for Langston Hughes, Melvin B. Tolson, Robert Hayden, and Gwendolyn Brooks. Dunbar's fiction has tended to suffer a form of critical neglect for three reasons. His reputation as a poet has overshadowed his other ar-

PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR / 211 tistic contributions, and this situation is quite understandable given his career as a poet. Dunbar was somehow considered a less effective writer of fiction than Chesnutt, who emerged with him in the 1890's as the first really professional black artists in America. This second reservation requires qualification. Certainly "One Man's Fortunes," "Mr. Cornelius Johnson, Office-Seeker," and "A Council of State," all in Dunbar's most seminal volume of short pieces, The Strength of Gideon and Other Stories (1900), deserve to stand alongside the tales in Chesnutt's The Wife of His Youth, published the previous year. The last cause for neglect is unquestionably Dunbar's continuing association with the plantation tradition, an enduring commitment that fictional experimentation in other areas does not support. There may be a simple answer—money, the sustained desire of the contemporary magazines for this always successful and much-tried fictional staple. It is very likely that Dunbar distinguished between plantation breadwinners and the more daring excursions into social realism and the social order in black urban communities. In any event, more than half of his approximately 100 short pieces are tales from the old plantation, more or less furnished with the characters and formulaic plots too well known for repetition. Hugh Gloster, a fine critic of black fiction, can assert with some justification: In his short stories, . . . Dunbar generally accepts the limitations and circumscriptions of the plantation tradition. Glorifying the good old days in the accepted manner, he sentimentalizes master-slave relationships and implies that freedom brings social misery to the black man. Negro migrants to the North are usually represented as nostalgic misfits. ... Gloster is ultimately wrong, partly because he underestimates the value of Dunbar's attempts to explore social problems in the North and the alienation of the outsider there, and partly be-

cause he does not fit together the short stories and the novels to see how they relate to each other. The fact that Dunbar was working on The Uncalled and Folks from Dixie during the same period suggests that he was perfectly capable of carrying in his head two quite different structures for fiction. Essentially they represent two sides of the strong sentimental tradition in America. The Uncalled (1898) is a novel about a minister, Freddie Brent, an orphan whose foster parent, Hester Prime, forces him to accept a call to undertake divine work that Freddie hears imperfectly, if at all. Freddie ultimately quits the Methodist ministry when his stern superior, Reverend Simpson, asks him to preach a sermon reprimanding a poor fallen woman. Freddie finds an expanded life, joy, and love in Cincinnati, although many critics have said that Dunbar has found nothing to praise in the city: I have learned to know what pleasure is, and it has been like a stimulant to me I have come face to face with Christianity without cant, and I respect it for what it is. The novel falls into a rather special line of sentimental narratives about the troubled minister, though there are touches of realism and few black characters within its structure. The Uncalled does not deserve to be classified with the strong realistic novels of midwestern life, The Booster Schoolmaster (1871) by Edward Eggleston and The Story of a Country Town (1883) by Edgar Watson Howe. Dunbar's Dexter, Ohio, has no complex social dimensions and poses to the minister a simple problem of the restricted, as opposed to the expanded, life under the umbrella of Christianity. The questions that really disturbed churchmen at the time—science, the corruption of wealth, and urban alienation—have no place here. Although Folks from Dixie is essentially a collection dealing with plantation life, it is more

272 / AMERICAN WRITERS of a mixed bag than it appears to be. Though several tales are set in northern backgrounds, the genuine surprise in the collection is "At Shaft 11," a story of a miners' strike in West Virginia. Violence occurs when black strikebreakers are introduced into the mine. Blacks battle whites for the possession of the property until the troops arrive and disperse the white strikers. The blacks retain their jobs under the original management of the mine. The significance of the tale is not so much who wins or loses but rather Dunbar's willingness to face the vexing problems of a new era and to provide a glimpse of a larger and more impersonal system of economic distribution and human relations, in which race plays only a part, and possibly not a dominant one. This discovery of what appears to be an external, larger-than-life force is one that Dunbar was not to forget. A comparison of the two books suggests that Dunbar chose the short fiction for the launching of trial balloons. The novel is the careful, if not cautious, achievement, restricted by the limitations of the sentimental line of narratives of which it is a part. Folks from Dixie, despite its unprepossessing title, offers the radical departure in fictional material, vastly different from anything to be found in the novel. A similar incongruity exists between The Love ofLandry and The Strength of Gideon and Other Stories, both published in 1900. The Love ofLandry is more a product of the sentimental tradition; both this and The Uncalled have as their main actors white characters. The Uncalled dealt with a real problem that had a modest appeal for thoughtful readers. The Love ofLandry has no problem at all, except to promote the alliance between representatives of two upper-class families. A product of Dunbar's stay in Colorado while recuperating from tuberculosis, the novel poses the question of a difference between eastern and western attitudes and realities. (Interest in it extended beyond Dunbar. William Vaughn Moody's play, The

Great Divide, produced with considerable success in New York in 1906, probed for more substantial distinctions between easterner and westerner.) Landry talks of breathing space and a lack of duplicity in the West, and Mildred, who has suffered from general weakness in her constitution, is rejuvenated by her visit to Colorado. A visit becomes a permanent stay since East and West are to be joined in marriage, with the place of residence for the couple to be apparently in the West. Nothing could be fluffier than this tale, which moves toward seriousness only with the appearance of a black porter. The Strength of Gideon, on the other hand, contains much more provocative matter. The range of topics is broad indeed. There are plantation stories emphasizing black fidelity to families of former masters ("The Strength of Gideon"); black wisdom in assisting the families of former masters in accommodating to post-Civil War poverty; and black good sense and faithfulness to other blacks, despite temptations offered by freedom and the North. The collection also has plantation anecdotes dealing with familiar characters who enjoy favorable turns of fortune so that a bad case is made good. More innovative are the stories about the corruption of blacks by the cities. Perhaps the most compelling of these is "The Finding of Zach," in which a wild young buck is cleaned up and made respectable by the Banner Club, a black social club patronized by entertainers and other people who have seen much of the world, so that he can greet his father, who has come to New York to see him. Then there are urban anecdotes in which city ways seem either better or more honest than country approaches to life. The most impressive pieces by far are Dunbar's explorations of the forms of discrimination in the urban North. "One Man's Fortunes" presents the brief legal career of Bertram Halliday, who has returned to his hometown with a college degree and the idealism of Henley. He is determined to

PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR / 213 study law, despite the objection of his friend H. G. Featherton, a white lawyer who thinks that the time is not ready. He is hired by Featherton to get out the black vote for his election as a "Christian judge" and is fired immediately after the election. Deeply embittered, he decides to teach in the South. Webb Davis, a college graduate as well and a realistic counterpart to Halliday, has prospered by setting up a barber shop and engaging in local politics. "Mr. Cornelius Johnson, Office-Seeker" records the frustration of a black candidate who arrives in Washington to collect what is due him as a consequence of his efforts in an Alabama election. Optimism is succeeded by doubt and then despair, as Congressman Barker either refuses to see him or delays giving him what he seeks. Johnson is totally crushed by the news that the Senate has refused to confirm his appointment. At the end he is a broken and bitter man. "A Council of State," the most ambitious tale in the volume, describes the successful attempt of Boss Luther Hamilton to prevent criticism of the administration at the Afro-American Convention. His agent and confederate is Miss Kirkman, an intelligent, hard, near-white woman who "found it more profitable to ally herself to the less important race because she could assume a position among them as a representative woman, which she could never have hoped to gain among the whites." Miss Kirkman packs the convention with proadministration people, tears up the speech of her fiance, who wishes to complain about administrative neglect, and defeats the progressive forces. There is much that is new in these stories: black involvement in urban political power struggles, insensitivity to other blacks because of ambition or fear of losing status, and vulnerability to capricious acts of fate, unexpected inconsistencies in character or the attraction of forms of unrealistic idealism. One no longer talks of the innocent, pleasure-loving blacks in

these urban sketches, because innocence has died and the only ambition worth respecting is power. The Fanatics (1901) is a sentimental novel, set both in Dorbury, Ohio, and on a Virginia plantation. What occurs on the plantation is predictable, following the familiar pattern of the plantation romance. What happens in Dorbury is something else, since there we find actions for the first time that have had the benefit of experimentation and trial in short fiction. This new matter is inserted within a sentimental frame and acquires a life of its own apart from the general pattern of reconciliation in Dorbury between representatives from the North and South—not only long-separated lovers but fathers and sons as well—after the Civil War. The predictable action is full of emotional crises, declarations of love, denunciations and disowning, transformations, and reconciliations. The matter and manner of the novel achieve a distinction above that of the plantation romance only when blacks appear. Dorbury does not like or accept blacks, sentiments shared both by northerners, who hold blacks responsible for the war, and southerners, who have accepted them only as slaves. The chapter "The Contrabands" and the one following, "License or Liberty," present an explosion in Dorbury when a group of rootless, shifting blacks, shaken from their home environment by the war, arrives in town. The blacks stand fast in a violent confrontation, and the leader of the mob, a drunkard, rabble-rouser, and defiler of the weak, is killed by a new arrival from the South, whose family suffered insults from Raymond Stothard. The only prominent citizen sympathetic to the blacks is a white ex-Confederate soldier from a prominent family, Stephen Van Doren. Sympathy does not come from the blacks in Dorbury. They bar the new arrivals from entering their church and are apprehensive about

214 I AMERICAN WRITERS their own status, which might be degraded by an influx of ignorant blacks from the South. The regeneration of Nigger Ed, a forlorn black and the town drunk before the war, who performs heroic services on the battlefield and wins acceptance with respect and love by the whole town when he returns, offers little comfort. For the first time Dunbar has introduced into the novel unpleasant matter documenting real problems involving blacks. The description of the black upheaval in Dorbury is accomplished with the same clear-eyed, objective perspective that first appears in the short pieces. Blacks and whites are good and bad—perhaps mostly inbetween—and they shape ambitions, high and low, and struggle to achieve them. The plantation mythology has no place here. Though Dunbar published two other collections largely of plantation tales, they do not really figure in his development as a writer of fiction. In Old Plantation Days (1903) represents, if anything, regression, since it records in the familiar style the quaint actions of slaves on Colonel Mordaunt's property, over which the Colonel presides with appropriate dignity and tolerance. The Heart of Happy Hollow (1904) offers, with the plantation tales, more varied items, and the whole collection is an improvement upon In Old Plantation Days. The Heart of Happy Hollow includes, for example, a shocking story of violence, "The Lynching of Jube Benson." Both collections may suffer from Dunbar's waning energies and the unfortunate progress of tuberculosis, which would cause his death. The real culmination of Dunbar's achievement as a writer of fiction is The Sport of the Gods (1902). The novel incorporates much of the substance and the style of his finest tales. There are specific points of connection: Dunbar's handling of the problem of a group's ostracism by a town; his knowledge of the many forms of cruel exploitation that can occur in a

city; his evenhanded view of the presence of good and evil in whites and blacks, except that these qualities suffer at times from a certain vagueness; and his skilled portrayal of the mounting frustration—even rage—in the black psyche. These are matters of substance that are new in a Dunbar novel, but not foreign or alien to the short fiction. The Sport of the Gods possesses them all. Equally important is the approach to character and action, the guiding intelligence that organizes and paces the events within a narrative. The narrator is a cultivated observer who displays a detached manner and a disposition to point up ironies in the developing action. His voice is consistent and unforced; it has the natural authority of someone who knows the country and the city and has the historical perspective to make informed commentary when required. In The Sport of the Gods Dunbar clearly shapes a form in fiction that suits his purpose, and he does not respond to the demands of traditional structures. His irony, muted in narratives of sentiment, is here in full display. The first sentence suggests to some extent the manner of the whole novel: Fiction has said so much in regret of the old days when there were plantations and overseers and masters and slaves, that it was good to come upon such a household as Berry Hamilton's, if for no other reason than that it afforded a relief from the monotony of tiresome iteration. This serves as an introduction to the two large ironic propositions that dominate the novel. The first involves the way of life of the Hamiltons in the years following emancipation. The plantation romance offers a picture of good times before and after the war, and affirmation comes, apparently, from the favorable situation of Berry Hamilton, who is an old and respected

PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR / 215 retainer of Maurice Oakley's. What seems good turns vicious and offers a demonstration that the relationship between a former master and a former slave amounts to little. There are none of the traditional virtues of trust, kindliness, and benevolence here—just narrowness, vindictiveness, and a lack of charity. The North does not fare much better. New York, before and after the war, was regarded as a haven of opportunity and freedom for the homeless and oppressed, especially by blacks who made their way in recurrent waves to the city. As Dunbar has destroyed the Hamiltons' "bower of peace and comfort," he systematically demolishes the expectation that New York will be the Hamiltons' salvation: To the provincial coming to New York for the first time, ignorant and unknown, the city presents a notable mingling of the qualities of cheeriness and gloom. This mixed beginning is a preface to a reaction on the newcomer's part that is even less encouraging: ... after he has passed through the first pangs of strangeness and homesickness, yes, even after he has got beyond the stranger's enthusiasm for the metropolis, the real fever of love for the place will begin to take hold upon him. The subtle, insidious wine of New York will begin to intoxicate him.... And the expected conclusion follows: Then he is hopeless, and to live elsewhere would be death. Such a place is clearly not the appropriate home for Mrs. Hamilton and her two children, Joe and Kitty, to seek the comfort and psychic restoration that they require. The story of the Hamiltons is a tale of two locales, a small southern town and New York

City. Berry Hamilton, despite twenty years of faithful service in the Oakley household, is accused of stealing money that has actually been gambled away by the spendthrift, artistic brother of his master, Maurice Oakley. Hamilton is tried and sentenced to ten years in prison; the rest of the family are turned out of their comfortable house on the Oakley grounds and suffer hostility and ostracism by blacks and whites in the town. Fannie Hamilton and her children make their way to New York, where they undergo a spectacular degeneration. Weak, callow, and much pampered by his parents, Joe becomes a drunkard, a parasite, and a murderer. Kitty, "a pretty, cheery little thing" who "could sing like a lark," goes on the stage and tosses aside her moral instruction with almost the same eagerness. With her husband in prison, the faithful, religious, and loving Fannie takes another man, who beats her. He dies violently just in time to avoid being murdered by the newly released Berry. His liberation is a consequence of the good work of a white reporter, Skaggs. A frequenter of the Banner Club, Skaggs encounters Joe and senses from his drunken babbling that a good story exists for the Universe, his paper. Skaggs pursues the sordid story to its southern source, where he discovers Maurice Oakley's cruelty, his brother Frank's confession—revealing that the money was squandered, not stolen—and Maurice's refusal to acknowledge the confession. The whole affair finds its way to the pages of the Universe, and Berry receives justice and freedom at last, but not in time to do much about his shattered family. The elder Hamiltons return to the South and receive a warm welcome and a home from Mrs. Oakley, now repentant and contrite. Broken, humbled, and sad, the couple live in a peace shattered only by the shrieks of Maurice, who with the public revelation of his shocking behavior and his family's dishonor, has lost his mind.

216 I AMERICAN WRITERS There is no simple moral for the story. It is certainly not to be found in the general question that the novel poses: "Oh, is there no way to keep these people from rushing away from small villages and country districts of the South up to the cities, where they cannot battle with the terrible force of the strange and unusual environment?" True, the city corrupts, and it is especially hard upon untrained, ill-prepared blacks like Mrs. Hamilton and her children. But there are people of nobility and strength in black New York, to be found especially among the artists. Hattie Sterling, the generous and vulnerable musical comedy singer and dancer, who befriends the weak Joe, looks at her life and future with complete realism. Mr. Martin, "the managing star of 'Martin's Blackbirds,'" impresses his associates by his display of professionalism and integrity. The city, then, does not corrupt everyone, no more, indeed, than the country, where the standards of a depraved gentility still seek to dominate in a changing world. Some critics claim that The Sport of the Gods is a naturalistic novel. But Dunbar's suggestion that powerful, impersonal forces are at work in the city is not really pursued or documented; nor are the vague references to the will scattered throughout the novel. There is no overwhelming influence of setting, since possibilities exist for something other than an inevitable degeneration. The Hamiltons suffer their various calamities because of deficiencies of character, not from an impassive naturalistic fate. There are none of the other trappings of naturalism: the careful documentation of the total environment, the preoccupation with a design imposed by heredity, and the symbolism. The Sport of the Gods must be accepted for what it is: a fine, ironic, penetrating novel that neither offers easy solutions nor lends itself to classification. Although there are moments of striking realism, especially in the scenes in the

Banner Club, Dunbar's structure is too mannered, too dependent at times upon accident and melodramatic reversals to be called realistic. The Sport of the Gods is, in fact, a carefully planned narrative designed to sweep away vestiges of old myths and to encourage honesty in looking at and evaluating reality and an acceptance of self, with all of its deficiencies. There are few triumphs in Dunbar's mature, if slightly cynical, world, and that world has not much to do with gods. The gods, if anything, are the symbols of old expectations, unrealistic and without support in fact or possibility, and these creatures of fantasy play havoc with vulnerable mortals. Protection exists in honesty and maturity. Having been deeply wounded by life in the city, the sensible course for the elder Hamiltons is to return home, where they are able to resume their life much wiser than before. The Sport of the Gods is a splendid demonstration of the power of a controlling voice. The completely informed narrator orders the events with authority and a newly discovered freedom. He is not deterred from using events because they are realistic or melodramatic, nor is he inhibited in his comments on the action or on the characters' motivation. He has chosen to give the novel a large perspective, a wide view of the black experience as it undergoes psychic change in the South and the agonies of migration. Dunbar's sweep is not epic, but it is suggestive of a quality of narration just short of that. The triumph of the novel is the triumph of voice. For once, the mature, speculative, objective narrator appears; and that appearance, more than anything else in the novel, is Dunbar's legacy to the twentieth century. Dunbar's literary achievement is important for all black artists who follow him. He made an outstanding contribution in poetry, both in dialect verse and in literary English, although he never fully sensed where his greatest

PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR / 217 strength rested. But all poets who use the spoken language of the people as their medium owe Dunbar a great debt because he stretched dialect to incorporate serious ideas and to achieve new artistic effects. No poet in America has approached his success in this respect. Dunbar also stands as a pioneer in the development of the black novel. The influential The Sport of the Gods has sometimes been hailed as the first black novel using at some depth an urban background. Infinitely more important is the fact that this first black novel is ordered by a sophisticated narrator who exercises his freedom to choose and to organize fictional elements from any source. The Sport of the Gods is the first well-constructed ironic novel on the black experience with a fictional voice that speaks with authority and without commitment to a cause, on an important and central event in black history, migration to the cities. Dunbar's life is so close to the model presented by the romantic artist that it is difficult to consider him anything other than a creature totally given over to idealism. Out of a modest home in Dayton, Dunbar quickly rose to fame. He fell in love with Alice Ruth Moore after seeing her picture in a magazine next to a poem of hers. He experienced the hurt of separation from Alice, after accepting their mutual decision to live apart, at a time when he received honors for his literary achievements and more generous payments from publishers. He died of tuberculosis at the age of thirty-three, on February 9,1906. But the aura of high romanticism is misleading. Dunbar's great accomplishment is pushing beyond romantic restrictions and standards, both in his poetry and his fiction. His doing so makes him the father, in effect, of black poetry and fiction in the twentieth century. What he has done for blacks, he has done for all America, and he will survive as a great, innovative, and brave artist.

Selected Bibliography WORKS OF

PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR POEMS

Oak and Ivy. Dayton: United Brethren Publishing House, 1893 [1892]. Majors and Minors. Toledo: Hadley and Hadley, 1895 [1896]. Lyrics of Lowly Life. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1896. Lyrics of the Hearthside. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1899. Poems of Cabin and Field. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1899. Candle-Lightin' Time. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1901. Lyrics of Love and Laughter. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1903. When Malindy Sings. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1903. LIT Gal. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1904. Chris'mus Is A' Comin and Other Poems. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1905. Howdy, Honey, Howdy. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1905. Lyrics of Sunshine and Shadow. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1905. A Plantation Portrait. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1905. Joggin Erlong. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1906. NOVELS

The Uncalled. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1898. The Love ofLandry. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1900. The Fanatics. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1901. The Sport of the Gods. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1902. SHORT STORIES

Folks from Dixie. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1898. The Strength of Gideon and Other Stories. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1900. In Old Plantation Days. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1903. The Heart of Happy Hollow. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1904.

218 I AMERICAN WRITERS COLLECTED EDITIONS

The Life and Works of Paul Laurence Dunbar, edited by Lida Keck Wiggins. Naperville, 111.: J. L. Nichols, 1907. The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar, with the Introduction to Lyrics of Lowly Life by W. D. Howells. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1913. Speakin' o' Christmas and Other Christmas and Special Poems. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1914. The Best Stories of Paul Laurence Dunbar, edited by Benjamin Brawley. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1938. Little Brown Baby, edited by Bertha Rogers. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1940. The Paul Laurence Dunbar Reader, edited by Jay Martin and Gossie H. Hudson. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1975.

BIBLIOGRAPHIES Blanck, Jacob N. "Paul Laurence Dunbar, 18721906." In Bibliography of American Literature, vol. 2. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957. Pp. 498-505. Burris, Andrew M. "Bibliography of Works by Paul Laurence Dunbar, Negro Poet and Author, 18721906." American Collector, 5:69-73 (1927). Cunningham, Virginia. Paul Laurence Dunbar and His Song. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1947. Pp. 267-83. Fuller, Sara S. The Paul Laurence Dunbar Collection: An Inventory to the Microfilm Edition. Columbus: Ohio Historical Society Archives Library, 1972. Metcalf, E. W., Jr. Paul Laurence Dunbar: A Bibliography. Metuchen, N. J.: Scarecrow Press, 1975.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL STUDIES Achille, Louis T. "Paul Laurence Dunbar, poete negre." Revue Anglo-amfricaine, 11:504-19 (August 1934). Allen, Walker M. "Paul Laurence Dunbar: A Study in Genius." Psychoanalytic Review, 25:53-82 (1938).

Arnold, Edward F. "Some Personal Reminiscences of Paul Laurence Dunbar." Journal of Negro History, 17:400-08 (1932). Baker, Houston A., Jr. "Paul Laurence Dunbar: An Evaluation." Black World, 21:30-37 (November 1971). Bone, Robert. Down Home: A History of AfroAmerican Short Fiction from Its Beginnings to the End of the Harlem Renaissance. New York: Putnam, 1975. Brawley, Benjamin. Paul Laurence Dunbar: Poet of His People. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1936. Burch, Charles Eaton. "The Plantation Negro in Dunbar's Poetry." Southern Workman, 50:22729 (May 1921). Butcher, Philip. "Mutual Appreciation: Dunbar and Cable." CLA Journal, 1:101-02 (November 1957). Candela, Gregory L. "We Wear the Mask: Irony in Dunbar's The Sport of the Gods." American Literature, 48:60-72 (March 1976). Clippinger, Lulu May. "A Visit to Paul Dunbar." Watchword (March 6, 1906), pp. 151-52. Cunningham, Virginia. Paul Laurence Dunbar and His Song. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1947. Daniel, Theodora W. "Paul Laurence Dunbar and the Democratic Ideal." Negro History Bulletin, 6:206-08 (June 1943). Dunbar, Alice Moore. "The Poet and His Song." A.M.E. Church Review, 31;121-35 (1914). Flusche, Michael. "Paul Laurence Dunbar and the Burden of Race." Southern Humanities Review, 11:49-61 (Winter 1977). Fox, Allan B. "Behind the Mask: Paul Laurence Dunbar's Poetry in Literary English." Texas Quarterly, 14, no. 2:7-19 (Summer 1971). Gayle, Addison, Jr. Oak and Ivy: A Biography of Paul Laurence Dunbar. Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, 1971. . The Way of the World: The Black Novel in America. Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, 1975. Gloster, Hugh. Negro Voices in American Fiction. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1948 Pp. 46-56. Hudson, Gossie Harold. "A Biography of Paul Laurence Dunbar." Unpublished dissertation, Ohio State University, 1970. . "Paul Laurence Dunbar: The Regional Her-

PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR / 219 itage of Dayton's First Black Poet." Antioch Review, 34:430-40 (Summer 1976). Hughes, Langston. Famous American Negroes. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1954. Pp. 82-90. Larson, Charles R. "The Novels of Paul Laurence Dunbar." Phylon, 29:257-71 (Fall 1968). Lawson, Victor. Dunbar Critically Examined. Washington, D. C.: Associated Publishers, 1941. Loggins, Vernon. The Negro Author: His Development in America. New York: Columbia University Press, 1931. Martin, Jay, ed. A Singer in the Dawn: Reinterpretations of Paul Laurence Dunbar. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1975. Phillips, Waldo. "Paul Laurence Dunbar: A New Perspective." Negro History Bulletin, 29:7-8 (October 1965). Redding, Jay Saunders. To Make a Poet Black. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1939. Pp. 56-57.

Revell, Peter. Paul Laurence Dunbar. Boston: Twayne, 1980. Stronks, James B. "Paul Laurence Dunbar and William Dean Howells." Ohio Historical Quarterly, 67:95-108 (April 1958). Terrell, Mary Church. "Paul Laurence Dunbar." Voice of the Negro, 3:271-78 (April 1906). Turner, Darwin T. "Paul Laurence Dunbar: The Rejected Symbol." Journal of Negro History, 52:1-13(1967). . "Paul Laurence Dunbar: The Poet and the Myths." CLA Journal, 18:155-71 (December 1974). Wagner, Jean. Black Poets of the United States, from Paul Laurence Dunbar to Langston Hughes. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973. Young, Pauline A. "Paul Laurence Dunbar: An Intimate Glimpse." Freedomways, 12:319-29 (1972).

—CHARLES T. DAVIS

Ralph Ellison 1914O4E of the "enduring functions of the Amer-

firmative. Virtually all of his fiction—ten stories before the novel, eleven after—features a young black man stretching toward adulthood. We see in this work the evolution of a central theme: the more conscious a person is of his individual, cultural, and national history, the freer he becomes. As a young writer, Ellison quickly became dissatisfied with the typical naturalistic scenarios in which characters struggling to survive the merciless American environment are eventually overcome by impersonal forces. To Ellison, this documentary fiction was dull—and failed to capture the richness and variety of black life as he knew it. Influenced by a broad range of writers, including Richard Wright, Andre Malraux, and Ernest Hemingway, Ellison began to focus on the person who, by force of character and will, manages to endure. Ralph Waldo Ellison was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, on March 1, 1914. Aggressiveness and optimism about life seem to have run in his family. His grandfather, Alfred Ellison, was an illiterate ex-slave who had nonetheless served during Reconstruction as constable, marshal, and magistrate in the Ellison clan's hometown, Abbeville, South Carolina. In the tense and violent post-Reconstruction days, Alfred Ellison lost his political titles and returned to driving a dray and chopping cotton,

ican novel," Ralph Ellison has written, "is that of defining the national type as it evolves in the turbulence of change, and of giving the American experience, as it unfolds in its diverse parts and regions, imaginative integration and moral continuity. Thus it is bound up with our problem of nationhood." In Invisible Man (1952), one of the most significant American novels since World War II, Ellison gives us a terrifying and yet vibrant national metaphor: we are invisible men. In Ellison's created world, as in American society, the quick pace of change, the caprice, the arrogance alongside the innocence, the newness and the general instability of institutions, and, above all, the impulse to recoil from the awful demands of American democracy—all keep Americans from seeing each other or even themselves. The complexity and diversity of American life, along with the development of the novel as form, has brought forth novels like Invisible Man: "picaresque, many-leveled . . . swarming with characters and with varied types and levels of experience." Ellison's novel is more than a "slice of life": it is an attempt at no less than a new definition of the national character, a modern national epic. Accordingly, the vision in Ellison's novel, and indeed throughout his fiction, is ultimately af227

222 / AMERICAN WRITERS while his wife, Harriet, worked as a washerwoman. Still, he retained his defiant willingness to assert his rights. Once, after a friend had been lynched, he walked through Abbeville with his hands clasped behind his back, announcing to the whites on the street, "If you're going to kill me, you'll have to kill me right here because I'm not leaving. This is where I have my family, my farm, my friends; and I don't plan to leave." Another time Alfred Ellison talked a white mob out of lynching one of his friends. The old man, said Ralph Ellison many years later, must have talked to the whites in an "unknown tongue." At four Ralph and his younger brother, Herbert, were taken to South Carolina to see Grandfather Alfred and his brother, the boys' Uncle Jim. A half-century later Ellison still remembered the scene: Uncle Jim in his horse and buggy, the bridge to the homestead, the pecan trees planted by the boys' father, the reaping and gathering of vegetables, the old church that was used as a chicken house, the immense fireplaces inside which he could stand and see light flickering down. In Ellison's words, "it was very important for me to go to South Carolina and to visit and see the old house, to see those fireplaces, to see the forms, to see how fertile things were, to see what my relatives did." If South Carolina evokes for Ellison sacred memories of places and persons, Oklahoma, his birthplace, does even more so. "I dream constantly of Oklahoma City," he told an interviewer in 1975. "My childhood is there." His parents, Lewis Alfred Ellison and Ida Millsap Ellison, left the Deep South for Oklahoma in 1911, only four years after the territory was granted statehood. At least Oklahoma (a word coined by the Reverend Allen Wright, a Choctaw-speaking Indian, to mean "red man") had no firm tradition of slavery. As it turned out, segregation laws were imported from neighbor-

ing Texas and Arkansas; but even so, the blacks who had trekked west in wagon trains to escape southern oppression fought hard for their political rights. The blues lyric "I'm going to the Territory, baby / I'm going to the nation" meant, for blacks heading west during this hopeful period, "I'm going to be free." This determination for freedom, the fighting spirit of the people, and the sense of possibility suggested by the vast expanses of undeveloped land gave Oklahoma a frontierlike aspect. All the same, Oklahoma City was an established place. The capital city, recalls Ellison, "seemed fully articulated with its streetcars and its tall buildings. It appeared to be in the same class with say Kansas City or St. Louis or Chicago—only it was much smaller and very much better." Especially after the death in 1917 of Lewis Ellison (who had worked as a construction foreman and then as an independent businessman, selling ice and coal), the Ellisons were poor—at times extremely poor. Still, Ralph and Herbert were made to feel that the worlds of the rich and the white were approachable. This confidence had been their father's; Lewis Ellison, an avid reader, named his son after Emerson. It was reinforced by Ida Ellison, a woman of enormous determination, faith, and purpose. A stewardess at the Avery Chapel Afro-Methodist Episcopal Church, who valued action in this world, she brought home records, magazines, and books discarded in white homes where she worked as a maid. And she saw to it that her sons had electrical and chemistry sets, a rolltop desk and chair, and a toy typewriter. Her activism extended to politics. "If you young Negroes don't do something about things," she would tell her sons, "I don't know what's going to happen to this race." An ardent supporter of Eugene Debs's Socialist party, she canvased for the party's gubernatorial candidate in 1914. In 1934, after Ralph had gone off to Tuskegee In-

RALPH ELLISON / 223 stitute, she was jailed for attempting to rent buildings that Jim Crow laws had declared off limits to blacks. Usually the family lived in a three-room shotgun house. "We ate poor food," Ellison remembers, "which was generally well-prepared, sometimes not, because my brother and I were taught to take care of ourselves when my mother went out and worked." The Ellisons became so close to their neighbors, the Randolphs, that Ralph considered the families to be extensions of one another. Taylor Randolph recalls that his family would assist Ida Ellison, whom his parents called "Brownie," during this trying period: "I remember one day when it was so cold and snowy that we didn't dream Brownie could have gone out to work. But our mother thought she had better go over and check anyway. And when she got there, she found that Brownie had gone out to work. And, sure enough, the fire had gone out, and Ralph and Herbert were huddled up, freezing. My mother took them right back to our house and kept them there until Brownie came home from work. This was a time when there was a great togetherness among families, and when there was a great sympathy for people who had to struggle to bring up their children." Despite hard times, breaks in the pattern of segregation contributed to the relatively free atmosphere. Indians and blacks had lived side by side in Oklahoma for generations. "There were Negroes who were part Indian," observes Ellison, "and who lived on reservations, and Indians who had children who lived in town as Negroes." The Ellisons had many white friends, and black-white cultural integration, at least, was relatively widespread. Downtown theaters were not segregated until the 1920's. And after blacks were barred from the white theaters, black actors like Richard B. Harrison (who later played De Lawd in Marc Connelly's The

Green Pastures) continued to perform regularly on "Deep Second" (the blacks' nickname for Second Street, the main strip in Oklahoma City's black neighborhood); Harrison included Shakespearean soliloquies in his repertory. Miss Clark, the maid of the English actress Emma Bunting, used to stay with the Ellisons when Bunting's repertory company came to Oklahoma City, and she brought stories of the professional theater and of England into the Ellison household. As teen-agers Ellison and his comrades dreamed of being latter-day Renaissance men; they snatched desired symbols along with attitudes and values from blacks, Indians, and whites alike. Ellison wanted to read everything he could at the Paul Laurence Dunbar Library: fairy tales, James Fenimore Cooper, Bernard Shaw, and even a translation of Freud's Interpretation of Dreams, which he thought to be a fanciful version of the dream books used by certain "scientific" players of the numbers game. He wanted to play expert "sheenee" (a kind of street hockey played with sticks and tin cans) and varsity football, to imitate the styles of certain "vague and constantly shifting figures"— from his community, from lore and literature, from the movies—figures "sometimes comic but always versatile, picaresque, and self-effacingly heroic." He identified with people he met on odd jobs around town: in private clubs where he waited tables, at buildings where he ran the elevator, on downtown streets where he shined shoes and hawked newspapers. He identified too with the tellers as well as the heroes of the tales that he heard in J. L. Randolph's pharmacy, where he also worked. On rainy or snowy days, local men would pack the store and trade yarns, some of which had been told best, he was informed, years before by his father. J. L. Randolph recalls that Ellison "was always delving into things. He asked about the drugs we sold,

224 I AMERICAN WRITERS and asked about what it felt like to be a druggist. By fifteen or sixteen Ralph was quite a talker. He would sit at the fountain and talk about doing things in a big way. His concern back then was how to get started." Not all of Ellison's early job experiences were uplifting. The battle-royal scene in Invisible Man was suggested not only by similar scenes that he had read about but also by those he had witnessed as a waiter at private clubs. The specific event that ignited his imagination occurred while he was job hunting as a youngster: One summer when I was still in high school I was looking for a job (and it gets to be 105 to 110 in the shade in Oklahoma City; it used to, anyway). I met a friend and he said, "If you go up to Broadway between Ninth and Tenth there is a car lot there and the man wants someone to help him around the car lot." He said, "I couldn't take it because I got another job, but you better hurry up there." So I turned on the fan, as they say; and by the time I arrived, I was pretty moist. There was this white man sitting out under a tree; and I said, "Sir, I understand you need someone to work here"; and he said, "Yes, sit over here on this box." (He had a crate with a cushion on it.) He said, "Sit over here and tell me about yourself." He began to ask me about my grades, about my parents, and so on; and I began to feel that I was getting this job. And then, at the moment when I was most certain that the job was mine, I felt a charge of electricity in my tail; and I went up in the air and I came down... .The whole thing, again, was a ritual of initiation—a practical joke— wherein a Ford coil, a coil from an old Model T Ford, has been hooked up to a battery Of course, there was no job. In the music-centered Oklahoma City of the 1920's Ellison heard church performers, marching bands, tent showmen, silent movie accom-

panists, and those who amused themselves by improvising on ukuleles, kazoos, and C-melody saxophones. With musicians as the heroes most revered, it is small wonder that from age eight through his middle twenties, he wanted to be a musician. Ellison himself wanted to be able to read music as well as to improvise. Thanks to Zelia N. Breaux, supervisor of the music program for the Negro schools in Oklahoma City, Ellison learned music theory at Douglass High School and soon picked up a working knowledge of the soprano saxophone and several brass instruments. As first-chair trumpeter in the Douglass school band, and then as the group's student conductor, Ellison played light classics and marches at church recitals, graduation exercises, football games, lodge and fraternity social functions, and for special productions at the Aldridge Theater, of which Mrs. Breaux was co-owner. Meanwhile, Ludwig Hebestreit, conductor of the Oklahoma City orchestra, taught Ellison privately and invited him to the Little Symphony concerts for children. Ellison recalls being "the only brother of color" permitted to attend these concerts at that time. In return for these favors, young Ellison cut the conductor's lawn. Ellison admired the elegance, artistic discipline, and seemingly infinite capacity for selfexpression that were the hallmarks of jazz musicians. These men and women, some of whom played by ear, some of whom were conservatory-trained, were the heroes of Deep Second. At the Aldridge Theater and at Slaughter's Hall (the public dance hall), Ellison heard Ma Rainey, Ida Cox, and King Oliver as well as the Old Blue Devils band (the nucleus of which became the Count Basic band), with Walter Paige, Oran ("Hot Lips") Page, Eddie Durham, and Jimmy Rushing. As a high school student, Ellison played occasional dance jobs in pickup groups, sat in on rehearsals of the Blue

RALPH ELLISON / 225 Devils, and learned the jazz idiom at jam sessions. In Halley Richardson's shoeshine parlor, for instance, Ellison heard Lester Young playing with and against other tenor-sax men, sitting in the shoeshine chair, "his head thrown back, his horn even then outthrust, his feet working on the footrests." In 1933 Ellison left Oklahoma for Tuskegee Institute, to which he had been accepted as a scholarship student. He wanted to write a symphony encompassing his varied experiences: as a poor black boy who never felt inferior to anyone because of race or class, as a frontier boy with a certain city slickness, and as a classically trained musician steeped in blues and jazz who wanted to capture their rocking power in classical forms. Tuskegee was a trade and teachers' school, and its founder, Booker T. Washington, was an apostle of intellectual conservatism; still, Ellison developed there as a musician. The dean of the music school was William L. Dawson, best known as a skillful arranger of spirituals and as the composer of the Negro Folk Symphony. In the face of deeply entrenched segregation law and custom, Dawson had built Tuskegee into one of the major music centers of the South, with department heads like the pianist Hazel Harrison, who had been one of Ferruccio Busoni's prize pupils in Berlin. As in high school, Ellison played first trumpet in the school orchestra and, on occasion, served as the band's student director. He also delved into other arts at Tuskegee. He played a leading role in a campus play and in his third year began to test his powers in painting and photography; between school classes he attended an art class to learn watercolor. The instructor, Eva Hamilton, encouraged Ellison to try sculpture. Another favorite teacher, Morteza Drexel Sprague, guided much of his wide reading. But on his own Ellison dis-

covered T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," and the poem deeply engaged him: "I was intrigued by its power to move me while eluding my understanding. .. .There was nothing to do but look up the references in the footnotes to the poem." So began Ellison's conscious study ot literature. In 1935, as a "reflex" of his reading, Ellison tried his hand at writing poetry. It was at first "an amusing investigation of what seemed at best a secondary talent... like dabbling in sculpture." Because of a mix-up about his scholarship, at the end of his third year Ellison found that he had neither the forty-dollar tuition fee for the coming term nor any money to live on. He decided to venture to New York City, where he thought he could make and save money for the fall more easily than in Alabama. Though she knew that music was his first love, Eva Hamilton was enthusiastic about Ellison's prospects as a sculptor and gave him a letter of introduction to Augusta Savage, a black sculptor in Harlem. Fully intending to return to school, Ellison headed north to New York. Apart from the winter of 1937, which he spent in Dayton, Ohio, the war years in the merchant marine, and two years (1955-1957) in Rome as a guest of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Ellison has lived in New York City since his arrival there in 1936. Although he journeyed north specifically to study sculpture and to earn money as a musician, he was also drawn to New York by its glamour and promise of greater freedom. "New York," he has said, "was one of the great cities prominent in the Negro American myth of freedom, a myth which goes back very far into Negro American experience. In our spirituals it was the North Star and places in the North which symbolized Freedom and to .that extent I expected certain things from New York." He expected, in fact, a dazzling fulfillment of "an ir-

226 I AMERICAN WRITERS repressible belief in some Mecca of equality." Harlem he supposed to be "a glamorous place, a place where wonderful music existed and where there was a great tradition of Negro American style and elegance." In Invisible Man, the protagonist informs the outspoken veteran of the Golden Day brothel that he is on his way to New York, and the vet responds excitedly:

heralded by the folklore. Twelve years after coming north, Ellison wrote: "To live in Harlem is to dwell in the very bowels of the city . . . a ruin ... overcrowded and exploited politically and economically." Black Manhattan he found the "scene and symbol of the Negro's perpetual alienation in the land of his birth." For when the black southerner moves north, he surrenders vital cultural supports:

"New York!... That's not a place, it's a dream. When I was your age it was Chicago. Now all the little black boys run away to New York. Out of the fire into the melting pot. I can see you after you've lived in Harlem for three months. Your speech will change, you'll talk a lot about 'college,' you'll attend lectures at the Men's House . . . you might even meet a few white folks. And listen," he said, leaning close to whisper, "you might even dance with a white girl!"

He leaves a relatively static social order in which . . . he has developed those techniques of survival to which Faulkner refers as "endurance," and an ease of movement within explosive situations which makes Hemingway's definition of courage, "grace under pressure," appear mere swagger. He surrenders the protection of his peasant cynicism—his refusal to hope for the fulfillment of hopeless hopes—and his sense of being "at home in the world" gained from confronting and accepting (for day-to-day living, at least) the obscene absurdity of his predicament. Further, he leaves a still authoritative religion . . . family ... and a body of folklore—tested in life-and-death terms against his daily experience with nature and the Southern white man—that serves him as a guide to action.

The vet recites portions of the southern black myth of New York and tells some of its history to his medical attendant: " . . . think of what this means for the young fellow. He's going free, in the broad daylight and alone. I can remember when young fellows like him had first to commit a crime, or be accused of one, before they tried such a thing. Instead of leaving in the light of morning, they went in the dark of night. And no bus was fast enough...." In fact the Invisible Man has himself been accused by the college president, Bledsoe, of a crime against the "beautiful college": he has allowed a rich, white "friend of the school" to see the nearby black slum and to be hit in the face. Although Ellison had had no climactic run-in himself with the Tuskegee administration, when he headed north he too looked forward to breaking away from southern Jim Crow practices as well as from a certain provincialism that he had confronted at Tuskegee. Harlem was not exactly the promised land

More than one newcomer has found Harlem and New York City to be a battleground of wills, chaos continually erupting within the orderly pattern of streets and traffic lights. Many of the so-called surreal city scenes in Ellison's fiction derive from his attempt to bring into focus the contradictions and confusions actually observed in Harlem: . . . the most surreal fantasies are acted out upon the streets of Harlem; a man ducks in and out of traffic shouting and throwing imaginary grenades that actually exploded during World War I; a boy participates in the rape-robbery of his mother; a man beating his wife in a park

RALPH ELLISON / 227 uses boxing "science" and observes Marquess of Queensberry rules (no rabbit punching, no blows beneath the belt); two men hold a third while a lesbian slashes him to death with a razor blade; boy gangsters wielding homemade pistols (which in the South of their origin are but toy symbols of adolescent yearning for manhood) shoot down their young rivals. Life becomes a masquerade, exotic costumes are worn every day. Those who cannot afford to hire a horse wear riding habits; others who could not afford a hunting trip or who seldom attend sporting events carry shooting sticks. Yet, if many blacks have been bent and broken by Harlem, if one sees "white-haired adults crawl in the feudal darkness of their childhood," if Harlem "is the scene of the folkNegro's death agony, it is also the setting of his transcendence." In Harlem "you see the transformation of the Southern idiom into a Northern idiom . . . Harlem is a place where our folklore is preserved and transformed. It is the place where the body of our Negro myth and legend thrives. It is a place where our styles, musical styles, the many styles of Negro life, find continuity and metamorphosis." Like Ellison, millions of blacks have brought their institutions and optimism to the cities of the North; and the emerging northern black culture did provide some sense of continuity for them. In the midst of Harlem's fantasticality and turmoil, opportunities for personal and artistic growth abounded. In 1966 Ellison observed that "Harlem was and still is a place where a Southern Negro who has a little luck, and who has a little talent, can actually make himself into the man or woman of his dreams." In Invisible Man, the factory hospital is a metaphor for the modern industrialized city that fractures black folk-consciousness. There the white doctors, with shrieks and electric shocks, endeavor to force the young fellow to

learn his place, to forget his history and identity, and to yield to the power of the cold, steely machine. Their intention backfires, however, and the Invisible Man is only purged of his fear of the North and of whites. Emerging from the hospital, he feels transformed and realizes dimly that he is still on the twisting road to freedom. In 1936, well before World War II (when the police began to warn whites away from that vast black neighborhood) Harlem was evolving into what James Weldon Johnson called the black American cultural capital, beckoning to artists and intellectuals, black and white. In the 1930's and 1940's Ellison could be found browsing at the Schomburg Library and at Lewis Michaux's bookstore, then located on Seventh Avenue at 125th Street. Ellison would save his nickles and dimes to go to the Savoy Ballroom once or twice a week. "The Savoy was thriving and people were coming to Harlem from all over the world. The great European and American composers were coming there to listen to jazz—Igor Stravinsky, Francis Poulenc. The great jazz bands were there. Great dancers were being created there." Twice a week, often with Langston Hughes, Ellison went to Harlem's Apollo Theater. By 1940 Ellison was going to after-hours hangouts where musicians jammed: to Sidney Bechet's place, where Teddy Wilson or Art Tatum held down the house piano, to the Rhythm Club, to Clark Monroe's Uptown House, or to a place where the waiters sang as they served drinks. "Jazz was part of a total culture, at least among Afro-Americans," said Ellison. And as in Oklahoma City, jazzmen were heroes. During the heyday of the jazz club Minton's, Ellison was among those "who shared, night after night, the mysterious spell created by the talk, the laughter, grease paint, powder, perfume, sweat, alcohol and food—all blended and simmering, like a stew on the restaurant range,

228 I AMERICAN WRITERS and brought to a sustained moment of elusive meaning by the timbres and accents of musical instruments locked in passionate recitative." There Ellison would listen to musicians he had first heard in Oklahoma City: Charles Christian, Lester Young, "Hot Lips" Page, Ben Webster. Also at Minton's he heard the creators of the "bop" idiom: Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, and Charles Mingus. Because he lacked the money for a musicians' union license, and because there was such an abundance of talent in New York, Ellison did not find steady work as a trumpeter. In fact, he performed only once in public, his last engagement as a professional musician, playing the trumpet for a dance recital by Anna Sokolow. But he still wanted to write symphonies and studied for about a year with Wallingford Riegger. In 1936 a friend took him to the Edgecombe Avenue apartment of Duke Ellington, who remembered seeing Ellison at Tuskegee. The bandleader invited the young man to the following day's rehearsal but then had to cancel the invitation. Not wanting to press the point, Ellison said no more about the matter, and it was dropped. By the late 1930's, when he became immersed in writing fiction, Ellison laid down his trumpet forever, refusing even to attend concerts for fear of being diverted. During the Great Depression finding work of any kind was not easy. At first, still hoping to return to Tuskegee, he worked for almost a year behind the food bar of the Harlem YMCA, where he had a room. Many odd jobs followed, one of the most interesting of which was as substitute receptionist and file clerk for the psychoanalyst Harry Stack Sullivan. That job lasted only a few months, but the experience proved instructive: as he was filing, Ellison would glance through patients' case histories, and what he read spurred him to reconsider the importance of dreams. When he began writing

fiction and reading authors who employed dreams in their fiction—especially Dostoevsky, who, as Ellison has said, "taught the novelist how to use the dream"—the young writer realized how much his stint with Sullivan had shown him. In 1936 and 1937 Ellison also worked in factories around New York. Later he worked as a free-lance photographer and builder of record players and radios. During one series of weeks without work, he slept on the daybed in a friend's living room and on benches in St. Nicholas Park. The sculptor Augusta Savage explained that her duties on a WPA arts project made it impossible for her to instruct Ellison. Alain Locke and Langston Hughes, impressed with Ellison's sculpture, suggested that he work with another Harlem artist, Richmond Barthe, and Ellison studied with him for about a year before abandoning sculpture. Ellison's contact with the literary world was already made. He had met Hughes quite by chance on his second day in New York. Through Hughes he met Richard Wright, whose poems "I Have Seen Black Hands" and "Between the World and Me" Ellison considered the best ever written by a black writer; and their friendship blossomed. Although Wright was six years older and on the verge of his first major literary success ( Uncle Tom's Children in 1938), the two were in basically the same predicament: they were radically inclined black intellectuals with southern backgrounds, trying to survive in New York and struggling to make art in the midst of the Great Depression. They talked endlessly about politics and art, drank, and exchanged jokes and stories. Wright said candidly that Ellison had started too late to develop into a serious writer, but he was impressed with his friend's ability to discuss literature and urged him to write a short story for New Challenge, a leftist literary mag-

RALPH ELLISON / 229 azine of which Wright was an editor. Ellison begged off. He was at that time still a musician and lacked writing experience. Wright forced his hand by asking instead for a short review of Waters Edward Turpin's novel These Low Grounds. With this review, entitled "Creative and Cultural Lag" (Fall 1937), Ellison took the decisive step toward becoming a writer. When Wright again asked Ellison to write a short story, for the Winter 1937 issue of New Challenge, Ellison agreed. Drawing on his experience of bumming on trains, he wrote "Hymie's Bull," his first short story. Although heavily derivative of Hemingway, it impressed Wright and got as far as galley proofs. But in the end some new poems by Margaret Walker and others superseded "Hymie's Bull" and the story was dropped—as was the Communist party's moral support. Problems between the other editors, Dorothy West and Marion Minus, led to the magazine's suspension and the Winter 1937 number went unpublished. In February 1937 Ellison's mother died in Dayton, Ohio. In a haunting memoir, "February" (1955), he recalls her death and the awesome Dayton winter during the recession of 1937: February is a brook, birds, an apple tree—a day spent alone in the country. Unemployed, tired of reading, and weary of grieving the loss of my mother, I'd gone into the woods to forget. So that now all Februarys have the aura of that early morning coldness, the ghost of quail tracks on the snow-powdered brook which I brushed aside as I broke the brook to drink; and how the little quail tracks went up the ice, precise and delicate, into the darker places of the bank-ledge undisturbed. Ida Ellison's death proved a painful initiation into manhood for her son: "... I was in my early twenties then, and I had lived through my mother's death in that strange city, had sur-

vived three months off the fields and woods by my gun; through ice and snow and homelessness. And now in this windless February instant I had crossed over into a new phase of living. Shall I say it was in those February snows that I first became a man?" Ellison's statement that he survived by his gun through ice, snow, and homelessness is no mere figure of speech. He and his brother both arrived in Dayton almost completely out of money. At night, when the temperature skidded toward zero, they slept in a car parked in a garage open at both ends. They supported themselves by hunting quail, which they either ate or sold to local General Motors executives. Although the Ellison brothers had hunted since childhood, never had it been such a serious enterprise. By reading Hemingway's descriptions of "leading" a bird in flight, Ellison became an excellent hunter during those lean months. Years later he said of Hemingway: "When he describes something in print, believe him ... he's been there." Ellison returned to New York weary and distraught, but one issue was settled: all of his creative energies would be channeled into becoming a good writer. In Ohio, Ellison had begun writing in earnest. After hunting all day, he wrote at night and studied Joyce, Dostoevsky, Gertrude Stein, and Hemingway—"especially Hemingway," he recalls. "I read him to learn his sentence structure and how to organize a story." Ellison began to arrange his life so that writing would be his main focus, "to stake my energy against the possibility of failing." Out of money but determined to continue writing, in 1938 Ellison was hired by the Federal Writers' Project. Ellison's four-year experience on the project provided $103.50 monthly, enough money to live on, and a good deal more. Besides rescuing him from unemployment, the work stocked him with "information and insights about [his] country during a highly formative period of

230 / AMERICAN [his] literary life." It also made Ellison aware of being part of a community of writers, black and white, fledgling and established, all trying to perfect their craft. And it was on the project that Ellison began to find his voice in fiction. He grappled with questions that were to provide the dominant themes in his writing: Who is the American? Who is the black American? How is a man's past related to his identity? What role does folk art play? Ellison pursued his project assignments with diligence. One of the first, a study of "Famous New York Trials," gave him the opportunity to learn something of the history of New York's political and legal systems. The aspiring writer spent many days at the New York Court of General Sessions, reading crime reports and court transcripts. Even when the research was tedious, the drama and ritual of the courtroom suggested forms to consider as possible material for fiction. Along with about twenty other black employees of the writers' project, Ellison spent months in the Schomburg Library doing research for a projected book of social history, The Negro in New York. As a member of that research team, Ellison wrote a series of short memorandums, several hundred words in length, on prominent black New Yorkers and historical incidents involving the black community. From June 9, 1938, to June 29, 1942—almost his entire tenure on the project—Ellison submitted such papers as "Negro Instructors in New York Institutions of Higher Learning," "Jupiter Hammond," and "Great Riots of New York; Complete Account of the Four Days of the Draft Riot of 1863." These essays were interpretive as well as expository and often prefigured the balance and grandeur of Ellison's later prose, although many of them lacked his characteristic precision and zest. From 1938 to 1940 Ellison worked also under the supervision of Nicholas Wirth of the New

WRITERS

York "Living Lore Unit." This group of twenty-seven writers sought to recount the history of New York City in the words of its inhabitants. The resulting unpublished collection of "urban and industrial folklore," assembled under the working title "Chase the White Horse," testified to their conviction that a vital part of American history lies in the tales, toasts, songs, and boasts of folklore. In this research group, Ellison collected children's gamerhymes, chants, and taunts, some of which turned up later in his fiction. Part of the song "Buckeye the Rabbit," which Ellison heard recited by five Harlem girls while playing, appears in Invisible Man: I'm riding through Kentucky I'm riding through the sea, And all I catch behind me Is a buckle on my knee. Buckeye the Rabbit, Shake it Shake it Shake it With a buckle on my knee. I swing to the bottom I swing to the sea And all I catch behind me Is a buckle on my knee So Buckeye the Rabbit Shake it Shake it With a buckle on my knee Ellison sometimes recognized a remnant of a saying or rhyme he had heard in the South, reduced to a mumble or nonsense phrase in Harlem. Out of the rural context in which the story or rhyme had originated, the meanings of the folk art changed—and at times appeared to dissolve entirely. Even reduced to mumbles, however, the folklore often retained ritual meanings and signified a tradition, a bridge to the South and to the past. "That's what the people have to

RALPH ELLISON / 231 work out of," Ellison has said. "This tradition goes way back to the South, and some of it goes back to Africa." Ellison also visited hundreds of Harlem apartments and public places, where he collected stories from adults. This process of interviewing and transcribing sharpened his ear for idiosyncrasies of language and his mind for getting particular patterns of speech onto paper. He was often able to get a story on paper "by using a kind of Hemingway typography, by using the repetitions ... I could get some of the patterns and get an idea of what it was like." On May 10, 1939, Ellison talked to a man in Eddie's Bar in Harlem, described as a modernistic room with green walls, marine designs, red imitation leather upholstery, mirrors, and a nickel phonograph—"all of this in good taste." The unnamed man, who brings to mind Langston Hughes's character Jesse B. Simple, told Ellison: Ahm in New York, but New York aint in me. You understand? Ahm in New York but New York aint in me. Who do I mean? Listen. Im from Jacksonville, Florida. Been in New York twenty-five years. Im a New Yorker! But Im in New York an New York aint in me. Yuh understand? Naw, naw, yuh dont get me. What do they do; take Lenox Avenue. Take Seventh Avenue; take Sugar Hill! Pimps. Numbers. Cheating these poor people outa whut they got. Shooting, cutting, backbiting, all them things. Yuh see? Yuh see whut Ah mean? I'M in New York, but New York aint in me! Dont laugh, dont laugh. Ahm laughing but Ah dont mean it; it aint funny. Yuh see. Im on Sugar Hill, but Sugar Hill aint on me. The man ended his song of himself with a eulogy to "spirits": "Whut did the saint say? He said a little spirits is good for the stomach, good to warm the spirit. Now where did that come from? Yuh dont know, yuh too young. Yuh

young Negroes dont know the Bible. Dont laugh, dont laugh. Look here Ahll tell you somethin: Some folks drinks to cut the fool but some folks drinks to think. Ah drinks to think." Ellison submitted one especially vivid report on June 14, 1938. Standing on 135th Street and Lenox Avenue, Leo Gurley told Ellison about "Sweet-the-monkey." Gurley began his story with what folklorists term a "signature": "I hope to God to kill me if this aint the truth. All you got to do is go down to Florence, South Carolina and ask most anybody you meet and they'll tell you its the truth." Gurley's "Sweet-the-monkey" in some respects resembles the narrator of Invisible Man: It was this way: Sweet could make hisself invisible. You don't believe it? Well here's how he done it. Sweet-the-monkey cut open a black cat and took out its heart. Climbed a tree backwards and cursed God. After that he could do anything. The white folks would wake up in the morning and find their stuff gone. He cleaned out the stores. He cleaned up the houses. Hell, he even cleaned out the dam bank! He was the the boldest black sonofabitch ever been down that way. And couldn't nobody do nothing to him. Because they couldn't never see im when he done it. He didn't need the money. Fact is, most of the time he broke into places he wouldn't take nothing. Lots a times he just did it to show 'em he could. Hell, he had everybody in that HI old town scaird as hell; black folks and white folks He wont let himself be seen. Many of the verses, jokes, and peculiarities of speech that enrich Ellison's fiction were drawn from his experience in Oklahoma and Alabama; other are based on notes made in Harlem for the Federal Writers' Project. There he refined his sense of the folkloric context: the occasions in which persons were likely to use the stylized speech of folklore. Thus in his fiction, the lore is more than mere "local color"; it is ritualistic

232 I AMERICAN and reflective of a whole cultural style. For example, in Invisible Man the protagonist tells a black man on the street to "take it easy" and the man replies with an ebullient boast, here serving an initiatory function: "Oh, I'll do that. All it takes to get along in this here man's town is a little shit, grit, and motherwit. And man, I was bawn with all three. In fact, Fmaseventhsonofaseventhsonbawnwitha cauloverbotheyesandraisedonblackcatbones highjohntheconquerorandgreasygreens . . . I'll verse you but I won't curse you—My name is Peter Wheatstraw, I'm the Devil's only son-inlaw, so roll 'em! ... My name's Blue and I'm coming at you with a pitchfork. Fe Fi Fo Fum. Who wants to shoot the Devil one, Lord God Stingeroy! . . . Look me up sometimes, I'm a piano player and a rounder, a whiskey drinker and a pavement pounder. I'll teach you some good bad habits. You'll need 'em." On the Federal Writers' Project, writers studied folklore and exercised their literary craft transposing the lore into written literature. Ellison collected lore and studied history by day, but wrote his own fiction by night. The project inspired some writers' rediscovery of the American vernacular in the 1930's, and in those years Ellison applied his new awareness of language and folklore to the past and to human identity. "The character of a people," he has said, "is revealed in their speech." The project's structured examination of language and folklore helped his writing grow beyond the limits of literary realism. If Harlem proved a somewhat tarnished "Mecca of equality," it did offer young Ellison opportunities for artistic growth. Ellison's increasing maturity as a writer coincided with a gradual shift in his political perspective. During the late 1930's he was an enthusiastic supporter of many Communist party

WRITERS

tenets, but by the mid-1940's he was publicly denouncing the party. He was first drawn to left-wing politics by his mother's involvement with the Socialist party in Oklahoma; by his own experience of poverty, segregation, and hard times; and by the impact of such events as the Scottsboro and Herndon cases and the Civil War in Spain. Andre Malraux's political, critical, and fiction writings also affected Ellison profoundly and further stirred in him the prospect of participating in a concerted effort by— in Malraux's word—"conscious" revolutionary artists, intellectuals and the people to redeem an immoral world torn by war and depression. Ellison recalls that the "swell of events which I plunged into ... the stimulus that existed in New York during the thirties was by no means limited to art; it was also connected with politics; it was part of the esprit de corps developed in the country after we had endured the Depression for a few years. It had to do with my discovering New York and the unfamiliar areas of society newly available to me." Ellison's friends influenced his leftward progress. Wright was an active member of the Communist party when they met. Having been secretary of the John Reed Club in Chicago, he was considered a party spokesman. Hughes was a charter member of the radical American Writers' Congress and had been writing leftist articles, fiction, and poetry for almost ten years. In 1937 Hughes traveled to the Soviet Union, which he described in reports for the Chicago Defender as a haven of interracial cooperation. Though never a member of the Communist party, Hughes often wrote and spoke in behalf of party causes. Fron 1937 to 1944 Ellison wrote over twenty book reviews for such radical periodicals as New Challenge, Direction, and the Negro Quarterly; in 1940 the New Masses printed at least one piece of his every month.

RALPH ELLISON / 233 In the 1930's Ellison joined the chorus of critics calling for realism as the literary mode appropriate for the radical writer. Mirroring the Communist party position of the day, Ellison's criticism often described black Americans as members of a state or nation (like a Russian soviet) within the United States. The literature of black Americans (the subject of about half of his reviews of the 1930's and 1940's) was, he believed, an emerging national literature that should serve to heighten the revolutionary consciousness of black people. The black writer should instill in his audience not merely "race consciousness" but awareness of class. Ideally, the revolutionary black writer should inspire black working people to unite with workers of other "nationalities" against the bourgeoisie, white and black. While the Great Depression years brought tremendous difficulties, they were also, in Ellison's words, "great times for literature," times for "the conscious writer" to study his society's laws and to examine its citizens' emotions "stripped naked." Furthermore, the writer could perceive the great American themes of tomorrow shining "beyond the present chaos." The black writer's particular duty was to overcome the handicap of living in racist, capitalist America and to teach his readers to do likewise. His greatest responsibility, said Ellison, echoing Joyce's phrase, was "to create the consciousness of his oppressed nation." Toward this nation-building effort, Ellison's first published writing, his review of These Low Grounds (1937), called for a greater awareness of literary technique and tradition among what he called "realistic" black writers. He also steadfastly maintained, then and in years to come, that black folklore is one of the richest sources for the black writer. In 1940 and 1941, Ellison published "Stormy Weather" and "Recent Negro Fiction," his

longest and most searching critical essays up to that time. They were pioneering works in establishing the creative use of folklore as a touchstone for evaluating black literature. While reviewing one of Langston Hughes's autobiographies, The Big Sea, Ellison proclaims that of the "New Negro movement" in American letters in the 1920's, only Hughes, much of whose poetry had been based on black speech and the blues, transcended the "bourgeois," white-imitating wave of black writing and survived the shattering impact of the Great Crash. Most black writers of the 1920's wrote as if blind to the technical experiments of Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and Joyce; furthermore, they had ignored what Ellison termed "the folk source of all vital Negro art." Hughes, however, "castigates the Negro bourgeoisie Declining its ideological world, he gained his artistic soul Hughes's vision carried him down into the black masses to seek his literary roots. The crystallized folk experience of the blues, spirituals, and folk tales became the stuff of his poetry." Obviously there is a nationalistic—perhaps a proletarian—note struck here. There is also a point about diction and rhetoric. Ellison explains that the black writer of the 1930's, discovering the path mapped out by Hughes, began to sense that black workers spoke a "language of protest," a black urban idiom, and that "the speech patterns of this new language had long been present in Negro life, recorded in the crystallized protest of American Negro folklore." Hughes's fiction reflected the transformation of rural folk expression into urban folk expression, which, by the 1930's, was fast becoming "the basis of a new proletarian literature." His radical perspective and power as a spokesman for the people derived from Hughes's having followed "the logical development of the national folk sources of his art." In

234 I AMERICAN other words, Hughes used the language, tone, and structure of the blues and spirituals in his work; writing from the perspective of the folk, his radicalism glowed with the energy and irony of "the dozens," the boast, the deadpan tale. The Big Sea, however, is not explicit enough for Ellison in its realism or radicalism. Its use of understatement as a narrative pose was "charming in its simplicity" but risked the possibility of being misunderstood: Many New Masses readers will question whether [understatement] is a style suitable for the autobiography of a Negro writer of Hughes's importance; the national and class position of the writer should guide his selection of techniques and method, should influence his style. In the style of The Big Sea too much attention is apt to be given to the esthetic aspects of experience at the expense of its deeper meanings. Nor—this being a world in which few assumptions can be taken for granted—can the writer who depends upon understatement to convey these meanings be certain that they do not escape the reader. To be effective the Negro writer must be explicit; thus realistic; thus dramatic. Ellison has remained somewhat suspicious of understatement in fiction. In a review in 1946 he attacked his literary hero Hemingway for using understatement as a deceptive mask; beneath his clipped prose, writes Ellison, Hemingway takes reactionary positions. As late as 1953, upon accepting the National Book Award, Ellison explained that he chose not to take the narrative stance of the "'hard-boiled' novel, with its dedication to physical violence, social cynicism, and understatement. Understatement depends, after all, upon commonly held assumptions and my minority status rendered all such assumptions questionable." Ellison also criticized Hughes's self-portrayal as a picaresque figure rather than a tough-

WRITERS

minded hero whose self-awareness deepens with experience. Using Malraux's terminology, Elli= son observed that by rendering himself as picaresque, "Hughes avoids analysis and comment, and, in some instances, emotion." Hence "a deeper unity is lost. This is the unity which is formed by the mind's brooding over experience and transforming it into conscious thought. Negro writing needs this unity, through which the writer clarifies the experiences of the reader and allows him to recreate himself." In a proper autobiography, writes Ellison, the black writer is responsible for revealing the process whereby he has gained his artistic consciousness in a world in which "most of the odds are against his doing so." In the South "the attainment of such a consciousness is in itself a revolutionary act." The black writer's duty is to recognize that "the spread of this consciousness, added to the passion and sensitivity of the Negro people . . . will help create a new way of life in the United States." The desire for a "conscious hero" in American literature has remained a theme of Ellison's. In 1942, reviewing William Attaway's Blood on the Forge for the Negro Quarterly, Ellison commended the author's presentation of southern "folk" blacks as harried and confused in the concrete mazes of the urban North. He pointed out that the artistic vision is incomplete, however, without the presence of a character whose consciousness is reborn in the North: Conceptually, Attaway grasped the destruction of the folk, but missed its rebirth on a higher level. The writer did not see that while the folk individual was being liquidated in the crucible of steel, he was also undergoing fusion with new elements. Nor did Attaway see that the individual which emerged, blended of old and new, was better fitted for the problems of the industrial environment. As a result the author is so struck by the despair in his material that he fails to see

RALPH ELLISON / 235 any ground for hope in his characters. Yet hope is there A few years later, in "Flying Home" (1944), "King of the Bingo Game" (1944), and Invisible Man (1952), Ellison would present his own black protagonists threatened with liquidation in modern industrial society. His heroes' resiliency, folk memories, and luck, however, help them to "fuse" with "new elements" in their environment; they are "reborn" better able to deal with the churning world of airplanes and factories. In 1948 Ellison described the bemused protagonist of Invisible Man, which he was then writing, as "a character who possesses both the eloquence and the insight into the interconnections between his own personality and the world about him to rtiake a judgment about our culture." Ellison's early desire for conscious heroes in American writing foreshadowed his eventual break with many of his literary and political friends, including Wright. But in his literary essays of the early 1940's Ellison champions Wright as living testimony to the shining possibilities within the black community. Against all odds, Wright had made himself into a highly conscious activist and writer. For Ellison, Wright's early novellas, published as Uncle Tom's Children (1938), constituted his best fiction; their protest and existential themes emerged not from overt Marxist or Kierkegaardian theorizing but from the fiction itself, rich in folklore. And in the review "Recent Negro Fiction" (1941), Ellison held up Native Son (1940) as "the first philosophical novel by an American Negro. This work possesses an artistry, penetration of thought, and sheer emotional power that places it in the front rank of American fiction." Wright's autobiography, Black Boy (1945), prompted Ellison to compare it with works by Joyce and Dostoevsky, and with the blues. Wright's eloquent "song" of trouble and trial is filled "with blues-

tempered echoes of railroad trains, the names of Southern towns and cities, estrangements, fights and flights, deaths and disappointments, charged with physical and spiritual hungers and pain. And like a blues sung by such an artist as Bessie Smith, its lyric prose evokes the paradoxical, almost surreal image of a black boy singing lustily as he probes his own grievous wound." Despite Ellison's admiration for his mentor, and despite Wright's encouragement (he inscribed a copy of Uncle Tom's Children "To Ralph, who I hope will someday write a better book than this"), by 1940 a degree of "anxiety of influence" afflicted the friendship. Ellison's early fiction style so resembled Wright's that Wright protested. Upon seeing one short-story manuscript, Wright exclaimed, "Hey, that's my stuff!" Ellison deliberately left the piece unpublished, like most of his exercises of the period, and afterward he never showed Wright any work in progress. "You might say," Ellison later commented, that in this awkward scene Wright "influenced me not to be influenced by him." That Ellison was finding his own direction in writing is clear from his fiction of the 1940's. And in critical essays of the 1960's he explains his early dissatisfaction with Native Son and Black Boy. Recognizing that Bigger Thomas in Native Son represents black humanity smoldering under the ashes of despair and white oppression, Ellison nevertheless cannot accept Bigger as an adequate portrait of the Afro-American. To him this character is little more than an ideological formulation, a sociological mortar shell fired at the guilty conscience of white America. Blacks themselves know that life in the ghetto is not as dimensionless and dull as Wright paints it. Native Son is too deterministic and anchored in Marxist ideology: In Native Son Wright began with the ideological proposition that what whites think of the

236 I AMERICAN WRITERS Negro's reality is more important than what Negroes themselves know it to be. Hence Bigger Thomas was presented as a near-subhuman indictment of white oppression. He was designed to shock whites out of their apathy and end the circumstances out of which Wright insisted Bigger emerged. Here environment is all—and interestingly enough, environment conceived solely in terms of the physical, the non-conscious. Well, cut off my legs and call me Shorty! Kill my parents and throw me on the mercy of the court as an orphan! Wright could imagine Bigger, but Bigger could not possibly imagine Richard Wright. Wright saw to that. Black Boy fared little better in Ellison's later criticism. Here again the portrait of black life is too raw and hopeless in Ellison's view. When Wright decided to employ determinist ideology and to dwell upon the crushing power of environment, instead of the individual's ability to overcome it, that, wrote Ellison, was doubtless "the beginning of Wright's exile." In 1944, when Ellison's disagreement with radical American leftists was already strong, the war policies of the American Communist party impelled Ellison and many other blacks to leave the organized Left entirely. When the party lent what Ellison called its "shamefaced support" to segregation in the armed forces, many blacks became bitterly disillusioned with the radicals' vaunted good will toward minorities. The party blundered in ignoring the fact that "little Hitlers" (white racists and racist policies) plagued blacks at home; for blacks the war against fascism had to continue on the home front as well as overseas. When the party attacked this position as "narrowly nationalistic," it seemed to Ellison that Soviet foreign policy moved the American Communist party more than did the plight of its local black members. In an interview years later, Ellison said of the Communist party:

They fostered the myth that Communism was twentieth-century Americanism, but to be a twentieth-century American meant, in their thinking, that you had to be more Russian than American and less Negro than either. That's how they lost the Negroes. The Communists recognized no plurality of interests and were really responding to the necessities of Soviet foreign policy, and when the war came, Negroes got caught and were made expedient in the shifting of policy. Just as Negroes today who fool around will get caught in the next turn of the screw. However radical their politics, American Communist party leaders often suffered from what Gunnar Myrdal called "the American dilemma." In Ellison's words: the Party had inherited the moral problem centering upon the Negro For in our culture the problem of the irrational, that blind spot in our knowledge of society where Marx cries out for Freud and Freud for Marx, but where approaching, both grow wary and shout insults lest they actually meet, has takeri the form of the Negro problem. In Invisible Man, the protagonist's decision to renounce his wholehearted support for the Brotherhood is based on his discovery that the radical group is racist. The Brotherhood sacrifices Harlem's interests for the sake of "international" goals and tries to mold the Invisible Man into their conception of the Good Negro: one passively willing to use his energy and his art (which is his oratory) exactly as the Party commands. In the novel the Brotherhood stands, to a large extent, for the American Communist party. But Ellison also wanted the Brotherhood to be seen in a larger context: the party was not the only group of white American political activists to betray their black countrymen for narrow political ends. In 1942 Ellison quit the Federal Writers'

RALPH ELLISON / 237 Project to become managing editor of the Negro Quarterly and worked on its staff for one year, leaving just before the journal closed. Angelo Herndon, who was just then breaking away from the Communists, was the editor of this radical "Review of Negro Life and Culture," which featured leftist artists and scholars, black and white. Sterling A. Brown, Herbert Aptheker, Richard Wright, Norman McLeod, J. Saunders Redding, E. Franklin Frazier, Owen Dodson, and Stanley Edgar Hyman all contributed to the Negro Quarterly during its brief existence (only four issues were published). Besides his review of William Attaway's Blood on the Forge, Ellison wrote an unsigned editorial that obliquely criticized the Communist party and urged black leaders to concentrate more on the interests and needs of blacks. Calling for black unity and self-determination, without mentioning the Communists, he warned that when black leadership is provided from outside the black community, Negro people [are] exploited by others: either for the good ends of democratic groups or for the bad ends of Fascist groups. And they have the Civil War to teach them that no revolutionary situation in the United States will be carried any farther toward fulfilling the needs of Negroes than Negroes themselves are able, through a strategic application of their own power, to make it go. As long as Negroes fail to centralize their power, they will always play the role of sacrificial goat, they will always be "expendable." Freedom, after all, cannot be imported or acquired through an act of philanthropy, it must be won. In this comment, as in several of Ellison's early political writings, the artist inadvertently upstages the political analyst. Black leaders, he argues, must realize that the hope of consolidating black power rests on their ability to analyze and use the lore and language of black

Americans. Without understanding AfroAmerican myths and symbols, no black leader can succeed, regardless of his program's merits: Much in Negro life remains a mystery; perhaps the zoot suit conceals profound political meaning; perhaps the symmetrical frenzy of the Lindyhop conceals clues to great potential power— if only Negro leaders would solve this riddle. On this knowledge depends the effectiveness of any slogan or tactic.... [American war aims] will be accepted by the Negro masses only to the extent that they are helped to see the bright star of their own hopes through the fog of their daily experiences. The problem is psychological; it will be solved only by a Negro leadership that is aware of the psychological attitudes and incipient forms of action which the black masses reveal in their emotion-charged myths, symbols and wartime folklore. Ellison calls here for a more efficient propaganda effort by black leaders and for their increased identification with the political interests of the black masses. He also seems to call on the black artist and the student of black culture to express the true values and forms of black life. But it was Ellison himself who went on to explore the mysterious relation of folklore, art, and politics most daringly in his own early stories. The years 1939 to 1944 were years of apprenticeship for Ellison who, in a New York Post feature story of 1943, was identified as "a short story writer." He published eight stories during this period, and his writing grew in eloquence and complexity from one work to the next. He wrote many more stories than he tried to publish, looking upon some as exercises. As we might expect, his first short stories, "Slick Gonna Learn" (1939) and "The Birthmark" (1940) were in the realistic mode and highlighted the jagged edges of the blackAmerican environment. These stories offer ex-

238 I AMERICAN WRITERS plicitly political resolutions. But as early as 1940, as Ellison began to draw upon his Oklahoma City background, his vision was not so much that of a political realist as of a regionalist: his first Buster and Riley stories, "Afternoon" (1940), "Mister Toussan" (1941), and "That I Had the Wings" (1943), explored the language, folklore, and unique features of a southwestern town as seen by two curious and daring black boys. "It Is a Strange Country" (1944) is a transitional wartime story, important because of its heightened technical complexity. Here too an Ellison protagonist first declares his ineradicable Americanness as well as his blackness. The final two stories of the early 1940's, "Flying Home" and "King of the Bingo Game," are more than mere apprentice pieces. In these works the young fiction writer discovers his own surrealistic voice and manages to integrate folklore, ritual, politics, history, and an absurdist vision of American experience in a way that may be termed "Ellisonian." These important early stories center on the individual's struggle to cope with a world that has become machine-mad; in both works a black protagonist struggles to confront the question, Who ami? In 1943 Ellison joined the merchant marine, in part because he had belonged to the National Maritime Union since 1936, when he picketed for them, but mainly because he "wanted to contribute to the war, but didn't want to be in a Jim Crow army." While still in the service, Ellison was awarded a Rosenwald Fellowship to write a novel. In fact, he already had one outlined: a wartime story in which a black pilot is shot down, captured by the Nazis, and placed in a detention camp where he is the highestranking officer, and pitted by his Nazi guards against the white prisoners. Ellison continued working on this novel even after he began Invisible Man in 1945. But it never achieved

enough unity to satisfy its maker, and only one section, "Flying Home," was published. Constructed as a story within a story, "Flying Home" deals with two thwarted flights: that of the black pilot Todd, whose plane collides with a buzzard and crashes in a field in Macon County; and that of Jefferson, who comes to Todd's rescue and who in his "tale told for true" sails from heaven back to the hell of Alabama. Jefferson's uproarious folktale, cataloged by collectors as early as 1919, eases the pain of Todd's injured ankle and his wait for a doctor's help. It also serves an initiatory function for this starry-eyed greenhorn, who, like Jefferson's heavenly flier, must eventually confront the evils of Jim Crow Alabama, however high he has flown. In this brilliantly layered story (which nods cordially to the swing instrumental of the same name and period) a variety of other folk motifs directs the young pilot on his looping homeward flight. The critic Walter Blair has written that comic folklore aids the American's attempts to adjust to "totally new ways of living" as well as to "amazing differences between himself and his neighbors." In a lecture on American humor, Ellison himself has pointed out that funny tales provide not only escape and entertainment but also instruction. "Americans began," he says, "to tell stories which emphasize the uncertain nature of existence in the new world and as we did so, we allowed ourselves some relief from the pain of discovering that our bright hopes were going to be frustrated." Thus we have tall tales about the flintiness of farmland bursting with mile-high cornstalks, corroded buried treasure, and the brutality and sorcery of the Indians. Thus in the land of the free and the brave, we have humorous tales about the hatred and the casual violence of surly white men toward men black and red. Jefferson's tale, listed by the folklorist Richard Dorson as "Colored Man in Heaven," pro-

RALPH ELLISON / 239 vides Todd with a perspective for viewing his plight as a black trainee flier whose plane has been knocked down by a buzzard (called a "jimcrow bird" locally) onto the land of a racist white man named Graves. The folkloric lesson also needles the segregated air force of World War II, during which the question was raised of whether black fliers could be trusted in combat. Implied, too, is the more general question of how to face a segregated society that is patrolled by violence—or yet more generally, how to confront a manmade world full of sorrow and death. From Jefferson's tale Todd learns to laugh at the fact that his brightest and loftiest hopes may at last be grounded by jimcrow birds. Like many Afro-American humorous tales, the "Colored Man in Heaven" joke momentarily accepts as true certain black stereotypes. As Jefferson tells it, the moment he got to heaven he raised such a ruckus by speeding that he scared the white angels and "knocked the tips offa some stars." Some of the heavenly "boys" even claim that Jefferson, flying with just one wing, stirred up a storm in Alabama and caused some lynchings. "Like colored folks will do," he forgets a warning from St. Peter, who finally loses patience with the "flying fool" and sends him back to Alabama. But Jefferson has the last word. "Well," he says, "you done took my wings. And you puttin' me out. You got charge of things so's I can't do nothin' about it. But you got to admit just this: while I was up here I was the flyingest sonofabitch what ever hit heaven!" Far from expressing self-hatred, this tale turns the black stereotype of the unmanageable, forgetful, smart-mouthing black man inside out. As a black in-joke, "Colored Man in Heaven" takes the teeth from racist charges by accepting them as true and then laughing at their foolishness. If he does "act up" in heaven, at least while there Jefferson is the "flyingest" of the heavenly fliers.

This tale also gives historical perspective to the dilemma of living in Jim Crow America. Jefferson finds that black angels do not fly, because they are required to wear heavy harnesses. He himself refuses to be encumbered and discovers that, "smooth as a bird," he can "loop-the-loop," even on one wing. But all this earns him a dressing-down by St. Peter in front of smirking white angels. Jefferson is finally thrown back into segregated Alabama. Similarly, not only were blacks in the "heaven" of America burdened with the harness of slavery, but at the abrupt end of Reconstruction the political freedoms tentatively held out were snatched back. Blacks again found themselves in a society filled with restrictions based on race. By the 1940's black men were trained to fly planes at the Tuskegee airfield, but for a long time black air force pilots (like Todd) were barred from combat duty. Knocked back by "jimcrows," Todd must learn the old survival technique of laughing at—or otherwise distancing himself from—an oppression with deep historical roots. This tale is also part of a greenhorn's initiation into a complex and violent society. Todd's greenness is reflected in his undue optimism about being allowed to fly in combat. Why does he want to fly? "It's as good a way to fight and die as I know," he tells Jefferson. Asked if he has ever been hindered by whites who don't want blacks to be pilots, Todd tightens up and says, "No one has ever bothered us." To this the older man says, "Well, they'd like to." In Jefferson's tale even St. Peter and God himself seem involved in the conspiracy to keep blacks harnessed. The whole story angers Todd at first, but he relaxes as he sees that symbolically he too has been knocked down from the heaven of his aspiration. In the end he is freer of illusions; he is more shrewd and wary. Like the Invisible Man, Todd has crossed over into the fallen realm of adulthood. As he is carried from the

240 I AMERICAN field by Jefferson and Jefferson's son it is "as though he had been lifted out of his isolation, back into the world of men. A new current of communication flowed between the man and boy and himself." The last story Ellison published before he began to work full-time on Invisible Man was "King of the Bingo Game." This compelling story, the first in which he felt he had discovered his own fictive voice, synthesizes much that he had learned as an apprentice and foreshadows certain of the most memorable forms and themes of Invisible Man. As in "Slick Gonna Learn*" the protagonist is an unemployed young black man whose wife's need for medical care has made him desperate for money. Here again, as in all his previous stories, a young black man fights for freedom in a land tightly gripped by authority figures. In this surrealistic story, however, with its dreamlike shifts of time and levels of consciousness, the struggle is seen in its most abstracted form. In an epiphany the unnamed hero realizes that his battle for freedom and identity must be waged not against individuals or even groups but against no less than history and fate. The King is Ellison's first character to sense the frightening absurdity of everyday American life. He has seen a woman walking into the bright street with a bedbug on her neck. He dozes in a theater and imagines himself a boy in the South, chased by a train that has jumped the track to pursue him, "and all the white people laughing as he ran screaming." He sees himself as "a long thin black wire that was being stretched and wound upon the bingo wheel." His nose begins to bleed, and he feels "as though the rush of blood to his head would burst out in baseball seams of small red droplets, like a head beaten by police clubs." It is in this wildly imagistic realm, where past and present, dreaming and waking converge, that the King, like the Invisible Man, sees the visions that may spell salvation.

WRITERS

In Ellison's earliest stories, Buster and Riley find that southern folk culture—despite its sudden violence—provides clear and stable definitions of black manhood. Up north, however, the King discovers that the values he had learned in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, do not apply. He is hungry and thirsty but knows better than to ask strangers in a movie theater for food and drink. "Up here it was different. Ask somebody for something, and they'd think you were crazy." When the King stands perplexed on the bingo stage, not only does the white master of ceremonies laugh at him ("So you decided to come down off that mountain to the U.S."), so do the blacks. "Ole Jack thinks he done found the end of the rainbow," someone shouts. As his emotions mount, the audience claps and shouts in mockery: Shoot the liquor to him, Jim, boy! Clap-clap-clap Well a-calla the cop He's blowing his top! Shoot the liquor to him, Jim, boy! With no encouraging spiritual or anthem, with no guide like Jefferson to remind him of the way home, this hero must make his way alone. "He felt alone, but that was somehow right." Finding his southern folk consciousness shattered and half-forgotten in the North, the King must rely on his creativity and resilience to win his freedom and identity. His fate seems to have been irreversibly determined long before his birth. Standing before the bingo wheel, he feels that he has "moved into the spell of some strange mysterious" being and that he is blinded by the wheel's lights and awestruck by its power: "He felt vaguely that his whole life was determined by the bingo wheel; not only that which would happen now ... but all that had gone before, since his birth, and his mother's birth and the birth of his father. It had always been there, even though he had not been aware of it, handing out the un-

RALPH ELLISON / 241 lucky cards and numbers of his days." Here the King echoes a question posed by the Invisible Man: What if history is a gambler? If it is, the King feels he must do more than hope his lucky number comes up: he must subvert the process that has left him and his generations luckless. His refusal to stop turning the bingo wheel symbolizes this forthright subversion. By refusing to play a game that he has been fated to lose, he discovers who he is. First he realizes that he has lost the old identity: "somehow he had forgotten his own name. It was a sad, lost feeling to lose your name, and a crazy thing to d o . . . 'Who am I?' he screamed." Then "he was reborn. For as long as he pressed the button he was The-man-whopressed-the-button-who-held-the-prize-who-wasthe-King-of-Bingo." Like the Invisible Man, the King frees himself when he discovers that he has been a sleepwalker, a fool, naive enough to accept unquestioningly the judgments handed down by an indifferent bingo wheel of fate, of circumstance, of history. Like the Invisible Man, he sees the cruelty of the culture and society that have shaped his personality; the vision frees him of his illusions. The instant before he is hit by the descending stage curtain, he is in full control of his fate. Moreover, he is symbolically reborn, better able to deal with life's absurd and dreadful turns. Before the curtain is rung down, the King hears the taunts and laughter in the theater but, foreshadowing the steely determination of Jim Trueblood in Invisible Man, he says, "Well, let 'em laugh. I'll do what I gotta do." In 1945, exhausted by hard work and by a grueling merchant marine voyage, and hopeless over the unfinished war novel, Ellison went to recuperate at a friend's farm in Wakesfield, Vermont. Certain ideas seemed to come into focus there. He had been reading Lord Raglan's The Hero, a study of historical and mythic heroes, and had been thinking about leadership in the Afro-American community. Why, he won-

dered, did black leaders so often seem uncommitted to their black constituents? Why did they so often seem dependent not on the will of blacks but on the largesse of white patrons? Along with these questions, Ellison was pondering a number of others—and overall, the persistent problem of finding a literary form flexible enough to contain his vision of the wild and shifting American hodge-podge of cultures and characters. He determined to write a novel about black identity, heroism, and history, and to write it in a style "unburdened by ... narrow naturalism." One morning in 1945, still in Vermont, Ellison scribbled the words, "I am an invisible man"—his novel's first sentence. He recalls that he played with the idea and "started to reject it, but it intrigued me, and I began to put other things with it. And pretty soon I had a novel going, and I began to work out of a conceptual outline on it. And as fast as I could work out the concepts, the incidents started flowing in on me." Back in New York, Ellison continued work on the novel in his apartment on St. Nicholas Avenue, but he also went downtown every morning to work like any businessman. Using a friend's Fifth Avenue office, he put in at least eight hours a day writing before returning to his home. The project was blessed with the support of Ellison's present wife, Fanny McConnell, of whom he has written "my beloved wife . . . has shown, again and again, through her sacrifices, encouragement and love, more faith in the writer and his talent than the writer has shown in himself." He worked on Invisible Man for five years, taking one year off to work on another novel. Invisible Man was published in 1952. To many critics the novel seemed like a miraculous first work. But Ellison's first published fiction, "Slick Gonna Learn," had been conceived as part of a novel. By the 1940's, with "Flying Home" and "King of the Bingo Game" he had discovered

242 I AMERICAN WRITERS a voice and a set of questions and concerns that were timeless but were his own. By the mid1940's he had absorbed the lessons of Mark Twain, Hemingway, Richard Wright, and the social realists; and he had experimented with the narrative devices of many writers, especially Henry James, Faulkner, Dostoevsky, and Joyce. The sentence "I am an invisible man" started him on a work into which he could pour all he had learned as an apprentice perfecting his craft. With the publication of Invisible Man, Ellison moved suddenly into the front ranks of American writers. His novel evokes visions and tensions peculiar to American life as AfroAmericans know it: Ellison's brown-skinned, nameless seeker suffers and scoots, forth and back through a thicket of briars well-known to American blacks. Yet Invisible Man is a modern masterpiece that, as Wright Morris has written, "belongs on the shelf with the classical efforts man has made to chart the river Lethe from its mouth to its sources." Expressing richly the meaning of life in Harlem (and the southern background of that life), Ellison manages to describe what he says he finds in the work of the painter Romare Bearden: "the harlemness of the human condition." Invisible Man is a deeply comic novel, with moments of terror and tragedy; it is a Bildungsroman in which a young man awakens to consciousness by piecing together fragments and symbols from history, myth, folklore, and literature, as well as his own painful experience. Set in the approximate period 1930-1950, Invisible Man is the story of the development of an ambitious black, a young man from the provinces of the South, who goes to college and then to New York in search of advancement. This greenhorn at first wants no more than to walk in the footsteps of Booker T. Washington, whose words he quotes at his high school graduation and at a smoker for the town's leading

white citizens. At the smoker he is given a new briefcase and a scholarship, but is first required to fight blindfolded in a "battle royal" with other black youths. That night he dreams that his grandfather tells him to open the briefcase, which contains a document reading: "To Whom It May Concern, Keep This Nigger-Boy Running." But the youngster remains naive. He goes off to college but is expelled when he makes the fatal mistake of taking a visiting white trustee to a section of the local black community (and, metaphorically, to a level of black reality) never included in the college-town tour. Bledsoe, the college president, sends the hero packing to New York, first giving him a set of private letters of introduction that, he finally discovers, also courteously request that he be kept running—and jobless. Eventually he does find work in New York, first in a paint factory, where he is discharged after being seriously hurt in an explosion—one that ultimately jars him into a new self-awareness and courage. He gives a moving speech at the eviction of an elderly Harlem couple and is hired by a predominantly white radical political organization called the Brotherhood. The group seems to confirm his childhood wish by telling him he will be made the "new Booker T. Washington ... even greater than he." But the Brotherhood also sets him running. Despite his success in Harlem, the downtown "brothers" withdraw support for his program. A race riot erupts, and, still carrying his briefcase, which now contains, besides his diploma, several other mementoes of his adventures, he falls down a manhole into an abandoned, bricked-up cellar. There he closely examines the papers in his briefcase and realizes how fully he has been betrayed by those who had professed to help him. And yet he discovers too that not only "could you travel upward toward success but you could travel downwards as well." He will remain down there, bathed in stolen light from the

RALPH ELLISON / 243 power company, and in blues music; he will compose his memoirs in his hole at the edge of Harlem, in hibernation. "Please, a definition: A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action." If others cannot or will not see him, he at least will see himself. His narrative, full of irony, insight, and fury, shows that he has attained full self-awareness—even a certain wisdom—and that he has been able to act, to write this stunning book. The shape and style of Invisible Man bespeak its determination to step toward the universal through "the narrow door of the particular." The novel resounds with black folklore, in which, says Ellison, "we tell what Negro experience really is. We back away from the chaos of experience and from ourselves, and we depict the humor as well as the horror of our living. We project Negro life in a metaphysical perspective, and we have seen it with a complexity of vision that seldom gets into our writing." Blues, spirituals, sermons, tales, boasts, and other black American folk forms influence the characters, plot, and figurative language in this teeming novel. The striving young man is drawn toward the freedom of consciousness and conscience by the magic horns and voices of the folk. Nonetheless, he himself is never so much a blues hero or Bre'r Rabbit as he is like Bre'r Bear, outmaneuvered until the end by Bre'rs Fox and Dog—in his case Bledsoe; Brockway, the factory supervisor; and One-Eyed Jack, who recruits him for the Brotherhood. Like the befuddled butt of many a folktale, this young man seems determined to be somebody's greenhorn, somebody's fool. The novel is built not only upon the foundation of black lore but also of black literature. It is a benchmark black novel that seems aware of the entire tradition of Afro-American letters. In it one overhears the black and white tricksters (slaves and slaveholders) of slave narrative locked in combat. One senses again the slaves'

desperate yearning for education, mobility, and individual and communal freedom. There are particularly strong echoes of works by W. E. B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, and Richard Wright, all of whom wrote fictional portraits of tragicomic characters, "articulate heroes" in search of broader freedom. But the power of Invisible Man is more than that of a repository of black influences. As if in defiance of the single-minded critic, Ellison adapted symbolism and rhetorical strategy from any and every source he felt would enrich the texture and meaning of his work: Sophocles, Homer, Dostoevsky, Malraux, Joyce, and Freud all figure in Invisible Man. Some allusions and symbol clusters fade out like wistful jazz riffs; others recur and provide the novel with structure. But no single critical "method" can explain this capacious novel, which owes as much to the symbolist tradition of Melville and Hawthorne as it does to the vernacular tradition of Mark Twain and Hemingway. This is not a "realistic" novel or an understated "hardboiled" novel, or a symbolist romance (it is not, in any case, to be only so categorized); instead, it is an epic novel of many voices, an experimental narrative constructed upon the author's mastery of American language: as he describes it, a rich babel . . . a language full of imagery and gesture and rhetorical canniness . . . an alive language swirling with over three hundred years of American living, a mixture of the folk, the Biblical, the scientific, and the political. Slangy in one instance, academic in another, loaded poetically with imagery at one moment, mathematically bare of imagery in the next. The Invisible Man embodies this confluence of traditions. He is a modern Odysseus, a latterday Candide, a "black boy" comparable to Wright, a black and obscure Jude, a Yankee

244 / AMERICAN yokel, a minstrel endman. Of the several secondary characters who also embody a rich mixture of allusions, two stand out: Trueblood and Rinehart Both are significant influences on the protagonist's growing awareness. It is Trueblood, the sharecropper, whom the hero encounters when giving Mr. Norton, the white trustee, a tour of the college environs. "Half-consciously" the student drives over a hill into a section of the black community built during slavery and, at Norton's "excited command," stops in front of Trueblood's shack. Trueblood had, in earlier days, been invited to entertain white guests of the school, but no more: he has brought disgrace to the black community by impregnating his own daughter. "You have looked upon chaos and are not destroyed!" says Norton. "No suh! I feels all right," says Trueblood. Not just willingly but "with a kind of satisfaction and no trace of hesitancy or shame," Trueblood recites the exuberant tale of his forbidden act; it is a private performance for the student and Norton, whose face, at story's end, "had drained of color." Shaking, the white man gives the farmer a hundred-dollar banknote: "Please take this and buy the children some toys for me," the northern philanthropist says. Rinehart enters the narrative late in the novel. To escape two followers of Ras, a black nationalist whose organization rivals the Brotherhood, the Invisible Man puts on glasses with lenses so dark that they appear black; he is immediately mistaken for Rinehart. "But . . . where's your new hat I bought you?" a young woman asks. To complete his disguise he buys the widest white hat in stock at a local store and is mistaken for Rinehart all evening: Bliss Rinehart, gambler and pimp; Rine the lover and cool "daddy-o"; Rine the briber and "confidencing sonofabitch"; Rine the numbers runner; Reverend B. P. Rinehart, "Spiritual Technologist . . . No Problem Too Hard For God."

WRITERS

The Invisible Man is stunned by Rinehart: "Could he himself be both rind and heart? What is real anyway? ... The world in which we lived was without boundaries. A vast seething, hot world of fluidity, and Rine the rascal was at home." Trueblood and Rinehart make their homes in quite different worlds. Trueblood has remained in the South, in a log-cabin homestead dusty with slave history. By contrast, while Rinehart may once have preached in Virginia, he has become a master manipulator of a chaos that is distinctively northern in scope. Indeed, what these black men have most in common is that both have stood before teeming chaos and have survived. Rinehart has embraced chaos. Trueblood has faced his crime of incest—the sin associated with confusion, degeneracy, and death, from Sophocles' Oedipus Rex to Freud's Totem and Taboo. Both characters bring to mind the AfroAmerican musical form, the blues. Trueblood has done wrong (but didn't mean to) and is bashed in the head by his wife, who leaves him for a time and spreads the tale of his wrongdoing until even the preacher calls him "the most wicked man" he has ever seen. Yet Trueblood tells his story until it achieves a certain cadence, and it ends with song. "Finally, one night, way early in the mornin', I looks up and sees the stars and I starts singin'. I don't mean to, I didn't think 'bout it, just start singin'. I don't know what it was, some kinda church song, I guess. All I know is I ends up singin' the blues. I sings me some blues that might ain't never been sang before, and while I'm singin' them blues I makes up my mind that I ain't nobody but myself and ain't nothin' I can do but let whatever is gonna happen, happen. I made up my mind that I was goin' back home " Trueblood is what Albert Murray has called a "blues hero": a resilient improviser who confronts the low-down dirtiness of life, the

RALPH ELLISON / 245 "changes" and the "breaks," and who manages with style and grace to keep on keeping on. Rinehart is no blues man in this broadly heroic sense. "Rinehart, Rinehart," thinks the Invisible Man, "what kind of man is Rinehart?" His name is a name from a blues song: "Rinehart, Rinehart, / It's so lonesome up here / On Beacon Hill. ..." But instead of evoking terror or pity, instead of putting confusion into perspective, as does Trueblood, Rinehart personifies confusion. He is the no-good "sweet-back," the evil mistreater that the blues bemoan. Trueblood sings the blues as a cathartic statement to assuage a tragic predicament, but Rinehart dispenses the blues to others: he distributes travail and thrives off it. Trueblood's classical ancestors include Oedipus the King, but Rinehart's forebears are shape-changers and tricksters. His middle name, Ellison has written, is Proteus. Yet both characters capture the note and trick of Afro-American life and function in quite specific ways. Trueblood's tale is a lesson and a graphic warning, from which the Invisible Man learns that "there's always an element of crime in freedom." Trueblood's breaking of the incest taboo (even if, as he insists, he was asleep while doing so) suggests that the Invisible Man can also break the law and so extend the definition of what it means to be black and what it means to be human. Rinehart's lesson is that the world is much more ambiguous—and, again, full of possibility—than any narrowminded, strict, schematic thinkers like the Brotherhood can know. "Underground" in Harlem there are operators undreamed of by OneEyed Jack and his "brothers." Some, like the unscrupulous Rinehart, prosper in the dark maze. Others, like the "hip" young men the narrator sees in the subway station, have also been ignored by the Brotherhood. "Men out of time, who would soon be gone and forgotten.... But who knew but that they were

the saviors, the true leaders, the bearers of something precious? ... What if history was a gambler, instead of a force in a laboratory experiment, and the boys his ace in the hole?" Rinehart the trickster is a figure of escape and of possibility whose presence suggests that beneath the surface of the American commonplace there burns a bright and raging world. Invisible Man is a complex, ironic novel in which the hero discovers a great deal about American history and culture. In the end he sees that he has been a fool, that, like Trueblood and Rinehart, he must confront chaos or it will engulf him. When he plunges underground, he vows to stop running the course that Bledsoe and others had set for him and can say with Trueblood: "I ain't nobody but myself ... I made up my mind that I was goin' back home." Ellison's only book since Invisible Man has been the excellent collection of essays, Shadow and Act (1964). Its initial appeal seemed to be that in it the "invisible" author would at last emerge from underground: here, as one reviewer proclaimed, was Ralph Ellison's real autobiography." And Shadow and Act does contain autobiographical essays, notably its introduction and "Hidden Name and Complex Fate"; while in the reviews and interviews here collected the author also draws extensively upon his own experience. Because the essays (none retouched) were written over a twenty-two-year period, they reveal certain aspects of his development from the twenty-eight-year-old, Marxist-oriented WPA worker of "The Way It Is" (1942) to the seasoned writer of 1964: by the latter date he is not "primarily concerned with injustice, but with art." In his introduction Ellison offers a sort of apologia, explaining that the essays "represent, in all their modesty, some of the necessary effort which a writer of my background must make in order to possess the meaning of his experience." When the first essay appeared, he

246 I AMERICAN tells us, he regarded himself "in my most secret heart at least [as] a musician," not a writer. "One might say that with these thin essays for wings," he notes, "I was launched full flight into the dark." Thus, "their basic significance, whatever their value as information or speculation, is autobiographical." Nonetheless, the book contains thematic unities that are even more compelling. A good deal of the cumulative power of Shadow and Act derives from its contrasting black American life as seen through the lenses of politics, sociology, and popular culture and as observed and lived by one sensitive, questioning man. Shadow and Act has enduring validity as a unified work of art because of its author's single-minded intention to define Afro-American life. Ellison sometimes gently punctures, sometimes wields an ax against inadequate definitions of black experience. In place of what he detects as false prophecy, usually uttered by social scientists, he chooses as broad a frame of reference as possible to interpret black experience in richly optimistic terms. "Who wills to be a Negro?" he asks, rhetorically. "I do!" Once Ellison had released the galley proofs for Invisible Man, he felt emotionally and artistically spent. But he had begun jotting down ideas for a new novel even before Invisible Man was published, so that if it failed he would be too busy to worry. In 1952 he said he had a new novel "on the bench." In 1953, shortly after the National Book Award ceremonies honoring Invisible Man, he suggested that his new novel might be an elaboration of the first. "I don't feel that I have exhausted the theme of invisibility," he said. Indeed he felt that he could salvage some material edited out of the several drafts of the novel. "Out of the Hospital and Under the Bar" (1953), an early version of a chapter in Invisible Man, works well as a short story, not as a mere clipping from the larger work; "Did You Ever Dream Lucky?" (1954) concerns

WRITERS

Mary Rambo, the novel's Harlem landlady. As early as 1953, however, Ellison had begun laying the structural framework for a totally new novel that he felt sure would be much better and more complex than Invisible Man. Since then Ellison has been stoking the fires of this new novel. Its eight published sections, along with sections read on public television and on college campuses, have made the wait for the finished volume—or volumes, as Ellison has tantalizingly suggested—something of a vigil. In 1965 Ellison told an interviewer that he wanted to publish a book "in the coming year," adding, "so the pressure's on." Where is this long-promised novel? When he is at all willing to discuss its progress, Ellison recites the history of a wayward work, tedious in the initial construction and reconstruction; destroyed, in part, by fire; bedeviling in the re-reconstruction. In 1970 James McPherson noted that tales concerning the awaited novel were plentiful: "One man has heard that he has pulled it back from his publisher again for more revisions; another says that Ellison worries about its being dated; a third man says that Ellison cannot finish it." One explanation was heard from the writer's wife. "She says she heard him in his study at night turning pages and laughing to himself. He enjoys the book so much that he isn't in a hurry to share it with the public." Richard Kostelanetz reports that an old friend of Ellison's has said: "Ralph is insanely ambitious. He actually writes quickly but won't release this book until he is sure it is the greatest American novel ever written." Ellison refuses to publish more selections from the novel's current manuscript not only because he is "not so strapped for money that I have to publish those pieces" but also because he wants "the impact of the total book ... rather than the published pieces." "Can you say when it will be finished?" an interviewer inquired in 1978. "No," responded Ellison, "I've done that too many times and been wrong."

RALPH ELLISON / 247 The writing slowed to a baffled halt, for a time, after the hail of assassinations in the 1960's—President John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy. With the assassination of a major political figure as the novel's central incident, the eruption of real killings "chilled" Ellison, for "suddenly life was stepping in and imposing himself upon my fiction." Ellison's conviction that his new novel must somehow deal with these real assassinations kept the book in blueprint: Much of the mood of this book was conceived as comic. Not that the assassination was treated comically, but there is humor involved Anyway, I managed to keep going with i t . . . I know that it led me to try to give the book a richer structuring, so that the tragic elements could contain the comic and the comic the tragic, without violating our national pieties— if there are any left. That Ellison was far out of step with the most vocal black ideologists of the 1960's also slowed his writing. When Haki Madhubuti (Don L. Lee), Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), and other black writers and social critics were asserting the national identity and the Africanness of black Americans, Ellison stiffly dissented: "I'm not a separatist. The imagination is integrative. That's how you make the new—by putting something else with what you've got. And I'm unashamedly an American integrationist." At Oberlin in April 1969 Ellison was given a brittle reception by black students, one of whom complained: "His speech was about how American black culture had blended into American white culture." Ellison had noted, for example, that the Afro hairstyle had become "a part of American popular culture" and warned the black students not to be surprised if whites began to adopt it. "The students went out screaming," a young woman recalled. "Who is he to insult what we wear? No honky could wear an Afro.

They're stealing what is ours." At a meeting after the speech, the black students said, "You don't have anything to tell us." One student said of Invisible Man: "Your book doesn't mean anything, because in it you're shooting down Ras the Destroyer, a rebel leader of black people." Ellison said that the book was written a long time ago but that he would not apologize for it, to which the student answered, "That just proves you're an Uncle Tom." At Harvard in December 1973 Ellison spoke about the philosopher Alain Locke as a champion of American pluralism. By then the mood on campus had changed. There were awkward silences when Ellison told the gathering that blacks are not an African people but an American one; yet the final applause was enthusiastic. At that point Ellison appeared to have weathered the radical tempest. By 1980 he could look back on those difficult days with irony, defensive pride, and some anger. Of those who contributed strident attacks to a special Ellison issue of Black World, a defunct black journal, Ellison has said. Safe behind the fence provided by a black capitalist, they had one big "barking-at-the-biggate" go at me. They, even managed to convince a few students that I was the worst disaster that had ever hit Afro-American writing. But for all their attacks I'm still here trying—while if I'm asked where is Black World today my answer is: Gone with the snows of yester-year / down the pissoir—Da-Daa, Da-Daaa—and good riddance! In Richard Kostelanetz's words, "One reason Ellison has not been able to complete his second novel is that all these distractions demand so much of his attention, as much to flush the ideological junk out of his own head as to speak about corruption in the social world." Black writers, Kostelanetz comments, seem to have a harder role to play than do white writers be-

248 I AMERICAN WRITERS cause blacks are cornered into commenting on sociopolitical issues that white writers can avoid. As if these deflections were not enough, in the late 1960's Ellison's summer home in Massachusetts was destroyed by fire, as were 365 pages of the new novel, an entire year's revisions. "I assure you, that's a most traumatic experience," he recalled, "one of the most traumatic of my life!" The writer Jervis Anderson has noted: Perhaps nothing more painful occurred in the working life of a well-known writer since Thomas Carlyle lost the manuscript of the first volume of his history of the French Revolution, a servant in the home of John Stuart Mill having used it to help get a fire going. Carlyle is said to have sat down, with astonishing calmness, and reproduced what he had lost. Ellison found it difficult to begin the task of restructuring, rewriting, and recapturing the fluid composition and insights of the first draft. The subtleties and rhythms of a first inspiration are almost impossible to reclaim. But if it is at all possible to overcome these problems, then Ellison, with his belief that difficult circumstances can almost always be made to yield benefits and victories, is the sort of writer to do it. Like most of his earlier fiction, the new work is experimental: now familiar, focused, compelling; now ill-lit, uncertain, frightening. "The new book's form," explains Ellison, is "a realism extended beyond realism." This is "a crazy book, and I won't pretend to understand what it's about. I do think," he adds, "there are some funny passages in it." The mixture of allusions is characteristic; images and narrative strategies echo Joyce and Faulkner especially, as well as classical and religious myth. And as in Invisible Man, popular American sources also energize the narrative: "I use anything from movies to comic strips," he says. "Anything: radio, ser-

mons, practical jokes. In fact anything that suggests new ideas for handling narrative; even jazz riffs." Startling shifts in point of view change the shape of events in sometimes surprising ways: everything depends on whether we view the action through the Reverend Hickman (black blues musician turned evangelist, whose voice and eloquence have earned him the nickname "God's Trombone"); Bliss (Hickman's adopted son, a boy preacher who abandons his calling, disappears, passes for white, and emerges as Senator Sunraider, the venomously antiblack representative from Massachusetts); Mclntyre (naive but sincere white reporter); Lee Willie Minifees (jazz musician who, enraged at Sunraider's racism, burns his gleaming Cadillac on the senator's lawn); or Cliofus (stuttering man-child with a terrifyingly clear memory and a way with words). Thrust into the realm of such tales as "And Hickman Arrives," "Night-Talk," "Juneteenth," "Cadillac Flambe," "Backwacking," "The Roof, the Steeple and the People," "It Always Breaks Out," "A Song of Innocence"—stories told as letters, fuzzy musings, tirades, sermons, or lies—the reader is forced to confront questions that Ellison says issue from the heart of America's condition as a nation still unformed. Where, what, who am I? What is illusion, what is real? What is black, what is white, what is American? This is fiction scored for many voices. In the 1920's, working the southern revival circuit, the Reverend Hickman and the Reverend Bliss deliver the dialogue sermon published as "Juneteenth." Blending with his mentor's trombone voice, Bliss's voice is a clear piccolo. The two trade phrases about the losses sustained by blacks during slavery, and the tragic recital swerves at comedy's edge as Bliss says: . . . Amen, Daddy Hickman! Abused and without shoes, pounded down and ground like grains

RALPH ELLISON / 249 of sand on the shores of the sea ... ... Amen [Hickman answers] And God— Count it, Rev. Bliss . . . ... Left eyeless [Bliss responds] earless, noseless, throatless, teethless, tongueless, handless, feetless, armless, wrongless, rightless,... motherless, fatherless, sisterless, brotherless, plowless, muleless, foodless, mindless—and Godless, Rev. Hickman, did you say Godless? Even so, laments Hickman. But in this sermon of redemption, blacks are shown stripped of African culture—but are reborn as AfroAmericans, tempered for struggle in this land of trouble and sacrifice. The trombone enters Hickman's voice as he says: Ah, but though divided and scattered, ground down and battered into the earth like a spike being pounded by a ten-pound sledge, we were on the ground and in the earth and the earth was red and black like the earth of Africa. And as we moldered underground we were mixed with this land. We liked it. It fitted us fine. It was in us and we're in it. And then—praise God—deep in the ground, deep in the womb of this land, we began to stir! Between sermons, Bliss chats with his friend Body, who swears he has sat in a dark room and watched white men and "bosses" and an entire railroad train shine out of a black box and move around on a glistening screen. The little preacher, who has never seen a movie, shakes his head and warns Body about the sin of false witness; but Body, speaking a broad vernacular, stings Bliss with a warning of his own: ... dont come preaching me no sermon. Cause you know I can kick your butt. I dont have to take no stuff off you. This here aint no Sunday, no how. Can't nobody make me go to church on no Friday, cause on a Friday I'm liable to boot a preacher's behind until his nose bleeds

That's the truth, Rev, and you know the truth is what the Lord loves. In Ellison's new fiction, antagonists include elementary-school principal Dr. Peter Osgood Eliot, "who usually looked no more human than a granite general astride a concrete horse," and school disciplinarian the Reverend Blue Goose Samson, "with his well-stropped head," who, informed of trouble, comes to class "dragging half a tree limb behind him" to whip the offender along with "all the boys in the first five rows." The teacher is Miss Mabel Kindly. "What's the difference," she quizzes her scholars,"between a multplier and a multiplicand ?" On a field trip to view the remains of a whale, she is ultraproper in manners and enunciation: "The whale, chill-dreen, is an ani-mule." Small wonder Cliofus dislikes school and prefers the easing music and language of distant, highballing trains: Miss Janey's right, though [he reflects]; those trains ease me.—Eeeeease me! What I mean is, they ease my aching mind. When I watch those engines and boxcars and gondolas I start to moving up and down in my body's joy and when I see those drivers start to roll, all those words go jumping out to them like the swine in the Bible that leaped off the cliff into the sea—only they hop on the Katy, the Rock Island and the Santa Fe.... Space, time and distance, like they say, I'm a yearning man who has to sit still. Maybe those trains need those words to help them find their way across this here wide land in the dark, I don't know. But for me it's like casting bread on the water because not only am I eased in my restless mind, but once in a while, deep in the night, when everything is quiet and all those voices and words are resting and all those things that I've been tumbling and running and bouncing through my mind all day have got quiet as a ship in a bottle on a shelf, then I can hear those train whistles talking to

250 / AMERICAN WRITERS me, just to me, and in those times I know I have all in this world I'll ever need mama and papa and jellyroll It is a similarly innocent boy, Severen, who by the 1950's has grown up to stand in the gallery of the Senate and to gun down Sunraider. Bliss/Sunraider is also from the South—his white-black, sacred-secular, revival-sideshow, city-country, downside-up boyhood eventually driving him to insulate himself behind the alabaster walls of jingoism and white-is-rightness. The novelist Leon Forrest has said that Bliss/ Sunraider emerges as "something of a brutalized metaphor himself of what happened to the baby democracy, tossed from hand to hand and born out of wedlock (a la Fielding's Tom Jones, to say nothing of some of the leading people in the U.S.)." In Ellison's vision, America is a 200-year-old child, a strangely wrinkled baby, a Bliss destined to choose among heritages. Some of Ellison's detractors charge that he dotes on the complexity of American experience in order to avoid speaking out against simple injustice; that he hides behind the grand banner of high art rather than "telling it like it is." He believes that the American melting pot has in fact melted and that blacks are as American— in some ways more so—as any Johnny Appleseed. This conviction, some critics say, obscures the fact that black Americans constitute a distinctive group with particular strengths as well as special troubles. As for Ellison's "complexity," it is part and parcel of his discipline as a writer. It is the novelist in him that insists on asking such bothersome questions as, "What, by the way, is one to make of a white youngster who, with a transistor radio, screaming a Stevie Wonder tune, glued to his ear, shouts racial epithets at black youngsters trying to swim at a public beach—and this in the name of the ethnic sanctity of what has been declared a neighborhood turf?" Ellison told a Harvard gather-

ing in 1973: "All of us are part white, and all of y'all are part colored." The novelist also insists on the cruel and tragic aspects of American comedy, on the blues side of black religion, on the upper-class elegance of the black poor, on the universality of what Ellison still calls "Negro" experience, and on the "harlemness" of the human condition. Many of Ellison's critics do not know that he was a left-wing critic and author for the New Masses and an advocate of black nationalism who has done his share of political stumping. Even now, Ellison maintains that writing novels is bound up with the process of nation-building: rediscovering, redefining, revitalizing America. The critic Kimberly W. Benston has observed that although their conclusions are often at odds, Ellison and Baraka have much more in common than is usually noticed. Both are concerned with various, crisscrossing lines of tradition that inform peculiarly Afro-American "responses to life"; both have looked upon an American scene marbled with ambiguity and contradiction and have sought "strategies for saving and improving the best aspects of the black self." Both see clearly that in the melting pot are ingredients unmistakably and magnificently black. In fact, with Baraka and Richard Wright, Ellison has been the most eloquent and influential spokesman for what, "on the lower frequencies" (Ellison's phrase), it means to be black and American. In Ellison's work one finds penetrating and yet lyrical descriptions of black life, insider's rare perceptions of the contour and meaning of a peculiarly American experience. Greater than these other writers is Ellison's sense of America's confusion and of the bleakly tragic barriers (underrated by most conservatives, liberals, and revolutionaries alike) against which we all struggle. Greater, too, is his faith in America's possibility of redemption and his awareness of the difficulty of

RALPH ELLISON / 251 securing true redemption from that most American sin, vanity. "Remember," he told a graduating class in 1974, "that the antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas. Or, as Emerson insisted, the development of consciousness, consciousness, Consciousness. And with consciousness, a more refined conscientiousness, and most of all, that tolerance which takes the form of humor." With his unfailing humor and tragic awareness, Ralph Ellison is an important voice in American fiction, a "man of good hope" whose work bespeaks his dedication to artistic craft and to the idea that writers are among America's most vital nationbuilders.

Selected Bibliography WORKS OF

RALPH ELLISON

"Flying Home." In Cross Section, edited by Edwin Seaver. New York: L. B. Fischer, 1944. Pp. 469485. "Did You Ever Dream Lucky?" New World Writing, 5:134-145 (April 1954). "February." Saturday Review, 38:25 (January 1, 1955). "A Coupla Scalped Indians." New World Writing, 9:225-236 (1956). "And Hickman Arrives." Noble Savage, 1:5-49 (1960). "The Roof, the Steeple and the People." Quarterly Review of Literature, 10:115-128(1960). "Out of the Hospital and Under the Bar." In Soon, One Morning, edited by Herbert Hill. New York: Knopf, 1963. Pp. 242-290. "It Always Breaks Out." Partisan Review, 30:13-28 (Spring 1963). "Juneteenth." Quarterly Review of Literature, 13:262-276(1965). "Night-Talk." Quarterly Review of Literature, 16:317-329(1969). "A Song of Innocence." Iowa Review, 1:30-40 (Spring 1970). "Cadillac Flambe." American Review, 16:249-269 (February 1973). "Backwacking, a Plea to the Senator." Massachusetts Review, 18:411-416 (Autumn 1977). SELECTED ESSAYS AND REVIEWS

BOOKS

Invisible Man. New York: Random House, 1952. Shadow and Act. New York: Random House, 1964. SHORT FICTION

"Slick Gonna Learn." Direction, 2:10-11, 14, 16 (September 1939). "The Birthmark." New Masses, 36:16-17 (July 2, 1940). "Afternoon." In American Writing, edited by Hans Otto Storm et al. Prairie City, 111.: J. A. Decker, 1940. Pp. 28-37. "Mister Toussan." New Masses, 41:19-20 (November^ 1941). "That I Had the Wings." Common Ground, 3:3037 (Summer 1943). "In a Strange Country." Tomorrow, 3:41-44 (July 1944). "King of the Bingo Game." Tomorrow, 4:29-33 (November 1944).

"Creative and Cultural Lag." New Challenge, 2:9091 (Fall 1937). "Stormy Weather." New Masses, 37:20-21 (September 24, 1940). "Recent Negro Fiction." New Masses, 40:22-26 (August 5, 1941). "Collaborator with His Own Enemy," New York Times Book Review, February 19, 1950, p. 4. "Society, Morality, and the Novel." In The Living Novel: A Symposium, edited by Granville Hicks. New York: Macmillan, 1957. Pp. 58-91. "What These Children Are Like." In Seminar on Education for Culturally Different Youth, Education of the Deprived and Segregated. New York: Bank Street College of Education, 1965. "Tell It Like It Is, Baby." Nation, 201: 129-136 (September 20, 1965). "The Novel as a Function of American Democracy." Wilson Library Bulletin, 41:1022-1027 (June 1967).

252 / AMERICAN "What America Would Be Like Without Blacks." Time, 95:54-55 (April 6, 1970). "The Little Man at Chehaw Station." American Scholar, 47:25-48 (Winter 1977-1978).

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL STUDIES Anderson, Jervis. "Going to the Territory." New Yorker, 52:55-108 (November 22, 1976). Baker, Houston. Long Black Song: Essays in Black American Literature and Culture. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1972. Benston, Kimberly W. "Ellison, Baraka, and the Faces of Tradition." boundary 2, 6:333-354 (Winter 1978). Blake, Susan L. "Ritual and Rationalization: Black Folklore in the Works of Ralph Ellison." PMLA, 94:121-136 (January 1979). Callahan, John F. "The Historical Frequencies of Ralph Waldo Ellison." In Chant of Saints, edited by Michael S. Harper and Robert B. Stepto. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979. Pp. 3352. College Language Association. CLA Journal, 13 (March 1970); special Ellison issue. Covo, Jacqueline. The Blinking Eye: Ralph Waldo Ellison and His American, French, German and Italian Critics, 1952-1971. Metuchen, N. J.: Scarecrow Press, 1974. Davis, Arthur P. From the Dark Tower. Washington, D. C.: Howard University Press, 1974. Gibson, Donald B., ed. Five Black Writers: Essays on Wright, Ellison, Baldwin, Hughes, and LeRoi Jones. New York: New York University Press, 1970.

WRITERS

Hersey, John, ed. Ralph Ellison, a Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: PrenticeHall, 1974. Kazin, Alfred. Bright Book of Life. New York: Dell, 1971. Kent, George. Blackness and the Adventure of American Culture. Chicago: Third World, 1972. Kist, E. M. "A Laingian Analysis of Blackness in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man." Studies in Black literature, 7:19-23 (Spring 1976). Kostelanetz, Richard. "Ralph Ellison: Novelist as Brown Skinned Aristocrat." Shenandoah, 20, no. 4: 56-77 (Summer 1969). Murray, Albert. The Omni-Americans. New York: Outerbridge and Dienstfrey, 1970. Nash, Russell W. "Stereotypes and Social Types in Ellison's Invisible Man." Sociological Quarterly, 6:349-360 (Autumn 1965). O'Meally, Robert G. The Craft of Ralph Ellison. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980. Reilly, John M., ed. Twentieth Century Interpretations of Invisible Man: A Collection of Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1970. Scott, Nathan A., Jr. "Black Literature." In Harvard Guide to Contemporary American Writing, edited by Daniel Hoffman. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979. Pp. 287-341. Stepto, Robert B. From Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979. Tischler, Nancy M. "Negro Literature and Classic Form." Contemporary Literature, 10:352-365 (Summer 1969). —ROBERT O'MEALLY

Philip Freneau 1752-1832

P

Hayden Clark, and Fred Lewis Pattee, who attempted to gain recognition for Freneau's "true merit," did not rate him very highly; and Lewis Leary's assessment in That Rascal Freneau (1941), that the poet's life and work are a study in "literary failure," has endured. Most of Freneau's work remains the concern only of literary historians and antiquarians. But the contemporary reader should not dismiss Freneau too hastily. He introduced much that is central to the development of American letters. He wrote during a period in the nation's intellectual life when it had begun to establish its cultural as well as political independence. For Freneau, cultural independence meant the creation of a new kind of artist and a new literature: a "democratic" artist who was both an ordinary member of society and a spokesman for it; and an "American" literature that focused on native materials and had an independent aesthetic—one that could give expression to the ideals of the new republic. In short, when Freneau began writing he envisioned no less than the creation of a literary New Jerusalem in America. Not surprisingly, Freneau's life and work have the excitement, but also the lack of finish, of the innovator and the experimenter. He was in and out of a dozen careers as he tried to find his place as a man of letters. He experimented

JL HI HILIP FRENEAU'S friends and enemies recognized him as the spokesman for some of the dominant impulses of their age. In 1771, while a student at the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University), he spoke for the cultural aspirations of his fellow students in "The Rising Glory of America," a poem written with Hugh Henry Brackenridge that predicted that leadership in the arts would someday come to America. During the war, Freneau was the "poet of the American Revolution" to his contemporaries. His poems of battles on land and sea commemorated American heroism and memorialized the dead. After the Revolution, Freneau spoke for the disillusion of many Americans, warning in his poetry and prose that the principles of the Revolution could be lost in ambition, avarice, and corruption. "That rascal Freneau," as George Washington called him, outspokenly attacked entrenched power and defended the common man, opposing privilege of every sort. Despite his influence, Freneau's readers did not consider him a great writer, and history has not redeemed his reputation. His contemporaries did not value romantic poems like "The Wild Honey Suckle," which is now considered his best work. Modern readers dismiss most of the satires and poems of action that Freneau's audience liked. Even Moses Coit Tyler, Harry

255

254 I AMERICAN with innumerable forms of expression—from the lyric poem to the journalistic essay—as he attempted to speak for the new society. In the midst of his many failures, he produced much that was successful: important poems and essays that are part of the shape of American literature. His work also is of historical importance, capturing the changing tones of the Revolutionary period. He is, in sum, a writer whose life and work reflect the ideas and sense of mission of his time, and one who moved American letters firmly in the direction of independence. Philip Morin Fresneau (the "s" was dropped at the death of his father) was born on January 2, 1752, in New York City, the first child of Pierre and Agnes Watson Fresneau. He grew up with two sisters and a younger brother in comfortable circumstances, the family having established itself in commerce and land investment in New York and New Jersey after the arrival from France in 1707 of Andre Fresneau, Philip's grandfather. Freneau's boyhood was spent in school in New York City and on the family estate at Mount Pleasant, near Middletown Point, in Monmouth County, New Jersey. He studied Latin and Greek and read widely in the family's large library. In addition, he had numerous opportunities to meet leaders of commerce and culture who were friends of his father. But his father's death, in October 1767, marked the end of this period of relative peace and of the family's financial security. In November 1768, intending to prepare for the ministry, Freneau entered Princeton, where John Witherspoon, a moderate Calvinist of the Scottish commonsense school of philosophy, was president. Witherspoon believed that educated men should lead society to improvement through appeals to "the simple perceptions of common sense," the ability to "sense" the truth that all people, to some degree, share and that is "the foundation of all reasoning." Students

WRITERS

learned leadership and trained in the methods of commonsense reasoning through daily exercises in declamation. At these sessions students expounded on many topics, but most frequently they discussed the political issues related to American independence. Freneau soon found himself deeply involved in these exercises and in political activity, declaring himself staunchly in favor of Americans' rights as free men. He especially admired the Reverend John Livingston's essays dealing with the "inestimable value of liberty." Inspired by Livingston's views, Freneau, together with his friends James Madison, Hugh Henry Brackenridge, and William Bradford, and using Livingston's "American Whig" pseudonym, formed the American Whig Society. Its purpose was to rival the Tory Cliosophic Society. In the ensuing quarrel between the American Whigs and the Tory Cliosophics, Freneau discovered an interest in political writing and a talent for invective and partisan debate. He threw himself into the quarrel with the Cliosophics, writing satires designed to "dash the proud Tory in his gilded car." His efforts culminated in a jumbled satiric novel, Father Bombo's Pilgrimage to Mecca (completed in 1770, but not published until 1975), written jointly with Brackenridge. Satirizing the Tories at the college and burlesquing the intellectual pretension, inhumanity, and social instability of American society, the work—coarse, crude, and unfocused as it was—did capture the antiauthoritarianism, quarrelsomeness, and insecurity of the age. Under Witherspoon's influence at Princeton, Freneau also took up the study of belles lettres. He learned that the cultivation of "taste" was important to the moral and social improvement of individuals and societies. Literature made an immediate "impression on the mind" and so raised the moral and intellectual sensibility of the audience. The classics were fundamental

PHILIP FRENEAU / 255 and he read Xenephon, Homer, Cicero, Vergil, and Horace—many of whose poems he later translated. He also read the English writers, concentrating on William Shakespeare, John Milton, John Dryden, Samuel Butler, Joseph Addison, Jonathan Swift, and Alexander Pope. Freneau was impressed with what he read. But in the climate of Princeton with its debates on "independence," he believed that America could develop a literature of its own. As he and his fellow Whigs perceived it, culture was on the move westward. It had traveled from Greece and Rome through Europe and Britain and would soon find a home in the New World. The literature growing out of this cultural movement would deal with American values and material and would express America's commitment to reason, liberty, and the rights of man. It would also capture the great moments in American history, moments that in drama and significance had as much to offer the writer as any events in Europe's past. Freneau's first attempt to translate the idea of an "American" literature into a poem was "Columbus to Ferdinand" (1770), a very imaginative evocation of Columbus' mood as he prepared to set sail for the New World. Freneau was fascinated with the discovery of America and with Columbus' venture into the unknown. In Freneau's mind, it was the great demonstration of the power of reason to bring about human progress. Columbus was the hero of this enterprise, and Freneau believed that he had never been given due credit for his explorations. (In recognition of Columbus' achievement, Freneau regularly used the term "Columbia" in referring to his country, rather than the more common "America.") In this poem Columbus, led by his desire to know something more of "this huge globe," begs Ferdinand to let him sail west. He knows that reason (which in Freneau's poetry is usually associated with responsibility, discovery, society, and philosophy) will

protect him from danger: he "dreads no tempests on the untravell'd deep, / Reason shall steer, and shall disarm the gale." Reason also leads the way, finally, to America "the mighty land." Even as he focused on American themes, however, Freneau recognized that before America could have its own belles lettres, it had to appreciate the power of the beautiful and the legitimacy of the merely fanciful. As Freneau well knew, most Americans had a deep distrust of any writing that lacked a purpose or a moral, believing it to be frivolous and even immoral. A Protestant by training who appreciated Witherspoon's form of Calvinism with its highly moral and socially committed view of life, and also a follower of Enlightenment philosophy, with its belief in the power of reason to resolve problems, Freneau was aware that there was little in either of these practical systems of thought that left room or toleration for the purely sensual, strange, or beautiful—qualities that for Freneau were the essence of poetry. Although he never developed an argument defending the purely aesthetic in poetry, Freneau showed his perception of the problem in "The Power of Fancy," the most skillful of his college poems and the first of its kind in American literature. Reflecting the "graveyard school" of the English poets Edward Young, Thomas Gray, and Mark Akenside in its macabre depiction of night life, the poem is nevertheless original in portraying Fancy as that quality of the Divine Mind which allowed it to create the universe, "this globe, these lands, and seas." Fancy is also one of the products of Divine Reason, although it has a will of its own. It is a "wakeful, vagrant, restless thing" that leads the speaker to the far reaches of the sun and stars, to the "prison of the fiends," and to "good and fair" Belinda's tomb. With its associations of escape, illusion, isolation, and death, Fancy is a powerful, attractive force, responsi-

256 / AMERICAN WRITERS ble, the speaker asserts, for "half my happiness below." Freneau, with his interests in politics and writing, had a productive and satisfying life at Princeton, and despite the threat of impending war, he and his classmates were for the most part optimistic. Witherspoon and the Princeton faculty had imbued them with an idealism toward America and its mission as the beacon of liberty and the land of free and equal men, and they fully expected to contribute to its future. Freneau and Brackenridge captured this spirit in "The Rising Glory of America," a poem written for the 1771 commencement. Expressing the Scottish moral-philosophical view that the human race was progressing toward a "millenium" where "Paradise anew shall flourish, by no second Adam lost," the poets hail America as "the best of climes," where the arts and science would thrive. Here would be a land "by freedom blest and richly stor'd with all the luxuries." It was a hope that—for Freneau at least—never quite fulfilled its promise. Freneau graduated from Princeton in 1771 with a love of poetry and politics but with little idea of what he was going to do with his life. The family circumstances were straitened, and he needed to earn his living. In April 1772 he began to teach school at "Flatbush on Long Island," but was so unhappy and unsuccessful that he left after two weeks, arousing the anger of his students' fathers, who, he wrote to Madison, "swore that if I was caught in New York they would either Trounce or maim me." He also contemplated turning "quack," or entering the ministry, which at one point he described as the "study of nothing." Indeed, little would satisfy him but the writing of poetry, and in 1772 he tried to establish himself as a poet with the publication of The American Village, a short collection of four poems. The publication was not successful. Describing the experience to Madison, Freneau wrote, "as to the main poem,

it is damned by all good and judicious judges and my name is on the title page, this is called Vanity by some—but 'who is so fond as youthful bards of fame?'" But Freneau's expression of failure was illfounded and premature. Indeed, his writing was at a definitive and formative stage. During this period, which lasted from approximately 1771 to 1776, he remained faithful to his desire to form an American literature made out of American materials, giving expression in his poetry to the emotional, political, and philosophical currents of his age. The American Village was one such attempt. In these poems he had tried to show aspects of the life of the ordinary American, whose common sense and independence were to form the backbone of the new nation. With his almost Puritan recognition of human evil and weakness, the picture Freneau gave was not overly idealistic. It was, rather, a varied and often a humorous one. Most important, the volume contains "The American Village," which, despite its dependence on Oliver Goldsmith's The Deserted Village (1770) and Alexander Pope's Windsor Forest (1713), is noteworthy in its expression of American feelings about primitive life, nature, and the rural tradition. This 450-line adaptation of pastoralism to the American scene sounds the note of conflict between the requirements of peace and contemplation and "cities and the noisy throng" that still resounds in American writing. It also expresses longings for simplicity and escape from care (the same vein that Longfellow was to tap so successfully a century later), which Freneau believed could be found in the rural life. Thus, unlike Goldsmith's poem, which laments the passing of the country village with the coming of industry to England, Freneau's poem celebrates the presence of the rural tradition in America. The country village provides peace and solid comfort, reflecting the prosperity of a predominantly agricultural land.

PHILIP FRENEAU / 257 It is a place where a man might pass "the slow circle of a harmless life." But this pastoralism is not unqualified. Perfect peace exists only in the imagination because men spoil everything with which they come into contact. Echoing Pope, the speaker remarks that "Men are more fierce, more terrible" than beasts of prey. Realizing this, he longs to be rid of his "distressful years" with "not one comfort left but poetry." Nevertheless, the poem ends with the speaker accepting his life, but turning away from the pastoral in search of "new scenes" to occupy his mind. In his poetry Freneau also gave expression to the political developments of the period. A libertarian with a hatred of monarchy, special privilege, organized religion, and any other means by which, he believed, the few sought to control the behavior of the many, he violently opposed the British, who, with their "vile despotic sway" employed all these methods of tyranny. In Freneau's view, they supported pride and privilege, vaunted their culture, manners, and religious institutions, while heartlessly destroying American liberty and peace. In particular, they had betrayed the American colonies by refusing to grant them the rights accorded to Englishmen. In July 1775, when the British began the siege of Boston, Freneau responded with a series of patriotic poems supporting American resistance. In these poems he is the "modern poet," not the pastoral one, and his angry tone is full of righteous indignation. After furiously cataloguing British offenses in the earliest of these poems, "A Political Litany," he concludes that Britain may "be damned" for all he cares. More somberly, in "American Liberty," his anger is compounded with the awareness that British treachery will cost American lives. Even as he is shocked that "Britons of old renown'd" can descend to "enslave their brethren in a foreign land," he calls for brave men to "warm in

the cause of Boston's hapless town" and "shew the world America can bleed." Although the patriotic verses are blunt efforts in a propaganda war rather than distinguished poetry, they establish Freneau as one of the most capable satirists of the pre-Revolutionary period, and they convey vividly the outrage and anger of the Americans. Three of the most effective poems are "General Gage's Soliloquy," "The Midnight Consultations," and "General Gage's Confession," which satirize the British through techniques of ridicule and irony that Pope had made famous in The Rape of the Lock (1712) and The Dunciad (1728). John Burgoyne, whose plays and verse ridiculing the Americans were so dislikable in their assumption of British cultural superiority, receives special attention in "The Midnight Consultations": Is he to conquer—he subdue our land? — This buckram hero, with his lady's hand? By Cesars to be vanquished is a curse, But by a scribbling fop—by heaven, is worse! As in The Dunciad, the British and Tory speakers in these poems reveal their own vileness. They confess that they act out of "ambition," "thirst for power," and desire for "a place in fame's proud temple." But they are cowards who let the common soldiers take the responsibility for the murder of Americans. Thomas Gage, responsible for the siege of Boston, has finally had enough. In "General Gage's Confession," which deals with his recall to Britain, he confesses to a friar who absolves him of his sins, saying "hell, you know, is only for the poor." Gage, his conscience finally awakened, dismisses the friar's "holy whining" and rejects the absolution. He compares himself to Pontius Pilate: "Tho' he confess'd and wash'd his hands beside, / His heart condemn'd him and the monster dy'd." In addition to The American Village and his

258 I AMERICAN WRITERS political verses, Freneau wrote many other poems during this period, most of which he did not publish until after the war. In their imaginativeness, use of American materials, and concentrated expression of the emotions of the revolutionary period, these poems represent his most significant contribution to pre-Revolutionary American letters. For the most part they express the negative feelings about the upcoming war that a jingoistic nation moving inexorably toward revolution was reluctant to recognize. The poems also are personal, reflecting Freneau's knowledge that the war meant inevitable sacrifice and suffering, and the possible interruption of his career. Such a poem is "The Dying Elm," which, as Richard Vitzthum has shown, indirectly expresses in restrained, melancholy tones, the sense that the heat of the world can destroy the poet's creativity. The elm, "companion of unsocial care," provides the speaker with "shades and love-sick whispers." If it fades "like angry Jonah's gourd at Nineveh" the speaker "thro' vehemence of heat" might, "like Jonah, wish to die." The same theme and mood inform "The Vernal Ague," in which the speaker complains that his traditional escapes into the "groves of half distinguish'd light" have "lost their charms." He prays for renewal "o'er the features of the mind" before "endless winter chills the soul." Other poems examine the premises on which the nation was founded and show that there was something tainted in the very source of its life. The nation started in violence, and that seems to be its heritage. In "Discovery," Columbus and his men keep looking for "new seas to vanquish, and new worlds to find"; but also "rove to conquer what remains unknown," spreading corruption and war, the "sad records of our world's disgrace." In "The Pictures of Columbus, the Genoese," Columbus—with the best of motives—nevertheless brings tragedy to the New World. He travels to understand "Na-

ture's bold design," to find "worlds yet unthought of," and to sail "far away beyond the reach of men," but his sponsors and fellow travelers are corrupt and greedy. Columbus realizes this when he lands at Cat Island, where he sees at first "sweet sylvan scenes of innocence and ease." Here "God and nature reign; / Their works unsullied by the hands of men." But soon he comes upon the body of a native who has been murdered by the sailors for what they thought was gold in his teeth. Columbus, disillusioned, cries, "Is this the fruit of my discovery! / If the first scene is murder, what shall follow / But havock, slaughter, chains and devastation " Sorrowfully, Columbus continues his explorations and ultimately returns to Spain, where he meets disgrace and oblivion, hoping that "freedom" will someday rise on the "plains" that he has discovered—he who "lived to find new worlds for thankless kings." In other poems Freneau questions the idealism of the Americans. Are they any different or better than other people? The answer is pessimistic in two poems written in the fall of 1775, "The Distrest Shepherdess" and "Female Frailty" (later entitled "Mars and Hymen"). Lacking in patriotic sentiment or moral indignation, these cold-blooded portraits of women's faithlessness make clear that some Americans had not become moral or heroic simply by virtue of being at war with the British. In both poems women lament the deaths of their soldier-lovers, who have been fighting the British in Canada. Mariana, the distressed shepherdess, is angry about her lover's "madness" in leaving her and, after reciting her grievances, concludes "Here's Billy O'Bluster—I love him as well." Lucinda, in "Female Frailty," is angry that her Damon, "with his soldiers, went strutting away." Thyrsis, who is not in uniform, successfully talks her out of her grief and wins her hand; he has, she notes, "all I wish for, but the lace."

PHILIP FRENEAU / 259 Like his fellow Americans, Freneau knew that war would bring death and devastation to the land and, like them, he did not express his fear of suffering and death openly. However, he indirectly made his feelings clear in "The House of Night," which could have been written only by someone who had suffered through deep conflict about the war. Although influenced by the poems of the English "graveyard school," particularly Young's The Complaint, or Night Thoughts on Life, Death, and Immortality (1742-1745), the poem is very much an American product, imaginatively exploring the impulses and fears that beset Freneau and his fellow countrymen as war impended. The poem, which Lewis Leary calls "certainly the finest poem written and published by an American during the time of the Revolution, and probably the finest written and published anywhere during these years," is a dream vision' that ingeniously reverses the pastoral tradition. At midnight, on the Chesapeake, the speaker, a poet "by fancy led," is blind to "the woods, in fairest vernal bloom." For him each "childless tree" seems to stand naked. To the howls of wolves, he approaches dark buildings where he finds no peace but he&rs talk of coffins, shrouds, and a tomb. He enters a building and confronts Death, who talks of "broad mouth'd cannon and the thunder-bolt" and seems to sneer at poets, like the speaker, "who by the laurel o'er him did aspire." A young man attending him accuses Death of being warlike and of looking forward to the Revolution, remarking, "Even now, to glut thy savage rage, I see / From eastern shores a bloody army rise ... / Rejoice, O fiend, Britannia's tyrant sends / From German plains his myriads to our shore." Death refuses to accept the blame: "Even Death abhors such woe to see / I'll quit the world while decently I can." Death dies, and the speaker, having imagined the worst and noting that "Dreams are perhaps forebodings of the soul," awakens from

his nightmare and is back in the pastoral world on a "bloomy morn." He is resigned to fate: "Content to die, just as it be decreed / At four score years, or now at twenty-three." Thus, as the war fever rose, and even as he poured forth patriotic verse for the New York newspapers, Freneau needed to distance himself from the battle. "MacSwiggen," published in November 1775, indicates that this was indeed the case. In this poem the speaker attacks a Tory poet whom he calls MacSwiggen, "patron of dunces and thyself the same." After angrily summing up the Tory writer's sins, the speaker suddenly pulls out of the fight: "Sick of all feuds, to Reason I appeal / From wars of paper, and from wars of steel, / Let others here their hopes and wishes end, / I to the sea with weary steps descend " Shortly thereafter, Freneau left New Jersey for the West Indies. From 1776 to 1778 Freneau lived on a plantation in St. Croix, employed in various capacities and making numerous trading expeditions among the islands. Although his life was superficially comfortable, his real experience must have been something like a nightmare come true. As he had envisioned in so many poems, here was a natural paradise, offering him beautiful scenery, fine weather, and an untroubled life. But his own country was at war and he was no help; and on St. Croix beauty coexisted with evil. Slavery, exercised even more cruelly than in America, poisoned the atmosphere, brutalizing slaves and owners. What Freneau had suspected and imagined in his poetry was all too real: man corrupted and destroyed whatever he touched. During this period Freneau wrote two major poems that reflected what must have been his sense of uneasiness about the war and his own absence from it. In "The Hermit of Saba" he deals with the impossibility of escape from evil, a familiar theme that had concerned him since "The American Village" and that must have

260 I AMERICAN had additional significance now that he himself was trying to find peace in a world at war. The message is stark and unqualified, the language moving. A hermit, living on a deserted island to escape the corruption of civilization, rescues three shipwrecked sailors. Believing that the hermit has hidden real wealth on the island rather than the "spiritual" riches that he talks about, the sailors murder him. The poem ends with an explosive interjection from one of the sailors: "Perdition on these fiends from Europe." Their great greed and malice "unpeoples isles, and lays the world in ruin." Clearly, Freneau was frustrated: slavery on the islands and war at home. Was there no "safe" place for a poet? The other major poem to come out of this two-year experience in the West Indies is "The Beauties of Santa Cruz." Replete with lush images of tropical flowers and suffused with melancholy, the poem shows corruption to be at the heart of life on the island. In many aspects an imaginative recreation of Freneau's experience, it opens with a speaker encouraging a shepherd from the "northern glooms" to seek "more equal climes, and a serener sky." Yet, with growing insistence, the speaker reveals the island's dangers and evil. One must be careful of what one eats and drinks. Some of the fruit of the sugarcane can cause the drinker to quit "his friends, his country and his all." One might be lured to his death through enchantment with the beautiful "animal" flower. Finally, evil people inhabit the island, and their lust for gold leads their "murderous hands" to oppress others with brutal slavery. Recognizing these dangers, the speaker still intends to remain but understands that his brother might stay in the North and "repel the tyrant, who thy peace invades." In July 1778 Freneau returned to New Jersey, where he found the land ravaged from the recent Battle of Monmouth. He enlisted in the First Regiment of the New Jersey Militia and was a "scout and guard along the shore." A few

WRITERS

months later he became a sea privateer, serving on board the Indian Delaware, the John Coustor, and the Rebecca. He had several skirmishes with the British and sustained a minor bullet wound. On May 25, 1780, his journal recalls, the ship he was aboard was captured. He was put on the British prison ship Scorpion, which was moored in the Hudson. Three weeks later, when he became ill, he was transferred to the hospital ship Hunter, in the East River. There he remained, feverish for six weeks until his friends secured his release. As he wrote in his journal, he returned home by the back roads, so debilitated that he feared his "ghastly" looks would frighten the neighbors. Though the war continued, Freneau's days of direct confrontation with the British were over. In addition to his military service, Freneau continued to pursue his interest in belles lettres. His work was welcomed in the United States Magazine, published in Philadelphia by Brackenridge and Francis Bailey. Attempting to establish a national magazine that would reflect the cultural as well as political aspirations of the country, they published Freneau's romantic poems such as "The Beauties of Santa Cruz" and "The House of Night" to appreciative responses from readers. Freneau also tried his hand at a play, The Spy, a treatment of Benedict Arnold's desertion to the British, but he never completed the project. Freneau also became caught up in the politics of the war and developed an interest in journalism as well as other kinds of political writing. He published editorials and satires of the British in the United States Magazine until that journal failed in December 1779; and, in August 1781, he accepted the editorship of its replacement, the Freeman s Journal, also published by Bailey. This periodical was far more political than its predecessor, involving itself in national and local politics as well as in antiBritish activity. Freneau was drawn into the battles and soon gained a reputation as a sple-

PHILIP FRENEAU / 261 netic, vituperative writer, harsh not only on the British but also on his American political foes. During his editorship, Freneau used his versifying skills to attack his enemies, and he wrote approximately fifty poems like "On the Fall of General Earl Cornwallis": What pen can write, what human tongue can tell The endless murders of this man of hell! Nature in him disgrac'd the form divine; Nature mistook, she meant him for a—swine. Typical also is "Rivington's Last Will and Testament," which was only one salvo of many in a war that the Freeman's Journal was waging against James Rivington's Tory Royal Gazette: IMPRIMIS, my carcase I give and devise To be made into cakes of a moderate size, To nourish those tories whose spirits may droop, And serve the king's army with Portable Soup. Perhaps disturbed by the violence of these quarrels, Freneau abruptly resigned his editorship in September 1782 and accepted a post as "Clerk, Postmaster General of the United States." He held this position for almost two years while contributing frequently to the Freeman's Journal In 1784 he began a career on the sea, sailing regularly to Jamaica; and in 1785 he became master of the Monmouth, his brother Peter's sloop, and later captain of the schooner Columbia, also his brother's. He traded on the east coast, stopping often at Philadelphia but spending most of his shore time in Charleston, South Carolina, where his brother lived. During this period Freneau continued to write poetry and also developed as an essayist, publishing his work in the Freeman's Journal and other periodicals. By this time his poems, especially those attacking the British or celebrating American victories, were widely known,

and he had earned the reputation as "the poet of the American Revolution." In 1786, he capitalized on this reputation and published The Poems of Philip Freneau, Written Chiefly During the Late War. The edition, more or less chronologically arranged, contained 111 poems, many previously published, and covered Freneau's output since his college days. The collection shows his overwhelming involvement with his country: only thirteen poems do not have explicitly "American" themes. Mostly satires attacking the enemy within and without, the poems demonstrate the breadth of Freneau's activity in the propaganda war of the Revolution. The work also demonstrates Freneau's skill as a poet. While many of the satiric and propagandist poems appear merely to be verse in an angry war of words, others—notably what might be called "battle poems"—recount American suffering and bravery against the British and are worth reading today. Among these are the bellicose and bitter "America Independent," the jaunty "Song on Captain Barney's Victory," the thoughtful and controlled "Captain Jones's Invitation," and the heroic "The British Prison Ship." At their best, these poems convey the drama of Revolutionary events and an appreciation of the human selflessness and courage that made them significant. "A Poem on the Memorable Victory Obtained by the Gallant Captain Paul Jones" records Jones's victory over the British ship Seraphis. It expresses Freneau's admiration for and fascination with Jones, and also shows the excitement and vitality that Freneau associated with the sea: Twas Jones, brave Jones, to battle led As bold a crew as ever bled Upon the sky surrounded main; The standards of the Western World Were to the willing winds unfurl'd, Denying Britain's tyrant reign.

262 I AMERICAN WRITERS "To the Memory of the Brave Americans'5 commemorated General Nathanael Greene's victory at Eutaw Springs, South Carolina, on September 8,1781. Devoid of bitterness and restrained in tone, the elegy elevates the battle and its dead from the immediate cause to a commentary on the tragedy of the Revolution: They saw their injur'd country's woe; The flaming town, the wasted field It is also a fitting reflection on the American soldier: "None griev'd, in such a cause to die—". And it rises above the partisanship of the war: Now rest in peace, our patriot band; Though far from nature's limits thrown, We trust they find a happier land, A brighter sunshine of their own. Other memorable poems in the collection, mostly meditative and lyrical, deal with the tone or "spirit" of the nation as the war ended. As his earlier poems had expressed the dark side of war—the fear, violence, and sense of betrayal existing in America during the Revolution—these later poems express the dark side of victory, capturing the sense of disappointment and failed expectations even as the nation looked forward to peace and to the great experiment in republican government. Indeed, Freneau shared this disappointment. An idealist and dreamer whose "Rising Glory" had predicted a period of political and cultural independence, Freneau in the 1780's was frustrated when the great experiment in free government seemed to be bogged down in political maneuvering; and cultural freedom seemed as remote as ever with the British continuing to dominate American literature. "A Moral Thought" (later entitled "The Vanity of Existence") captures this sense of disillusionment and introduces the melancholy tone that characterizes much of the later poetry

in this edition. The poem observes that "vain pursuits, and joys as vain / Convince us life is but a dream" made up of disappointed expectations. The observer, after watching the splendid show of light on the sea at night, remarks: But when the tide had ebb'd away, The scene fantastic with it fled, A bank of mud around me lay, And sea-weed on the river's bed. "The Dying Indian" also deals with disappointment through its evocation of an alternative view of life—the primitive. -It was an appealing view in a nation that occasionally wanted to forget its uncertain struggle to establish a rational, republican government and to escape its troubles through nostalgia for an ideal past or through romantic idealization of the primitive life. To some degree Freneau also indulged io this desire to escape the increasingly complicated demands of civilization, but even as he wrote sympathetically about the Indians' faith in primitive customs and ideas, he recognized that there was no turning back. Thus, while "The Dying Indian" evokes nostalgia for the simplicity of the natural life, it also suggests that it is based on illusion. The dying Indian might try to imagine what life after death might be like in terms of his hunting grounds: "What solitary streams, / In dull and dreary dreams, / All melancholy, must I rove along!" He also might convince himself that death will bring "some new born mansion for the immortal mind!" But an observer does not share the Indian's fantasies and, as the Indian dies, remarks matter-of-factly: "He spoke ... / Then clos'd his eyes, and sunk to endless sleep." "Verses Made at Sea in a Heavy Gale" (later entitled "The Hurricane") is perhaps the most pessimistic and powerful poem in this collection. Based on his reaction to a storm at sea while he was on a trip to Jamaica, the poem describes Freneau's feelings of helplessness in the

PHILIP FRENEAU / 263 face of nature's overwhelming power. Also, in its call for a new "Columbus" and for a "Pilot" to guide the ship as "tempests rage with lawless power," the poem symbolically suggests America with its lack of leadership, and it captures an underlying mood in the nation—the sense that fate and the future were somehow beyond human control. Finally, with its broad references to "death and darkness," to "a strange, uncoasted strand ... where fate permits no day" and to "uncharted territory" with "no compass to direct the way," the poem comments on the human condition and on the futility of human endeavor, concluding that a ship in a hurricane must grope alone: While mountains burst on either side— Thus, skill and science both must fall; And ruin is the lot of all. Although The Poems of 1786 sold well and established Freneau's reputation as a poet of the Revolution, he did not seem especially pleased with the book, which he said Francis Bailey had put together in a "strange way" while he had been at sea. Perhaps he thought that the collection did not represent his mature abilities as a thinker and poet. By this time, he was less concerned with American achievements in the war, which had been the focus of The Poems, and more preoccupied with the nation's readjustment to peace. This critical period was an opportunity for the country to establish itself according to the ideals for which the war had been fought. As far as Freneau could see, however, America seemed far from interested in forming either a just government or an independent culture. People seemed, rather, to be concentrating on getting ahead, taking care of themselves, and making money. These attitudes were discouraging to Freneau, who suffered from them on many levels. Politically, he was out of tune with the swing toward conservatism in government and self-ag-

grandizement in society. Personally, he suffered from misunderstanding and lack of recognition. The Poems had established him as a patriot and writer of occasional verse, but he certainly had not achieved recognition as a serious or major poet. The public praised his satires and light verse but ignored the lyrics, which in Freneau's opinion were his true poems. In 1788 Freneau published The Miscellaneous Works of Mr. Philip Freneau, Containing His Essays and Additional Poems, which in many respects served as a correction of, and complement to, The Poems. Here Freneau was the serious thinker and artist as well as the satirist and patriot; here he expressed his views on American life and values. Thus, The Miscellaneous Works is more revealing than is The Poems of the complexity of thought and the range of expression that Freneau had achieved by the mid-1780's. It balances poems and essays about urban life and society with those about rural retreats, primitivism, and isolation; poems about travel and the sea with those about poetry and the writer's life. There is also a consistency of view. Lighthearted or serious, melancholic or satiric, the majority of poems and essays convey a pessimistic view of the individual and his world, and show the degree to which Freneau had become critical of his society and skeptical of its optimistic reliance on "progress" and "reason" to solve its problems. A number of the pieces, for example, are about poetry and the poet's life in America, and reflect Freneau's sense that American society had failed to support its artists. Writers were certainly not the central and respected figures, the "new bards," whom he had envisioned populating America in "The Rising Glory of America" fifteen years before. As "On the Folly of Writing Poetry" reports, they were the least respected members of society and the most deserving of sympathy: "Of all the fools that haunt our coast / The scribbling tribe I pity

264 I AMERICAN WRITERS most." In part, the poems and essays point out, American authors suffer because of their nation's dependence on Britain. "Literary Importation" asks: "Can we never be thought to have learning or grace / Unless it be brought from that damnable place?" But in America critics and readers ignore poets, and moreover the Revolutionary climate is hostile to them. "An Author's Soliloquy" complains: "An age employ'd in pointing steel / Can no poetic raptures feel." Only satire is popular: Her visage stern, severe her stile A clouded brow, a cruel smile A mind on murder'd victims plac'd— She, only she can suit the taste. Other poems—some of them the best that Freneau ever wrote—express more general views of the human condition. In "The Indian Student," "The Indian Burying Ground," and "Lines Written at Port Royal," Freneau writes with lyric intensity and in a straightforward language well advanced from the neoclassical imitativeness that still characterized his satires, to show his awareness of the chaos, fragility, and irrationality of human life and of mankind's helplessness in the face of the overwhelming forces of nature. In particular, many of these poems deal with the sea, which as Richard Vitzthum has shown, had become for Freneau a symbol for the unknown and of the irrational power of nature. In "The Departure" a trip out to sea symbolically expresses the speaker's sense of failed creativity and knowledge of approaching death. In "The Lost Sailor" the sea represents loss, uncertainty, and death. "Poor Ralph," attracted by "masts so trim, and sails as white as snow," wants to leave his friend and go to sea, even though he knows: Tis folly all—for who can truly tell What streams disturb the bosom of the main, What ugly fish in those dark climates dwell That feast on men....

Nevertheless, Ralph goes, his "black ship" never to be seen again. The best and most famous poem in this volume is "The Wild Honey Suckle." It is quintessentially American, demonstrating for the first time in poetry how closely nature and the American process of thinking about life were intertwined. Since their arrival in the New World, the "settlers" had had to order their lives in terms of the natural forces that surrounded them, and by the pre-Revolutionary era they knew as well that their culture and values were tied to the land. As Michel-Guillaume Jean de Crevecoeur and others had shown, the new land had shaped an "American" character. Going even further, Witherspoon, lecturing at Princeton when Freneau was a student, had reflected Lockean thinking and commonsense philosophy, and had emphasized the connection between the natural world and the human. A knowledge of nature led to a knowledge of human life—from its morality to its art. "The Wild Honey Suckle," deriving from this tradition and demonstrating Freneau's capacity to use nature symbolically to express his sense of the meaning of life, draws its power from the restrained depiction of a "fair" American flower, which in its life and death demonstrates the transiency of beauty and of life— and the apparent purposelessness of both. This "comely" flower in its "silent, dull retreat" far from "the vulgar eye" is shattered with its exposure to "unpitying frosts, and Autumn's power." But the death of this "little being" is pointless: If nothing once, you nothing lose, For when you die you are the same; The space between is but an hour, The mere idea of a flower. (In a later edition, Freneau refined the last line to: "The frail duration of a flower.") Most of the essays in The Miscellaneous Works had been published previously in the

PHILIP FRENEAU / 265 Freeman's Journal, in which Freneau expressed broad-ranging criticism of American society. Some of these focus on American manners and values. Written in the personae of such characters as Christopher Clodhopper, Priscilla Tripstreet, and Robert Slender, the essays accuse Americans of being poorly educated, boorish, materialistic, status-seeking, and powerhungry. Witty and urbane, the essays are a tribute to Freneau's ability to expose the materialistic side of American life with deftness and grace. Others of the essays are very serious and deal with more profound reservations about American life than those that have to do with its poor manners and grasping, provincial ways. They are concerned with a philosophy of life and with human nature, asking whether man indeed has the capacity to shape a free and peaceful society. Perhaps he is so depraved that he would convert any system, no matter how benevolent initially, into despotism. In these essays the observations are made through the eyes of the Philosopher of the Forest (originally the Pilgrim in the Freeman's Journal), a figure new to American letters and one whose creation established Freneau among America's leading post-Revolutionary essayists. Something of a pre-Thoreauvian character who lives alone in the forest outside of Philadelphia, spending his time commenting "on political, moral, philosophical, or religious subjects," the Philosopher is a dreamer and a skeptic. In an age of rationalism, he emphasizes mankind's irrational impulses—the power of dreams and visions to bring to the surface some of the hidden truths about the human character. At a time when faith is placed in "progress" and human perfectibility, he broods on the imbedded evil in human character. While deists are arguing that the universe is mechanistic and ordered, the Philosopher sees chance and barely concealed chaos. In one imaginative group of essays the Phi-

losopher dreams about the beginning of creation and is led by Genius to Nature, who holds before him "a just, disinterested, benevolent, upright, and honest man." After showing off her creation, Nature takes the mold for this man to the Deity for his admiration. But the scene shifts, and the Philosopher sees "Nature's journeymen" trying to achieve her perfect creation. One journeyman, Firando, does very well, making two superb Africans, but his apprentices fail to do as well. One creates "a thief, another a bully and a wrangler, a third a dunce, a fourth an idiot, a fifth a monster of avarice or envy; a sixth a sycophant—and so on, almost without end." Because the handiwork is so bad, threatening to bring disorder to the universe, Firando and his apprentices create numerous snakes, "severe and perpetual labor," "extremities of hot and cold," and other hardships that will keep the new beings too busy surviving to cause trouble. Other essays of the Philosopher reflect on the manifestations of man's character in his dealings with others. With the exception of a benevolent clergyman who, like the Philosopher, lives in the woods away from the everyday bustle, the Philosopher finds only greed, ambition, selfishness, and other hateful qualities among men. He recalls, for example, a Swiftian-style trip in 1765 to Snatchaway (England), where he landed penniless after a shipwreck. Here the "people at large are the slaves of the rich and great; are saddled with kings, royal families, [and] lords spiritual and temporal." People in this city "are so miserable" that even their females "hanged, drowned, or strangled themselves." They were "intolerably proud, and ambitious"; they ignored the Philosopher; and he left as soon as possible. The Philosopher series ends with essays on America, the nature of fame, and the meaning of life. The essays point out man's history of injustice, his desire to get ahead, and his disposition to war. Perhaps "the bold and manly sen-

266 I AMERICAN WRITERS timents" combined with the wealth of America will help her to produce a nation where men will no longer "treat each other as savages and monsters." But such is the evidence that the Philosopher is skeptical about the future and closes the essays with the observation: ... I am really in doubt whether a man that is constitutionally a lover of fighting ... is an emanation from the all perfect Spirit... or, on the contrary, a mere mass of those vexatious, discordant, chaotic atoms which are doomed to be everlastingly at enmity with each other, till the soul of the universe, the great principle of harmony and beauty, shall again move upon the superficies of these troubled waters, and bring light out of darkness, beauty and regularity from confusion, darkness, and disorder. Despite the pessimism of so many of the pieces, The Miscellaneous Works was received, as the 1786 collection had been, as an example of Freneau's "humor, wit, and satire." His reputation for these qualities grew as "The Wild Honey Suckle" and "The Indian Burying Ground" were largely ignored in favor of reprintings of his lighter, satiric verse. From Boston to Charleston, Freneau became known as a satirist and writer of patriotic verse; an American "bard," the "genuine son of Neptune and Clio." What Freneau thought of this reception is not known, but from this time on he became less concerned with romantic poetry and more involved with political writing. Soon after the publication of The Miscellaneous Works he retired from the sea and in April 1790 married Eleanor Forman, the daughter of a New Jersey neighbor. He returned to journalism, accepting a job with the Daily Advertiser in New York City. It was a critical time for the nation and for Freneau, who soon found himself deeply immersed in politics again. The problem, as he

saw it, was that in the move to establish a strong central government—which had culminated in the Constitution and in the election of George Washington—the forces of conservatism had gained the upper hand. The nation, increasingly under the domination of the powerful and the rich, was in danger of losing the rights it had fought for. While the poor were struggling for survival, the privileged, joined together in the Federalist party, were consolidating their gains. But the Daily Advertiser did not provide Freneau with enough opportunity to express his opposition to the new government's policies. While liberal in its politics, the newspaper avoided controversy. Becoming impatient, Freneau considered starting a newspaper of his own. His plans changed when he was approached by his old Princeton friend, James Madison, to found a newspaper in Philadelphia, where the new capital was to be moved. Madison, who by this time was a leader among the Republicans, spoke on behalf of Thomas Jefferson and others, to urge that Freneau begin a Republican newspaper to counteract the Federalist organ, the Gazette of the United States, which was published by John Fenno, a staunch supporter of Alexander Hamilton. When Jefferson offered him an appointment as a "clerk for foreign languages in the office of Secretary of State" for $250 a year, a stipend that provided some financial help, Freneau agreed to the move. In October 1791, he established the National Gazette in Philadelphia. For the next two years, Freneau edited the National Gazette, becoming one of America's most outspoken and vituperative journalists. He threw himself into the fight against the Federalists, attacking them in editorial after editorial and criticizing both their politics and their characters. Identifying Alexander Hamilton as his special villain, Freneau opposed his proposal for a central bank and his system of funding the national debt—changes in the economic system

PHILIP FRENEAU / 267 that, in his view, would make the rich richer and defraud the poor. Freneau soon paid the price for his vehemence. He was drawn into personal and spiteful exchanges with his opponents, who did not hesitate to attack his character as well as his arguments. The lowest point in the quarreling occurred when the Gazette of the United States accused Freneau of being Jefferson's mouthpiece and in his pay. In July 1792 a letter, probably written by Hamilton, pointed out that: "The Editor of the 'National Gazette' receives a salary from government." It asked whether the salary was paid "for translations; or for publications" and whether he was paid "to oppose the measures of government, and, by false insinuations, to disturb the public peace?" Indignant, Freneau denied the charges, signing an affidavit to the effect that in conducting his newspaper he was "free—unfettered—and uninfluenced." He also responded in kind to his attackers, accusing Fenno and his followers df being in the pay of the Federalists and calling Hamilton and others names in verse. In "Addressed to a Political Shrimp, or, Fly upon the Wheel," he implied that Hamilton and the Federalists were "rats and mice" and that Hamilton was a "reptile" whose "venom ever spits in vain." He concluded that "they that on no Treasury lean, despise your venal pen—your canker'd heart." In a series of poems to "Shylock Ap-Shenkin" (John Fenno), he accused Fenno and others of lying, harrassment, "knavery," and corruption. The tone of the accusation is angry, the language crude: Because some treasury-luncheons you have gnaw'd, Like rats, that prey upon the public store: Must you, for that, your crude stuff belch abroad, And vomit lies on all that pass your door! One bright spot amid these adverse political

developments, however, was the political revolution in France. To Freneau, the French Revolution was the first sign since the American war that the forces of tyranny might be stopped and that a new period of freedom might yet be in store for mankind. America was not alone in the fight for freedom, and while it struggled to preserve its principles, the French were offering an example and an inspiration. As Freneau wrote in December 1791 in the National Gazette: "As a friend of humanity, I rejoice in the French Revolution, but as a citizen of America the significance is greatly heightened.... The fate of the two governments has appeared to be intimately linked together, and that of either dependent on the other." The great spokesman for this revolution was Thomas Paine, whose Rights of Man Freneau reprinted in full in the Gazette. For Freneau, Paine articulated the ideals of this new age, showing that reason and virtue operating in harmony with an ordered universe might produce a world where mankind could live in freedom. As he wrote in "To a Republican, with Mr. Paine's Rights of Man": Rouse'd by the REASON of his manly page, Once more shall PAINE a listening world engage: From Reason's source, a bold reform he brings, In raising up mankind, he pulls down kings. Freneau used the National Gazette to support the Revolution, even after Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette had been executed and the excesses of the revolutionaries were becoming known in America. He also opposed Washington's policy of neutrality when France and Britain went to war, arguing that the British had a long history of tyranny and opposition to freedom. Moreover, he effusively welcomed the new French ambassador, Edmond Charles Edouard Genet, to America in 1793 with "God Save the

268 I AMERICAN Rights of Man/' a poem written in his honor. When it became clear that Genet was violating American neutrality by outfitting privateers in American ports, and that Washington wanted to disassociate the American government from him, Freneau wrote a series of articles under the pseudonym "Veritas," criticizing Washington and his policies and accusing him of being the dupe of "British emissaries" and "mushroom lordlings." Washington reacted angrily to Freneau's opposition. He had neveHiked the fact that the National Gazette had served as a place to voice disagreements within the administration between the Hamiltonians and the Jeffersonians, and now he asked Jefferson if Freneau could not be curbed. Jefferson declined to act, noting that Freneau's paper "has saved our constitution which was galloping fast into monarchy." Far from being subdued, Freneau continued to criticize the leadership and so angered the president that Washington referred to him in a cabinet meeting as "that rascal Freneau." By 1793, Freneau had become one of the nation's most powerful spokesmen for Jeffersonian republicanism and French egalitarian philosophy. He had effectively argued for the rights of the common man and opposed the forces of "special privilege," giving encouragement to "the friends of civil liberty" from Boston to Charleston. In the process, however, he had earned the reputation of being a partisan, angry political journalist—"a mere incendiary," as Timothy Dwight called him. His readers considered him a political writer, not a serious poet. Whatever respect was accorded American poets was reserved for the "Hartford Wits": Dwight, John Trumbull, Joel Barlow, and David Humphreys. But Freneau had not stopped writing poetry, nor had he lost his commitment to an independent American literature. Bitterly resentful of the dominance of belles lettres by the Hartford

WRITERS

Wits—those "moulded pedants from the East," as he called them—with their servile acquiescence to British forms and style, he concentrated on verse that was determinedly "republican" and American: straightforward, plainspoken, and "democratic." Lacking the intensity and imaginative power of his earlier verse, these new poems reflect Freneau's social and philosophical views, in particular his growing acceptance of deism, with its emphasis on an ordered universe governed by benevolent laws of nature, and of reason, with its faith in man's rationality to improve the human condition. The poetry also reflects the influence of Paine and the French philosophes, especially in its emphasis on egalitarianism and its attacks on privilege and vested interest. This poetry is not Freneau's best, much of it being simply occasional verse celebrating some special event such as the arrival in America of Paine's Rights of Man or the anniversary of American independence; yet some poems do bear rereading. Among those written at this time are the ones that explore the life of the common man in America. They come close for the first time in American letters to a picture of the ordinary man that is neither romantically idealistic nor patronizingly satiric. Typical is the small landowner in "The Pennsylvania Planter," who farms independently of "party," "new-made 'squires," or "Mammon." Statesmen and legislators have nothing to gain from him and shun his "homely door." In "humble hope his little fields were sown, / A trifle, in your eye—but all his own." Typical also is the character in "To Crispin O'Conner," an immigrant settled in the west on a spot of land "that no man envied, and that no man owned." With hard work he prospers. But what a different fate he would have met had he remained in Europe: "Nine pence a day, coarse fare, a bed of boards, / . . . Slave to dull squires, kings' brats, and huffish lords."

PHILIP FRENEAU / 269 Others of the more interesting poems are character sketches of humble Americans who are suffering under the new administration. Among them are the soldiers of the Revolution whom the nation has apparently forgotten. In "The American Soldier" the patriot is destitute and alone, "too poor to shine in courts, too proud to beg." With battle scars and a wooden leg, he is lost in "the abyss of want." All that freedom has left him is "famine and a name!" Similarly ignored, the village newspaperman who gave his best years to the support of the Revolution slowly goes out of business. As described in "The Country Printer" he is the "guardian" of his country and its laws, and the speaker pleads that he not be allowed to fade away: From this pure source, let streams unsullied flow; Hence, a new order grows on reason's plan, And turns the fierce barbarian into—man. These poems appeared regularly in the National Gazette, where they did not make much of an impression in the midst of the lively political exchanges that filled the newspaper. But Freneau soon lost his entire audience. Widely read as it was, the National Gazette could barely support itself, and when the yellow fever epidemic descended on Philadelphia in 1793, Freneau reluctantly stopped publication, in October, and left for his home in Monmouth to reassess his career. Freneau's return to Monmouth, where his mother and sister were still living, gave him the chance to settle his family, which now included a new baby, Agnes, in addition to a two-yearold daughter, Helena. Though he smarted from the political battles of Philadelphia, worried about the debts contracted from the failed newspaper, and vowed, as he informed Madison, to pass his days in peace "on a couple hundred acres of sandy patrimony," he was

soon immersed in his chief pleasures, writing and politics. With type brought with him from Philadelphia, he set up his own printing press and published The Monmouth Almanac for the Year M, DCC, XCV. He also published a new collection, Poems Written Between the Years 1768 and 1794. For Freneau, this collection must have been a way of putting the last few turbulent years into perspective and of giving a retrospective view of his achievement as a poet. Containing 289 poems that span his career, this edition shows his steady movement away from "fancy" and toward the political and philosophical. The Poems also emphasize his humanitarian concerns with cruelty and oppression. Included, for example, are two previously uncollected poems from the early 1780's. "To the Keeper of the King's Water Works" tells of Freneau's experience in the port of Jamaica, where an official had refused his sailors water "while hogs, and dogs, and keepers drink their fill." The sharply worded "To Sir Toby" tells about the owner of a sugar plantation in Jamaica who enjoys his wealth while creating a living hell for his slaves. Emphasizing the need for reason, and espousing the tenets of deism, the majority of the poems in the collection deal with social and political issues—even the treatment accorded Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette ("Folly's sad victims, fortune's bitter sport"). Although the volume does not provide much new in the way of insight into Freneau the poet, it is the only edition of his works that he supervised from beginning to end, and for many of his poems, therefore, it must be considered authoritative. It was also one of his least popular publications and soon after its appearance in 1795 ceased to be advertised in the New York newspapers. In addition to the almanac and the edition of his poems, Freneau tried to support himself with a bookstore and with the publication of a newspaper, the Jersey Chronicle. Published

270 / AMERICAN WRITERS weekly from May 2, 1795, to April 30, 1796, the paper was "intended to review foreign and domestic politics of the times, and mark the general character of the age and country." Far from the center of political activity, the newspaper could do little but carry extracts from other newspapers, both national and international. But it was distinguished by Freneau's editorials espousing the rights of man, opposing monarchy, articulating the principles of American republicanism, and attacking Britain and supporting France on every issue. In particular, the paper was enlivened by a series of essays by "Tomo Cheeki," one of Freneau's most imaginative creations, who gives a sharply focused indictment of American life and values in some of the most trenchant prose of the post-Revolutionary period. With the simplicity and asceticism of the primitive and the reason and detachment of the philosopher, Tomo Cheeki, a Creek Indian who is in Philadelphia with thirty other chiefs to "settle a treaty of amity with the republican government of this country," observes the habits of the white men and concludes that they have "ever proved proud, cruel, base and treacherous enemies of what they call the uncivilized life." Selfishness, greed, and irrationality appear to be at the root of their actions. As a deist, who takes "the whole of this stupendous system to be a great machine answering some prodigious purpose, of which the white men, any more than ourselves, have not the least idea," Tomo Cheeki is impatient with those who believe that the machine was "designed solely for their use and benefit." But, stoical and witty, he does not yield to despair. There is some hope for the future. Enough trust still exists so that a man can submit to the barber's razor "without danger of having his weazon cut!" Bemused, critical, poetical, Tomo Cheeki closes his essays looking forward to his retirement to the forest to pass his days "at a distance from men." Although the Jersey Chronicle, with the

Tomo Cheeki essays, was popular in New Jersey, Freneau could not earn enough from it to support his family. Hoping to find a more profitable publishing venture with "the spirit of the National Gazette" he looked about New York City for a situation. In March 1797 he formed an association with the printer Alexander Menut and founded a new periodical, The Time-Piece; and Literary Companion. Perhaps in deference to his partner, the paper at first concentrated on the cultural life of the city, opening itself up, as it declared, to "political, moral, or other interesting discussion." It was sprinkled liberally with sentimental poems and letters mostly from women readers and contained essays of Freneau's explaining the principles of republicanism. But there was little political controversy. When the French Directory snubbed Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, the new ambassador, because it believed American policy had become pro-British, Freneau remained silent. In September 1797, Freneau took on a new partner, Matthew L. Davis, and the tenor of the newspaper changed. It became active in politics and soon attracted the attention of the Federalist Noah Webster, editor of the Minerva in New York City, and of William Cobbett, a Federalist who wrote under the pseudonym "Peter Porcupine," for his Porcupine's Gazette in Philadelphia. Soon the vituperation that had marked Freneau's National Gazette period reappeared. When Cobbett called him "a tool, a toad-eater, a lick spittle" for his past connection with Jefferson, Freneau said he was a blackguard and derided him in the Time-Piece: Ah—Peter!—Thou, poor lousy numps Who loadest little horses' rumps, And mak'st them trot and sweat, On sandy road Beneath the load Of trash call'd Peter Porcupine's Gazette. Unfortunately for Freneau, with the Feder-

PHILIP FRENEAU / 271 alists firmly entrenched in New York and Philadelphia, he was at a disadvantage. He complained that merchants were afraid to advertise in his paper for fear of the controversy. Others failed to pay for their subscriptions, and still others dropped them. He was convinced that the habits of greed and opportunism had destroyed the spirit of republicanism and that people did not want to be reminded of their lapse from the high standards of the past. As he wrote in "To the Americans of the United States": The coming age will be an age of prose: When sordid cares will break the muses' dream, And Common Sense be ranked in seat supreme. Calling his newspaper venture "the wrongest step I could possibly have taken," Freneau admitted failure, and stopped editing the TimePiece in December. Discouraged and financially hard-pressed, Freneau traveled to Charleston, staying with his brother Peter for a while before settling once again at Monmouth with a family now increased by the arrival of a third daughter, Catherine. It must have been a difficult time for him, not only because he was short of funds and had to mortgage and sell property to meet his bills, but also because he was without a public platform during a time when issues that he felt strongly about were at the forefront of national debate. John Adams, the new president, was determined to muzzle the press that had harassed him throughout his vice-presidency and had made his election so problematic. Congress supported him in his efforts and in 1798 passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, which, among other restrictions, subjected to fine and imprisonment any person who should "write, print, utter or publish ... any false, scandalous, and malicious writing or writings against the government of the United States" or its officers. Twenty-four Republican editors were soon ar-

rested, including Freneau's colleague Benjamin Bache of the Philadelphia Aurora, and John Daly Burk, who had taken over the Time-Piece. Freneau also was at odds with American policy toward France. He believed that the Americans were being duped by the British and the Federalists into an unwarranted hostility toward France. In his view, the Federalists wanted to assist the British in the defeat of France because they distrusted that country's dangerous faith in democratic values and in the common man. In 1795, he had vehemently criticized Jay's Treaty of Commerce with Britain on the ground that it discriminated against the French; and when the French responded to the treaty by snubbing the Americans, declaring the American alliance of 1778 at an end, and harassing American shipping, Freneau defended the French policy. He also stood uneasily by in April 1798, when Americans learned that three French officials, referred to in dispatches as Mr. X, Mr. Y, and Mr. Z, had solicited bribes from Adams' envoys. With the slogan "Millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute," the nation prepared for war with France. To Freneau, the war fever was more evidence of unprincipled Federalist manipulation and of that party's desire to crush the egalitarian spirit engendered by the French Revolution. Isolated, but certainly not wishing to be imprisoned for expressing his views, Freneau nevertheless found a way to make his opposition to the government clear. He resurrected one of his old literary characters, Robert Slender, from his Freeman's Journal days. In those days Slender had been a writer and a weaver; in his reincarnation he is a humble, honest, timorous "mechanic," who goes "unnoticed among the swinish herd, as the poor are generally called by the great and well-born." Wanting peace and quiet, he spent the Revolution "snug out of the fight." If anything, his sympathies are with the Federalists who promise leadership and order.

272 / AMERICAN WRITERS But he is led to question their principles when he reads an essay in the Philadelphia Aurora signed by a "Monarchist" (but written by Freneau), defending the imprisonment of Congressman Matthew Lyon, a captain in the Revolution who has opposed the sedition acts. The Monarchist argues that his "imprisonment and fine did more good to America, by inculcating a proper submission to our rulers, than anything that could be devised, short of cutting off his head: which indeed would have been wrong in itself, but would have been right nevertheless, for great advantages would have sprung from it." Unhappy with the Monarchist's extreme position, which nevertheless seems to be compatible with the Federalists', Slender writes a series of letters to the Aurora in which he records his simple quest for the truth. He tells of discussing his worries with his neighbors, clergymen, his cousin Simon, and especially his friend the Latinist, who with his classical learning might be knowledgeable enough to explain Federalist policies to him. Slender gradually realizes that the Federalists put some men, those whom the "President delighteth to honour," above the law, while others are denied due process. Being a "little fellow" whose "dependence for protection is on society," he "loves the law" and is afraid of the Federalist abuse of it. He also sees that he might have gotten himself into trouble by writing to the Aurora. Perhaps his innocent "questions" will be considered seditious. "God be praised" that at least he is not "an alien!" In a series of forty-four letters Robert Slender wonders about and queries Federalist policies, always overhearing or putting into the mouths of others views that might be considered seditious. For example, he manages through indirection to take up the issue of organized Calvinist support of the Federalists and opposition to the current French government. At other times he is humorously obtuse. While having "a pint of ale at a tavern," he hears talk of an

"aristocratic Beast let loose in the country," where it can do all the harm it wants because it has "put itself under the protection of the Society of the Cincinatti," the hereditary society of officers of the American Revolution and their descendants. He hurries home "looking on this side and that" for fear the Beast "would leap upon me from some of its lurking places." As he debates with his friends and neighbors, Slender becomes less fearful and more outspoken, finally becoming angry at Federalist toleration of the impressment of American seamen and its surrender to the British of Jonathan Robbins, an impressed seaman who had jumped a British ship. Although he has been warned by his neighbors that the Federalists will "do all they can to intimidate weak minded people, keep back returns, forge votes, and bribe voters," Slender decides to oppose the Federalists in the next gubernatorial election in Pennsylvania and to support the Republican candidate, Thomas McKean. In a stirring essay beginning "Oyez, Oyez," he calls upon the voters to come "under the banners of freedom, and once more conquer—let the word be LIBERTY and M'Kean." Robert Slender had finally become a free, principled Republican. Dramatic and lively, the Slender letters appeared regularly in the Aurora. In response to popular demand, Freneau collected twenty-four of them in a volume entitled Letters on Various Interesting and Important Subjects;... by Robert Slender, O.S.M [One of the Swinish Multitude] (1799), which Slender dedicated "to the Freemen, the Lovers of Liberty, the Asserters, Maintainers and Supporters of Independence Throughout the United States." The edition was very successful, going through several printings, but a promised second volume never appeared. This volume, for all intents and purposes, marked the end of Freneau's journalistic career—a charming, witty testament to his skill as a political writer, satirist, and prose stylist. After the publication of the Slender letters,

PHILIP FRENEAU / 273 Freneau virtually retired from politics. When the presidential campaign of 1800 got under way and his old enemy John Adams opposed Thomas Jefferson, Freneau remained on the sidelines. He was caught up in farming, his fourth and last daughter, Margaret, had just been born, and he was in financial difficulties and evidently was sensitive about having his situation exposed. In a letter to Madison, the South Carolina jurist Aedanus Burke noted that "Freneau is still in embarrassed circumstances. He is an honest man, and an undeviating Republican; yet utterly incapable of soliciting for himself." Mary Austin, in her biography, says that Freneau turned down an offer for a position in Jefferson's new administration, instructing the intermediary to "tell Thomas Jefferson that he knows where Philip Freneau lives, and if he has important business with him, let him come to Philip Freneau's house and transact it." Although he would not accept a post in the administration, Freneau was pleased with Jefferson's victory and the defeat of Adams, whom he called "the Duke of Braintree." Approaching fifty, he maintained a private life, farming and looking for opportunities in shipping. From 1802 to 1804 he was captain of his brother's trading vessels, traveling between New York and Charleston and to the Canary Islands. From 1804 to 1809 he farmed, occasionally mortgaging or selling portions of his property to pay his bills. Throughout these years he "scribbled verses" and in the fall of 1804 probably contributed letters under the pseudonym "Joe Bunker" to the support of William Penrose, Democratic candidate from Pennsylvania for Congress. He briefly returned to publishing in 1809, when he prepared a two-volume edition of his works for the benefit of Lydia Bailey, the widowed daughter-in-law of Francis Bailey, publisher of Freneau's earlier volumes. Entitled Poems Written and Published During the

American Revolutionary War, the edition contained most of the poems of the 1795 collection with the notable omission of many of the poems about the French Revolution. (With the ascent of Napoleon, Freneau may have thought that the promise of the Revolution had not been fulfilled and had decided to keep silent.) With its emphasis on "poems originating from the temporary events of the American War," as the advertisement declared, the edition clinched Freneau's reputation as the poet of the American Revolution and sold very well. He was, according to Joseph Lloyd, editor of the Pennsylvania Democrat, entitled to respect as "a man, as a poet, and as a patriot." For Lloyd, Freneau was, "in the true sense of the word, a useful poet." Despite this judgment, which for all its flattery perpetuated Freneau's reputation as a political poet, the edition was not exclusively political. In particular, there .are thirty-seven previously uncollected poems written between 1795 and 1809 that show that Freneau's best work in those years was either lightheartedly satiric or philosophical—certainly not "useful" in the political sense. There are also seventeen poems, some older and some new, pseudonymously attributed to Hezekiah Salem. This fictional character, a poor clergyman who farmed pumpkins in Connecticut, first appeared in the Time-Piece. He was, Lewis Leary believes, the final butt of the poet's long quarrel with New England, on whom Freneau "purposely stuffed off" the poems of which he "was least proud." But, in addition, Freneau gave him some of his most entertaining, such as "The New England Sabbath-Day Chace" and "The Parting Glass." Hezekiah is also "responsible" for "On a Honey Bee, Drinking from a Glass and Drowned Therein." In this graceful, mock-heroic poem, the speaker wonders what draws the bee to the fatal glass: "Did storms harass or foes perplex, / Did wasps or king-birds bring dismay— ...?" Bemused, the speaker bids the bee enjoy itself and drink, even if it means death: "Go,

274 I AMERICAN WRITERS take your seat in Charon's boat, / We'll tell the hive, you died afloat." Poems Written and Published During the American Revolutionary War also contains eloquent and restrained philosophical poems that express Freneau's deistic beliefs and are indeed the most compressed, intense statements of deistic ideas in American literature. Moreover, the poems reveal the extent to which Freneau had been able by this time to reconcile the evil and irrational in human nature with the deistic belief that the universe is ordered, reasonable, and good. In "Science Favorable to Virtue," "Reflections on the Constitution of Nature," and "On the Powers of the Human Understanding," the poet shows that reason gradually controls the passions, and he predicts that man will ultimately fit into "the eternal scheme." Thus, as "The Powers of the Human Understanding" argues, "To slow perfection moves the mind / And may at last attain / A nearer rank with that first cause " After the publication of this book, Freneau lived quietly at Monmouth, farming, keeping up with political developments, and writing verse inspired by special occasions such as the death of Thomas Paine or the celebration of the Fourth of July. He watched the activities of Napoleon and increasing American involvement in European affairs. When Congress declared war on Britain in 1812, Freneau approved. It was the familiar story: British tyranny threatening American independence. As the public anticipated war, he saw many of his Revolutionary poems such as "To the Memory of the Brave Americans Under General Greene" reappear in print. When the war was under way, he wrote some new verses commemorating American battles on Lake Erie and on the high seas. He also wrote about the British invasion of Washington and satiric verse about the ineptitude of both the British and the American leadership. In substance, the verses repeated the themes that Freneau had sounded in

the Revolution, the need to resist oppression and to preserve the freedom of the common man. A few of the poems appeared in print. Most did not. After the war, enough interest remained in his work for the bookseller David Longworth to plan an edition of these later poems. Freneau's reaction to the proposition was cautious. As he wrote to Madison on January 12, 1815: "With some reluctance I consented to gratify his wish, altho' I think after the age of fifty, or thereabouts, the vanity of authorship ought to cease, at least it has been the case with myself." In a subsequent letter he informed Madison that the edition was ready, again disavowing any merit for his work: "I consider my poetry and poems as mere trifles." But clearly he was excited by the project and looked forward to the publication of the book. To his disappointment, A Collection of Poems, on American Affairs, and A Variety of Other Subjects, Chiefly Moral and Political, appearing in two volumes in the spring of 1815, was the least successful of Freneau's editions, "falling," he admitted, "nearly dead born from the press." Although he attributed the failure to "party men" and to his political enemies, the truth was that "this veteran bard," as Washington Irving's Analectic Magazine called him, had little new to offer. Most of the volume contained the patriotic and satiric verses that the public had come to expect from him, but much of it now seemed old-fashioned and dated. The Analectic Magazine summed up his predicament: With full applause, in honour to his age Dismiss the veteran poet from the stage; Crown his last exit with distinguished praise, And kindly hide his baldness with the bays. As with all of Freneau's collections, this edition contains solid new poems mixed in with the conventional political verse. There is the graceful "To a Caty-Did, the Precursor of Winter,"

PHILIP FRENEAU / 275 thought to be written for his daughter Catherine. In gentle, childlike couplets the poem explores Freneau's favorite subject, the transiency of life. Listening to the song of "the evening Caty-did," the speaker wants to know whether it utters "joy or grief—?": Did you only mean to say, I have had my summer's day, And am passing, soon, away.... Playfully, the speaker acknowledges nature's power over the Caty-did: Nature, when she form'd you, said, "Independent you are made, My dear little Caty-did: Soon yourself must disappear With the verdure of the year,"— And to go, we know not where, With your song of Caty-did A number of poems are restrained expressions of Freneau's deism, demonstrating his capacity to use simple, measured language to put forth his sense of reconciliation with nature and his faith in the inherent goodness of the universal order. Moreover, these poems, among them "On the Uniformity and Perfection of Nature," "On the Universality and Other Attributes of the God of Nature," and "On the Religion of Nature," are the final and perhaps most powerful summations of eighteenth-century deism and rationalism before they faded into romanticism; and they are, in addition, eloquent testaments to Freneau's acceptance before his death of a natural, benevolent order in the universe. As he wrote in "On the Uniformity and Perfection of Nature": "All, nature made, in reason's sight / Is order all, and all is right." Although Freneau subsequently continued to write verse and occasionally contributed to periodicals, he was, as he himself admitted, "out of the Literary World." He lived out his re-

maining seventeen years in obscurity and poverty, facing increasing financial difficulties and selling every year or two another tract from the Monmouth farm. On October 18, 1818, his Mount Pleasant home was completely destroyed in a fire, which took with it his books, papers, and according to Freneau "some" of his "best poems." Although he soon moved into a new house, he was beset by poverty. He worked on the public roads of Monmouth to pay his taxes, and legend has it that he went from door to door in the neighborhood doing odd jobs. In August 1832, at the age of eighty, he applied for a pension for his service in the Revolution, but he did not survive to receive the thirty-fivedollar annual stipend. On December 18, 1832, he was caught in a blizzard on his return home from a visit to the village of Freehold. He was found dead in the snow the following morning. Freneau's death did not bring about any radical reassessment of his achievements. His contemporaries still remembered him as a "revolutionary bard" with an "acrimonious" pen, but few recalled many of his poems. In the busy time of the Revolution he had contributed where he could, and the nation had absorbed his work before moving beyond him. Nevertheless, he had made a lasting contribution to American culture. He had set a course for an "American" literature, one that recognized the place in its culture of the plain, the natural, and the humble. His call for independence in art as in life did not go unheeded in America. In the same month that Freneau died, Ralph Waldo Emerson resigned from the ministry of the Second Church of Boston and later wrote in his journal: I would be free; I cannot be While I take things as others please to rate them. It was a statement that heralded a new era in American belles lettres: it was a view that Freneau would have understood.

276 I AMERICAN WRITERS

Selected Bibliography WORKS OF

PHILIP FRENEAU A Poem on the Rising Glory of America. Philadelphia: printed by Joseph Crukshank for R. Aitken, 1772. The American Village, A Poem. To Which Are Added Several Other Original Pieces in Verse. New York: Inslee and Car, 1772. Facsimile reprint with introduction and biographical data by H. Koopman and V. Paltsits. New York: Hurt Franklin, 1968. The British Prison-Ship: A Poem. Philadelphia: Francis Bailey, 1781. The Poems of Philip Freneau, Written Chiefly During the Late War. Philadelphia: Francis Bailey, 1786. Facsimile reprint in The Poems (1786) and Miscellaneous Works (1788) of Philip Freneau, edited by Lewis Leary. Delmar, N.Y.: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1975. A Journey from Philadelphia to New-York, ... by Robert Slender, Stocking Weaver. Philadelphia: Francis Bailey, 1787. The Miscellaneous Works of Mr. Philip Freneau, Containing His Essays and Additional Poems. Philadelphia: Francis Bailey, 1788. Facsimile reprint in The Poems (1786) and Miscellaneous Works (1788) of Philip Freneau, edited by Lewis Leary. Delmar, N.Y.: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1975. The Monmouth Almanac for the Year M,DDCJCCV. Middletown-Point, N.J.: Philip Freneau, 1794. Poems Written Between the Years 1768 and 1794, by Philip Freneau. Monmouth, N.J.: Philip Freneau, 1795. Facsimile reprint with introduction by Lewis Leary. New York: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1976. Letters on Various Interesting and Important Subjects; . ..by Robert Slender, O.S.M. Philadelphia: D. Hogan, 1799. Facsimile reprint with introduction and biographical note by Harry Hayden Clark. New York: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1943. Poems Written and Published During the American Revolutionary War. 2 vols. Philadelphia: Lydia R. Bailey, 1809. Facsimile reprint with introduction

by Lewis Leary. New York: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1976. A Collection of Poems, on American Affairs, and A Variety of Other Subjects, Chiefly Moral and Political. 2 vols. New York: David Longworth, 1815. Facsimile reprint with introduction by Lewis Leary. New York: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1976. Some Account of the Capture of the Ship "Aurora." Introduction by Jay Milles. New York: M. F. Mansfield and A. Wessels, 1899. The Poems of Philip Freneau, Poet of the American Revolution, edited with biography and critical evaluation by Fred Lewis Pattee. 3 vols. Princeton, N.J.: The University Library, 1902-1907. Unpublished Freneauana, edited by Charles F. Heartman. New York: [C. F. Heartman], 1918. Poems of Freneau, selected and edited with an introduction by Harry Hayden Clark. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1929. The Last Poems of Philip Freneau, edited with an introduction by Lewis Leary. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1945. The Prose of Philip Freneau, selected and edited by Philip M. Marsh. New Brunswick, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1955. Father Bombo's Pilgrimage to Mecca, 1770, by Hugh Henry Brackenridge and Philip Freneau, edited with an introduction by Michael Davitt Bell. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Library, 1975. The Writings in Prose and Verse ofHezekiah Salem, Late of New England: To Which Is Added An Account of His Last Yankee Venture, edited with an introduction by Lewis Leary. Delmar, N.Y.: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1975.

BIBLIOGRAPHIES The most complete bibliography of Freneau's published works is in Lewis Leary, That Rascal Freneau, pp. 418-80. Marsh, Philip. Freneau s Published Prose: A Bibliography. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1970. Miller, Ann. "Checklist of Freneau Material in The Monmouth Historical Association, Freehold, N.J." Monmouth County Historical Association Bulletin, 1:49-57(1948). Spiller, Robert E. et al. Literary History of the United States: Bibliography, 4th ed. 2 vols. New York: Macmillan, 1974.

PHILIP FRENEAU / 277 BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL STUDIES

Adkins, Nelson F. Philip Freneau and the Cosmic Enigma. New York: New York University Press, 1949. Andrews, William L. "Freneau's 4A Political Litany': A Note on Interpretation." Early American Literature, 12:193-96 (Fall 1977). . "Goldsmith and Freneau in the 'American Village.'" Early American Literature, 5:14-23 (Fall 1970). Arner, Robert D. "Neoclassicism and Romanticism: A Reading of Freneau's The Wild Honey Suckle.'" Early American Literature, 9:53-61 (Spring 1974). Austin, Mary S. Philip Freneau: The Poet of the Revolution. New York: A. Wessels, 1901. Axelrad, Jacob. Philip Freneau: Champion of Democracy. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1967. Bowden, Mary Weatherspoon. "In Search of Freneau's Prison Ships." Early American Literature, 14:174-92 (Fall 1979). . Philip Freneau. Boston: Twayne, 1976. Cady, Edwin H. "Philip Freneau as Archetypal American Poet." In Literature and Ideas in America: Essays in Memory of Harry Hay den Clark, edited by Robert Falk. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1975. Clark, Harry Hayden. "The Literary Influences of Philip Freneau." Studies in Philology, 22:1-33 (1925). . "What Made Freneau the Father of American Poetry?" Studies in Philology, 26:1-22 (1929). . "What Made Freneau the Father of American Prose?" Transactions of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters, 25:39-50 (1930). Eberwein, Jane Donahue. "Freneau's The Beauties of Santa Cruz.'" Early American Literature, 12:271-76 (Winter 1977-1978). Forman, Samuel E. The Political Activities of Philip Freneau. In Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science, Series XX, nos. 9-10. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1902. Reprinted New York: Arno Press, 1970. Kyle, Carol A. "That Poet Freneau: A Study of the Imagistic Successes of The Pictures of Colum-

bus:' Early American Literature, 9:62-70 (Spring 1974). Leary, Lewis G. "The Dream Visions of Philip Freneau." Early American Literature, 11:156-82 (Fall 1976). . "Philip Freneau." In Major Writers of Early American Literature, edited by Everett H. Emerson. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1972. -. That Rascal Freneau: A Study in Literary Failure. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1941. Reprinted New York: Octagon Books, 1964. Marsh, Philip M. Philip Freneau: Poet and Journalist. Minneapolis: Dillon Press, 1967. . The Works of Philip Freneau: A Critical Study. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1968. Vitzthum, Richard C. Land and Sea: The Lyric Poetry of Philip Freneau. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1978.

SUPPLEMENTARY STUDIES Davidson, Philip G. Propaganda and the American Revolution, 1763-1783. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1941. Kolodny, Annette. The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975. Martin, Terence. The Instructed Vision: Scottish Common Sense Philosophy and the Origins of American Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1961. May, Henry F. The Enlightenment in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976. Nye, Russell B. The Cultural Life of the New Nation, 1776-1830. New York: Harper, 1960. Pearce, Roy Harvey. The Continuity of American Poetry. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1961. Silverman, Kenneth. A Cultural History of the American Revolution. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1976. Tyler, Moses Coit. The Literary History of the American Revolution, 1763-1783. 2 vols. New York: G. P. Putnam, 1897. Reprinted New York: Barnes and Noble, 1941. —MAUREEN GOLDMAN

Margaret Fuller 1810-1850

A

troversial school. For five winters, beginning in 1839, she offered "conversations" for the leading women of Boston, a series of meetings at which they were induced to think aloud. In 1845 she published Woman in the Nineteenth Century, one of the first American books analyzing the situation of women in her time. Summer on the Lakes in 1843 (1844), on her travels in the West, won Fuller a position as the first woman member of the working press at Horace Greeley's New York Tribune. She produced articles on social questions and a body of literary criticism rivaled in America at the time only by that of Edgar Allan Poe. While writing dispatches from Europe, Fuller came to know Thomas Carlyle and George Sand, and was close to Giuseppe Mazzini and Adam Mickiewicz. She became one of the first war correspondents when the revolutions of 1848 broke out. In Rome she was the secret lover of an Italian revolutionary, whose child she bore and kept hidden in the Abruzzi mountains. She remained in Rome for the brief days of the Roman Republic and directed a hospital when the French held the city in siege. After the fall of Rome, Fuller claimed she was married, but offered no details; and after moving to Florence with her family, she continued work on a book on the Italian revolution. Her political radicalism made Elizabeth Bar-

FTER Margaret Fuller's death, Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote, "If I wished anyone to do her justice, I should say ... 'Never read what she has written.'" And although Ralph Waldo Emerson judged her conversation "the most entertaining in America," he also said, "Her pen was a non-conductor." Countless others testify that her writing never matched the vividness of her talk, her presence, and above all, her story. Certainly the barest recitation of the facts of her life commands attention. She was born on May 23, 1810. From the age of six, Fuller was tutored so rigorously by her father that in her mid-teens she could match wits with the brightest men at Harvard. She is supposed to have said, "I now know all the people worth knowing in America and I find no intellect comparable to my own." She was no beauty, but her conversation was so clever and eloquent that her plainness was forgotten. Called "an exotic in New England," she defended and interpreted Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in a community scandalized by him. A plan to go to Europe when she was twenty-five was deferred for eleven years by her father's death and the need to act as head of the family. An intimate of the transcendentalists, especially of Emerson, Fuller edited their journal, the Dial, and taught at Bronson Alcott's con-

279

280 I AMERICAN rett Browning, her friend in Florence, call Fuller "an out and out Red" and imagine that her book was drenched in "the blood colours of Socialistic views, which would have drawn the wolves on her ... both in England and America." On July 19,1850, the wolves were cheated by shipwreck within sight of the American shore. Henry David Thoreau spent days on Fire Island, New York, searching for her body and her manuscript, to no avail. Such a life would compete for our notice with the work of a much more talented writer than Fuller. But more than the patent drama and originality of her life, the sense that it was at once enigmatic and paradigmatic has kept her legend alive—tantalizing, infuriating, elusive. Henry James, who heard of her death as a boy of seven, wrote of the "haunting Margaretghost" that would not be laid to rest, and indeed she stalks the houses of his fiction. Alger Hiss recalled in the 1970's how, when he clerked for Oliver Wendell Holmes in 1930, the justice retold his father's accounts of discussions of Margaret Fuller, long after her death, in the Saturday Club; Holmes summed up: "She stuck in their craw." Fuller was famous for her appetite ("Such a predetermination to eat this big Universe as her oyster or her egg," Carlyle wrote, "I have not before seen in any human soul") but was herself apparently indigestible. Hence more ink—from pens great and small—was spilled about Fuller than about any other American woman of her time. The elder Holmes may have drawn on Fuller for his novel Elsie Venner, and James probably modeled both the predatory and the mesmerizing feminists in The Bostonians on her. Fuller's best-known fictional disguise is, of course, the Zenobia who so richly displays Nathaniel Hawthorne's ambivalence toward passionate and intellectual women in his Blithedale Romance.

WRITERS

The first direct reading of Fuller, the twovolume Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli (1852), which intercalates her informal writings with the recollections of friends, resembles a rush to judgment. In this labor of love, the editors—Emerson, James Freeman Clarke, and William Henry Channing—came to praise Fuller, but also to bury her. For however rebellious they had been as clergymen, the duty of protecting a lady's reputation revitalized all their orthodoxy. (Emerson confessed, tellingly, that the project "might turn out to be a work above our courage.") These gentlemen quelled their doubts (while forgetting to destroy records of them) to announce that Fuller was safely married before her child was conceived, ignored her growing radicalism, and excised all indiscretions. But, with pencil and even scissors, they did further damage. Channing was probably the worst offender; as Emerson shrewdly discerned, Channing was "too much her friend to leave him quite free enough." In his hands Fuller's adjective in "It will be terrible for me to leave Italy" becomes "sad," and "I... am happy, yes I am happy here" becomes the sedate "I am contented." By the addition of domestic and religious pieties to her sentences, she is locked for posterity in a posture against which she had rebelled. Thomas Wentworth Higginson began reinterpretation of Fuller in 1884 with his exhumation of the woman of action. In 1903 the startling publication of the long-suppressed love letters to the previously unknown James Nathan generated new readings, chief among them Katharine Anthony's oedipal one in 1920. In 1942, Emma Detti introduced the friendship with Mickiewicz and fleshed out the background of Italian political life. Drawing on these and similar materials, Joseph Jay Deiss in 1969 offered a portrait of a sexual and political renegade. In 1977, Ann Douglas found, in

MARGARET FULLER / 281 Fuller's rejection of fiction for history, the exception that proved the rule of feminization of American culture. From our perspective it is tempting to read Fuller's story as a myth of a woman who lived two lives or who died in the early nineteenth century and returned a few generations later to complete her life with a modern critical sensibility. But when did the first life end and the second begin? With the crisis in her relations with Emerson, her feminist activities, her trip west, her move to New York, or her passage to Europe? All these were decisive turning points. It is perhaps more accurate to see Fuller as a woman of the nineteenth century nurturing a modern woman within. This helps us to think about her problematic writing. Sometimes this modern woman, wary of being trapped in her time by use of its language, pushed away from all texts, including her own. But intermittently the modern woman sought expression. Fuller's failures were marked by a belated romantic rhetoric, or an outlandish, semicoherent jargon of her own. Although it was often strained, her writing was also a straining toward a future, altered society, a culture that would mirror and validate her reality as her America could not do. Sometimes she saw lucidly that the language of modern feeling had to be invented and that deep cultural change must accompany such speech. Increasingly, as Fuller approached such change in her last years, she found words—and her writing became easy, eloquent, and forceful. In a defense of the excesses of her style of living, she once implied a related explanation of her writing style: "In an environment like mine, what may have seemed too lofty or ambitious in my character was absolutely needed to keep the heart from breaking and enthusiasm from extinction." A woman seeking free action in nineteenth-century America must overdo to do

at all, she argues, and that may be the best justification of her early writing. Our sense of rhetorical extravagance in the sentence diminishes in proportion to the credence we lend to her thought. More useful to us than Elizabeth Barrett Browning's warning is Poe's observation: "Her acts are bookish, and her books are less thoughts than acts." Both Fuller's life and her writings were a series of rough drafts, hurried experiments of a woman who knew the time was late or early—in any case short—for the place was wrong, or the people narrow; but perhaps, if she could imagine another way of saying or doing it, the world around would change to be capable of receiving it. Because "it" was there—the ability, the courage, the energy, the hunger, and the conviction that the self had more to know and feel and do than was given. Read together, her life and work then make a single text, an unfinished text, or better, a potential one—and certainly a criticism of the canon of existing texts, because the canon gave Fuller no help. She spoke, at her best, in another tongue. Although the criticism for which Fuller was most valued in her time was of literature, we now profit most from the critical light that her life and work cast on the situation of American women and on the underlying social assumptions of her time. As Alexis de Tocqueville saw better than any American, the two were intimately connected. Visiting the United States in the 1830's, de Tocqueville noted that, as a "puritanical people and a commercial nation," Americans had a double motive for binding women in conventional marriages: ensuring the purity of their morals and securing order and prosperity in the home. But as a democratic nation, placing high value on individual independence, they believed "They had little chance of repressing in women the most vehement pas-

282 I AMERICAN WRITERS sions of the human heart." The only sure way "was to teach her the art of combating those passions for herself," by placing "more reliance ... on the free vigor of her will," by arming reason as well as virtue. So reared, the young unmarried woman revealed a freedom of mind and action unmatched in Europe. But as a wife she was more submissive, dependent, dutiful, and conformist than her European counterpart. What wrought this change? The young woman herself, who, in the culminating exercise of her virtue, reason, and free will, chose such marriage. De Tocqueville further noted that American women "attach a sort of pride to the voluntary surrender of their own will, and make it their boast to bend themselves to the yoke, not to shake it off." Although he observed that this system might produce in young women alarming forwardness and in wives a cold virtue, he admired what he took to be their freedom of choice. He seems to have been seduced by the very sophistry he describes, which dresses up conditioning as freedom. On her visit Harriet Martineau was not deceived for a moment: "While woman's intellect is confined, her morals crushed, her health ruined, her weaknesses encouraged, and her strength punished, she is told that her lot is cast in the paradise of women." While these Europeans were noting these contradictions, Margaret Fuller, then in her twenties and without benefit of their analyses, was suffering them. Her problem was that of all American women who wanted to realize in their adult lives a concept of freedom that was intended to be simply a plaything of their youth. As de Tocqueville had seen, the puritanical and economic objectives that defined the American nation defined woman as well—as a creature destined for marriage, and fulfilled and useful only in the family circle. To conceive of women differently was tantamount to challenging the

assumptions on which the nation was built. Ultimately Fuller did this, implicitly challenging puritanical assumptions by her sexual behavior, explicitly questioning the economic assumptions, and especially their social and political corollaries, in her writing from Italy. Fuller's apprenticeship to this critical lucidity abroad was her willingness to be a freak in America. Poe's version is the most succinct; he said, according to Perry Miller, that humanity is divided into three classes: men, women, and Margaret Fuller. But many others, and she herself as well, saw her as a hybrid, a union— sometimes happy, sometimes not—of two usually exclusive tendencies: more often than not, these tendencies were "masculine" and "feminine." Both de Tocqueville and Martineau were struck by an American insistence, unknown in Europe, on differences between men and women. De Tocqueville noted that "The women of America, who often exhibit a masculine strength of understanding and a manly energy, generally preserve great delicacy of personal appearance and always retain the manners of women." Martineau judged sharply that "the prevalent persuasion that there are virtues which are peculiarly masculine, and others which are peculiarly feminine" effectively crushed the morals of both sexes. By their natures Fuller's parents reinforced the sexual stereotypes, and by their method of rearing her they contributed to her sense of being hopelessly divided between these stereotypes. Her mother, Margarett Crane Fuller, seems to have followed without effort the model of the "true woman" esteemed at the time. Although as a teenage schoolmistress she could keep rough boys in line, she seems as a wife to have submitted serenely to her husband's domination, to illness, to the bearing of nine children and the death of two of them in infancy.

MARGARET FULLER I 283 Her steady faith and confident acceptance of her lot seem to have instilled idealism in her children. Individuality and strong, even controversial, behavior seem to have been constant traits of the Fullers, who had been in Massachusetts since 1629. Timothy Fuller, Margaret's father, worked his way through Harvard, where he was demoted to second place in his class because of his participation in a student rebellion. Serving two terms in Congress before becoming Speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, he opposed the expatriation of the Seminoles and the Missouri Compromise. In his love for literature of the French Revolution and his Jeffersonian principles, and in his loyal and unpolitic support of John Quincy Adams for president as late as 1832, he showed his political independence. These political stances, his Unitarian faith, and his abrasive personality made him something of a renegade in Cambridge until political discouragement drove him to the country to pursue farming, as his father had done. When, at the introspective age of thirty, Fuller came to write an autobiographical romance (later printed in the Memoirs), she gave an ideal and generalized account of her parents that connects the woman with physical nature, emotionality, spirituality, and idealism, and the man with the social world, intellectual discipline, and practicality. The tendency of the daughter to learn to follow the mother was distorted in Fuller's case by the unusually great influence of her father and the unusually retiring role of her mother. Though the two women grew closer after Timothy Fuller's death, the mother appears to have been a loving but somewhat distant figure on the child's landscape. Timothy, a scholar who "grudged the hours nature demands for sleep," was spurred by the precocity of his eldest child to initiate a rigorous

program of classical education when she was six. The curriculum was not unusual for the sons of professors, but was unknown for girls in this age of sentimental education, and—except in cases like John Stuart Mill's—it was rarely administered by fathers. He quizzed Margaret in Latin and English grammar until long past her bedtime; he rejected apology, hesitation, qualification, or circumlocution in her performance, effectively cutting her off from prevailing styles of female discourse. A few years later, as Paula Blanchard has demonstrated, he realized the cost in social terms of his one-sided nurture, and urged her to be less bold in speech, less obsessed with books, and more concerned with posture and decorous manners. It was too late; taking stock of her assets at the age of twelve, this daughter had resolved to be "bright and ugly." The intellectual and psychological effects of an education so odd, so strenuous, and so tied to paternal approval and love are incalculable. Fuller herself repeatedly revised her estimate. At thirty she wrote that the paternal influence whetted her appetite for heroic action and realism, for meeting the challenges of the actual world with disciplined will—all the values she associated with the Romans, whose literature and culture Timothy, as a true son of the American Revolution, chiefly stressed. But her expression of her relation to the Romans was problematic. "I kept their statues as belonging to the hall of my ancestors, and loved to conquer obstacles, and fed my youth and strength for their sake," she wrote, quite as if a New England girl might grow up to be a Roman hero. On the negative side Fuller felt that her father's nocturnal drills caused her to suffer as a child from terrifying nightmares and later from "continual headache, weakness, and nervous affections, of all kinds." A deeper distortion

284 I AMERICAN stemmed from his imposing the values of intellect, will, and action completely at the expense of those related to feeling—imagination, passion, and receptivity to nature. "The child fed with meat instead of milk becomes too soon mature," she observed sententiously. "With me, much of life was devoured in the bud." The rigid perfectionism of the Romans and of Timothy Fuller's nurture was later counterbalanced in some measure by Margaret's discovery of the Greeks' love of beauty and of the moral and psychological realism of Moliere, Miguel de Cervantes, and especially William Shakespeare. Of the Greeks, she wrote in her autobiographical romance that she "loved to creep from amid the Roman pikes to lie beneath this great vine, and see the smiling and serene shapes go by I loved to get away from the hum of the forum, and mailed clang of Roman speech, to these shifting shows of nature, these Gods and Nymphs born of the sunbeam, the wave, the shadows on the hill." It is striking that, in Fuller's imagery, the classical world is bisected by gender into male Rome (vertical pikes, "mail," the forum) and female Greece (horizontal vine, nymphs, nature). But it is hardly surprising, for by the same account her earliest refuge from the father's books was the seclusion of the garden, her mother's cherished work place. There she would indulge all afternoon in childish and passionate dreaminess. Understandably, then, Fuller came to feel divided into separate selves. But she turns inside out the model for female complexity, noted by de Tocqueville, in which the "masculine" gifts and impulses hide within a conventionally "feminine" exterior. For Fuller, as the side nurtured by her father came to be public, that associated with her mother became private, even invisible: His influence on me was great, and opposed to the natural unfolding of my character, which

WRITERS

was fervent, of strong grasp and disposed to infatuation, and self-forgetfulness. He made the common prose world so present to me, that my natural bias was controlled.... My own world sank deep within But my true life was only the dearer that it was secluded and veiled over by a thick curtain of available intellect, and that coarse but wearable stuff worn by the ages— Common Sense. Well into her thirties, Fuller remained ambivalent about this dividing and repressive curtain knit in childhood. Finding her vocation and finding herself would depend on her tearing down the curtain. In addition, she would have to learn to reject the notions of masculine and feminine that were locked into the culture, for as long as she described her problem in these terms, she conspired in delaying her progress to selfhood and freedom. By 1824, Timothy Fuller was anxious enough about Margaret to send her, against her will, to acquire "female propriety" at the Misses Prescott's School in Groton, Massachusetts. The intimacy Fuller developed with the headmistress, Susan Prescott, had the desired effect of making her want—sometimes—womanly "tact and polish" to complement the genius she took for granted. But back at home in 1825 she found that intellectual ability was always her steadiest resource. She noted that the study she pursued on her own filled her with a "gladiatorial disposition" that prevented her enjoying casual society. Society came late and not casually to this lonely adolescent. Yet in the yeasty Cambridge of the late 1820's, full of brilliant talkers and dedicated to the romantic cult of friendship, Margaret Fuller's arrival was a spectacular event. It was only by approaching people as a gladiator that she could, paradoxically, win them and lower her own guard. Many were ini-

MARGARET FULLER / 285 tially repelled by this long-necked, robust young woman with eyes alternately squinting and dilating, by her dominating erudition and scathing wit. William Henry Channing confessed that he avoided one "so armed from head to foot in saucy sprightliness," and Emerson underscored the martial image: "The men thought she carried too many guns." For an extraordinary number of men and women, though, closer acquaintance with her, especially tete-a-tete, broke down their resistance. Thus, Sarah Freeman Clarke wrote: "Though she spoke rudely searching words, and told you startling truths, though she broke down your little shams and defenses, you felt exhilarated by the compliment of being found out." Women like Sarah Clarke felt Fuller's assault on their reserves and pretenses, but some of the men apparently were wounded in their vanity and in their sense of what was proper to the "gentler sex." Once Fuller as warrior had broken through the shields of privacy or prejudice, she could lay down arms and disclose her unusual talent for empathic understanding. Doubtless she was exacting and often difficult in this second phase. But her friendship was rare and original, for it drew on the provinces, as then understood, of both sexes; they were united for her in Goethe's phrase that she inscribed in a friend's journal: "extraordinary generous seeking." With precocious psychological understanding, she seemed to know that the secret, even shameful, aspects of the personality had to be exposed and accepted for the integrated—the word then was "ideal"—self to flourish. Sarah's brother, James Freeman Clarke, recalled that Fuller's conversation could uniquely "make an epoch in one's life." He wrote to her, "What should I ever have been but for you? . . . You gave me to myself." "She was, indeed, the Friend. This was her vocation," pronounced Channing in the Memoirs, with all the finality of an epitaph. (Indeed,

it was on Fuller as friend that the three editors of the Memoirs wrote most comfortably and extensively.) Could friendship have been the vocation she sought? Certainly friendship was for her an object of most intense study, and character and destiny were as worthy of analysis as great literature. "Her wit, her insight into characters," Elizabeth Hoar wrote to a friend, are "such that she seems to read them aloud to you as if they were printed books." Sometimes the critique needed revision, as when Fuller thought in 1839 that she had underrated Bronson Alcott: "I will begin him again and read by faith awhile." Certainly she tried to make of friendship an art that would exploit all her resources. But as friendship approached vocation for Fuller, it had to meet so many conditions and needs—it had almost to feed on crisis—that both friendship and Fuller were endangered. This was a hard lesson, and in her thirties she would have to study it twice. It is small wonder that women who welcomed her intimacy often did so with the quality of reasoned courage disclosed by the odd locution of Sarah Shaw nearly four decades after Fuller's death: "I feel proud that I had the sense to love and venerate her as I did." To be Fuller's friend took a certain daring. The volatile young poet William Ellery Channing (William Henry's cousin, who married Fuller's sister, Ellen) made the shrewdest complaint. "I feel strongly attracted towards you, but there is a drawback in my mind," he told her, as she recorded it. "You will always -be wanting to grow forward, now I like to grow backward too. You are too ideal. Ideal people anticipate their lives, and they make themselves and every body around them restless, by always being beforehand with themselves." He also accused her of lacking spontaneity in group conversation, of being "disciplined, artificial." Touching Fuller's weakness, Ellery also touched her strength. Fuller had not only to re-

286 I AMERICAN sist models of American women, she had also to invent herself. It is tempting to think of her poised on a threshold, projecting into a room an image of what woman should be, then walking in and entering the image. Invention can be creation only if the atmosphere is receptive, the ground fertile; on barren land it is artifice. Whether Fuller's inventions were creative or artificial depended partly on the society she met and partly on her ability to transform it. Like the enthusiastic thinkers who surrounded her, she put too much stock for too long in the personal power of transformation. Fuller welcomed Ellery's objections, feeling that she must "learn from them all," but added, "I must not let them disturb me." She was more willing to be ridiculous than to abandon her quest: "I will bear the pain of imperfection, but not of doubt." But she found no one who could do for her what she had done for James Clarke—give her to herself. Friendship could not be her vocation; to identify what could, she needed a mentor and a guide. By the age of twenty, Fuller no longer cut such an outlandish figure. Eliza Farrar, the Cambridge matron who later wrote The Young Lady's Friend, had taken her in hand and taught her to lose weight and master the manners, coiffure, and dress of a young lady. Fuller seems not to have minded, but she had little expectation of the fate meant to accompany the fashion. She had left the Prescotts' School, as Blanchard points out, expecting to enter a "life of letters." Granted, she could feel brokenhearted when a delightful cousin failed to notice her passion and married someone else. And doubtless she smarted when James Clarke confided to her his attraction to one deferential young woman after another. (In a journal she confesses: "Of a disposition that requires the most refined, the most exalted tenderness, without charms to inspire it. Poor Mignon!") Al-

WRITERS

though she wanted love, she may not have wanted marriage. She thought the curse of loneliness "nothing compared with that of those who have entered into relations but not made them real." In her late teens Fuller enjoyed a rich "life of letters" with a small circle of friends, some from the Harvard class of 1829. Together they read Charles Lamb, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Carlyle. Influenced by the last two and by Henry Hedge's enthusiastic invitations to share his unique collection of books from Germany, Clarke and Fuller read Friedrich von Schiller and Goethe together. At twenty-one she wrote that, feeling oppressed by emotional disappointments, family cares, and social obligations, "I took up the study of German, and my progress was like the rebound of a string pressed almost to bursting." The prospect of reading, translating, and interpreting German literature came to Fuller's rescue at a time when her circle was breaking up and the young graduates were beginning their careers. She would soon have to draw heavily on Goethe's creed of self-sufficiency, for in 1833, disillusioned with political life, her father resolved to retire from her beloved Cambridge to a farm in her detested Groton. There she had the tutoring, five to eight hours daily, of her four youngest siblings added to an unusually onerous share of women's work—for her mother, grandmother, and brothers were often ill, and an infant brother died in her arms. In her "spare" time Fuller read at a prodigious rate in German, French, and English romanticism, European and American history, architecture, and astronomy—and discussed what she had read in her growing correspondence. In Groton, Fuller conceived the bold idea of writing a life of Goethe, who had died in 1832 and was not merely unread in America but shouted down for his monstrous worldliness by most of the enlightened men she knew. For

MARGARET FULLER / 287 Fuller, Goethe expressed as no one else did her desire for knowledge gained through passionate, broad, and subtle experience; and the wisdom of his female characters inspired her. At the age of twenty-two, she wrote: "How often I have thought, if I could see Goethe, and tell him my state of mind, he would support and guide me." Her dream of a biography was thus at once generous and self-validating. She felt that only she could write it. Ironically, she thought she would have to go to Europe to learn the details of the private life of the writer who had so liberated her spirit, for no American scholar who had met Goethe would share them with a lady. That problem was flanked by another that became acute when Fuller tried to write. If American men would not supply the matter, American women of course could not provide the model for Fuller as writer. The learned women of New England could not help a woman inspired by Aspasia, the courtesan who was the mistress of Pericles, noted for bold will and intellect; her description of Aspasia's portrait as marked by "the voluptuousness of intellect" would surely have jarred their still puritanical imaginations. Fuller noted wryly that no Muse came to her, a woman, and yet she was dogged by migraine; "It is but a bad head—as bad as if I were a great man!" But she was not a man, and only the confirming example of a woman of letters could help to free her from the psychosomatic part of her symptoms. All the examples were in Europe, for there the institution of the salon in particular had long given women of intelligence, wit, and sympathy an influential role with men of letters and politics, a role unknown in America. In her sixteenth year Fuller had been attracted to Madame de Stael, not by her political audacity but by her large spirit; the brilliance of her conversation, her intense friendships, and the writing that captured the imagination of a generation amply compensated for her plain appearance.

In a few years Fuller's contemporaries would compare her with Germaine de Stael and also with the heroine of the Frenchwoman's popular romance, Corinne, or Italy, for Fuller too was given to rushes of magnetic, extemporaneous speech. Actually, Corinne's rejection of England for Italy—that is, for genius, selfexpression freed of convention—provides a strong and prophetic link to Fuller. Corinne's inability to sustain her independence must have disappointed Fuller, and she outgrew de Stael and eventually disparaged her vanity and sentimentality: "She could not forget the Woman in the thought; while she was instructing you as a mind, she wished to be admired as a Woman; sentimental tears often dimmed the eagle glance." The passage recalls Fuller's careful concealing in childhood of the "true" or emotional life behind the curtain of intellect. In the 1830's George Sand's social novels gave Fuller the courage to want to tear down the curtain, to try to rejoin her divided selves through fiction: "I have always thought that I would not [write of human nature], that I would keep all that behind the curtain, that I would not write, like a woman, of love and hope and disappointment, but like a man of the world of intellect and action." But her fiction-writing ventures failed, and, as with de Stael, Fuller was quick to discern Sand's "womanish" failings: "She has genius and a manly heart! Will there never be a being to combine a man's mind and woman's heart, and who yet finds life too rich to weep over?" Though she would later write more warmly of Sand's courage, Fuller's anxiety about female weakness was too great in her younger years to let her choose Sand as a model. The heroic "common sense" instilled in her by her father was doing its work, making her disparage in women artists the emotionality she had come to cherish in her friends and leading her to discern egoism or inadequacy when they sought to

288 I AMERICAN WRITERS transcend the emotional sphere. In writing she continued for years to feel that she was committed to one part of herself while betraying another. "It is a mockery thus to play the artist with life, and dip the brush in one's own heart's blood," she wrote. And again: For all the tides of life that flow within me, I am dumb and ineffectual, when it comes to casting my thought into a form. No old one suits me. If I could invent one, it seems to me the pleasure of creation would make it possible for me to write I love best to be a woman; but womanhood is at present too straitlybounded to give me scope. At hours, I live truly as a woman; at others I should stifle; as, on the other hand, I should palsy, when I would play the artist. Plainly the "form" Fuller sought was not only literary; it would enlarge woman's role while including her gifts, and consequently would expand existing notions of artist and art. "Conversation is my natural element," she wrote, putting it another way. "I need to be called out, and never think alone, without imagining some companion." (This explains her frequent adoption of the dialogue form in her work.) Although she felt that this habit betrayed "a second-rate mind," it also marked a dialectical one. Fuller may justly have feared that the isolation of writing, compounded by the isolation of her position, could lead only to solipsism. In any case she wanted writing to be more a matter of relationship. In the same summer (1835) that she realized her inability to write fiction, Fuller met Harriet Martineau, who had fought illness, poverty, and disapproval to publish, on her own, her Illustrations of Political Economy. Still longing for a confirming mirror, Fuller hoped her new friend would "comprehend me wholly, mentally, and morally, and enable me better to comprehend myself"; still hungry for criticism, she rejoiced

that "There are no strong intellectual sympathies between us, such as would blind her to my defects." When Martineau offered to take Fuller with her to England, and her father consented, thus rewarding her for tutoring in rural exile, it seemed too good to be true—and it was. Timothy Fuller's sudden death from cholera in the fall of 1835 had the effect of detaining her for eleven years in her country, years that would totally alter the meaning a European trip would hold for her. Her father's death forced Fuller to become, in effect, head of the household (a position for which her mother was even less prepared than she), to learn how to disentangle his financial affairs, to fight against her narrow-minded and domineering uncle Abraham Fuller for her siblings' right to education, and later to guide them to work, to a profession, even to lodgings. Her father's death also left her emotionally orphaned, and for some years she searched for a father as well as a mentor. Curiously, it was Harriet Martineau, from whom, as a European woman, Fuller had hoped for so much, who introduced her to that American father, Ralph Waldo Emerson. He was a man she had longed to meet for years before she managed it, and she continued to regard him with love and reverence long after she discerned how little he could directly help or understand her. Each became for the other a touchstone for values attractively alien, and their friendship did much to clarify for both the bounds their temperaments set for them. Seven years older than Fuller, Emerson must have first drawn her by his likeness to her father in reserve and intellectual earnestness. More important, he seemed to offer what Timothy Fuller could not, an end to her anomalous social status—if not something to do, at least a way to be. For, though a man, he had found it necessary to invent his vocation.

MARGARET FULLER / 289 Thus, when Emerson read Nature aloud to her, Fuller might have drawn hope and support from its closing exhortation, "Build therefore your own world." As an alternative to the inhospitable social world, Emerson's vision sanctioned a world fashioned after her idiosyncratic individuality, not resistant to it. Her "own world" would become simultaneously the sedulously cultivated circle of high-minded intimates and the infinite expanse of the private self. "From him I first learned what is meant by the inward life," she wrote gratefully. In the beginning there was a pleasing reciprocity. When they met in 1836, Emerson, like Fuller, was grieving; and the death of his brother Charles had brought such a sense of loss that the "very sober joy" in his second wife, Lidian—one of the most pious, frail, and selfsacrificing of the transcendentalists—could not compensate for it. While he inducted Fuller into the worlds of solitude and natural harmony, she offered him the best of real society. Sometimes Emerson was exuberantly grateful for the company of Fuller and her young friends ("Your poor hermit... will yet come to know the world through your eyes"). But just as she eventually felt constrained by Emerson's ahistorical and solipsistic "inwardness," so did he resist breaking out of his inveterate reserve. A tension grew with their friendship for which both would use the same striking word. Emerson's adoption of Michel Eyquem de Montaigne's phrase, "Oh, my friends, there are no friends," was for Fuller "a paralyzing conviction," while Emerson confided in his journal after one of her visits, "Life too near paralyzes art." What they had to offer each other was great, but given the ascetic basis of his craft and her need for dynamic relation, the threat of mutual paralysis was always near. There were also more covert confusions. Teaching self-reliance, Emerson instilled expectations, even dependencies, for which he was unable to take responsibility. His belief that

each person should follow his inner convictions conflicted with his wish that those convictions should take on the coloration of his own. And Fuller could not separate her desire to forge an independent, richly integrated self from a desire to have that self accepted, even sanctioned, by a person of Emerson's stature. These tensions came to a head in 1840, when both moved to deepen their friendship, but from fatally diverse motivations. Emerson contemplated writing an essay on friendship, though to Fuller he confessed to being "perplexed lately with a droll experience of limitation as if our faculties set a limit on our affections." With Fuller as his guide, he sought to identify his limits; by contrast Fuller wanted through this engagement to arrive at her greatest potential. (In such a contest the conservative objective prevails.) Of course, this very verbal exercise afforded them the pleasurable opportunity to make metaphors and to dramatize—to the verge of caricature—their differing stances. In mid-August, Fuller challenged Emerson to enlarge the grounds of their friendship, which, he wrote, she "stigmatized" as "commercial." Although their correspondence on this subject was bold enough, their private thoughts of course reveal more. She wrote: I am bent on being his only friend myself. There is enough of me would I but reveal it. Enough of woman to sympathize with all his feelings, enough of man to appreciate all thoughts[.] I could be a perfect friend and it would make me a nobler person. I would never indulge towards him that need of devotion which lies at the depth of my being. He measures too much, he is too reasonable. I could not be my truest childlike self. But I might be my truest manlike self. The contradictions run rampant. Though Emerson draws on both her "masculine" and "feminine" qualities, Fuller feels she can openly be only "manlike." And the bald possessiveness

290 / AMERICAN of the first sentence belies the noble selfsacrifice. It is as if she wanted in this relation to replace both marriage and vocation. Here was a lust for the kind of power that comes only through dependency; had she had her way, she might have remained a satellite of Emerson's forever. Fortunately for the future of Fuller's independence and self-awareness, Emerson refused her experiment. In a journal entry he upbraids her as he never could directly: You would have me love you. What shall I love? Your body? The supposition disgusts you. What you have thought and said? Well, whilst you were thinking and saying them, but not now. I see no possibility of loving anything but what now is, and is becoming; your courage, your enterprise, your budding affection, your opening thought, your prayer, I can love, but what else. As Fuller sought an exclusive, mutual, and total comprehension, Emerson wanted from her and others only what was potential, suggestive, and fleeting—what, in short, could be absorbed into his own system. The persistent challenging otherness of a friend called up no response in him. Emerson's behavior was consistent with his developed theory of friendship. When Fuller, angered by his insistence that she was alien to him, threw in his face virtual quotations from his essay "Friendship"—writing, "But did you not ask for a foe in your friend? Did you not ask for a 'large formidable nature?'"—she was fixing on only part of that theory, for in the same essay he rationalized his retreat. (If he did not mean all that he said, he tried to say all that he meant.) "Though I prize my friends I cannot afford to talk with them and study their vision, lest I lose my own," he wrote, and "The soul environs itself with friends that it may enter into a grander self-acquaintance or solitude."

WRITERS

Thus, as he had encouraged intense relations with Fuller in order to pursue his understanding of friendship, so, when the essay was done, did he follow his own analysis and withdraw. "I see very dimly in writing on this topic," he wrote to her on October 14, 1840. "Do not expect it of me for a very long time." Fuller accepted his plea to return with goodwill to their old footing, and they remained friends throughout her life. But beyond the emotional obfuscation, their crisis had exposed differences in value that had intellectual and ideological implications. She touched on them when, in her last visit with the Emersons in 1844, she teased him lightly about how Concord lacked "the animating influences of Discord." Before Fuller discovered her own path, she drew heavily on the stimulating and steadying influence of Concord and the transcendentalists. Her intellectual commerce with Emerson was brisk. He helped her to fill the gaps in her knowledge of English literature, and she shared Continental literature, finally breaking down his resistance to George Sand and Goethe. Moreover, he led her to Bronson Alcott, who offered her her first job, at his Temple School. Teaching was the most conventional of female occupations—and one she had long shunned— but Alcott's pedagogy was so original for its time as to be scandalous. Following Wordsworth's conviction that children are nearer their celestial origins than adults are, he directed their education inward—and was charged with heresy, blasphemy, and obscenity. Fuller preferred Alcott's self-culture to her father's forced march, and defended him; but privately she noted that Alcott's spirituality lacked robust vitality and excluded the material and the complex. She went on to spend two restless years teaching at the Greene Street School in Providence, Rhode Island, a less radical and more lucrative school.

MARGARET FULLER / 291 After resigning her teaching post, Fuller wrote her translation of Johann Peter Eckermann's Conversations with Goethe, which George Ripley, the versatile cofounder of Brook Farm, published in 1839. Goethe was under regular and vehement attack in New England, and Fuller's introduction was tartly polemical: The objections, so far as I know them, may be resolved into these classes— He is not a Christian; He is not an idealist; He is not a democrat; He is not Schiller. She then took them one by one, becoming for that time one of Goethe's most balanced readers anywhere, and the only American in her circle who distinguished art from idealism. Her enthusiasm for Continental literature now sharpened her interest in the evolution of an authentic American literature. Early in 1840, Fuller undertook the most demanding of her transcendentalist enterprises, the editing of the Dial. Members of the "Transcendental Club" wanted a journal to compete with the conservative or theological or stridently partisan ones in New England that failed either to publish or to appeal to them. Initiating "a protest against usage, and a search for principles," the first editorial in the Dial proposed "not to multiply books, but to report life." Although "the portfolios which friendship had opened to us" were promised to fill its pages, Fuller had to beg contributors for them; and for one issue of 136 pages had hastily to provide 85 pages from her own notebooks. As editor she tried to be impartial, and later defended her practice of publishing representative pieces, even when she did not like them, against Emerson's preference for satisfying his own taste: "I wish my tastes and sympathies still more expansive than they are, instead of more severe. Here we differ." Apparently her tolerance was no-

where shared. "I hope our Dial will get to be a little bad" Emerson complained early; and Theodore Parker was not abashed to say that the Dial needed a beard. These rivaling calls for virile boldness seemed to drive Fuller into an uncharacteristically "feminine" neutrality, and made the Dial she edited for two years less challenging than any of her later work. Fuller's poems, stories, and art and music criticism are too subjective to interest us now, but in her literary criticism she undertook the first systematic examination of criticism in America. She argued that criticism should go beyond the impressionism that chiefly characterized the critic; it should combine empathic elucidation of literary works on their own terms with judgment by objective and external standards. In her twenty months in New York, Fuller wrote two literary pieces a week for the New York Tribune, thus outstripping all in her New England circle in practical criticism. ("The Muses have feet to be sure," Emerson remarked doubtfully, "but it is an odd arrangement that selects them for the treadmill.") But Fuller was satisfied to "aid in the great work of popular education." She was uniquely able to mediate between timid Americans and the variously threatening Goethe, Lord George Byron, and Sand. Placing Goethe's worldliness, Byron's morbidity, and Sand's free passion in the contexts of their ages and their options, she made them accessible, even enlightening. Her perspective made her want to encourage an American literature that was individual but not provincial. Fuller leveled her judgments without regard for fashion. She found the lionized Henry Wadsworth Longfellow "artificial and imitative," and deplored James Russell Lowell's "want of vitality." Though his "great facility at versification" generates "a copious stream of pleasant sound," she concluded that "his verse

292 / AMERICAN is stereotyped; his thought sounds no depth; and posterity will not remember him." By contrast, she admired Frederick Douglass, praised Poe— though not enough for his liking—found the early Hawthorne the most promising writer of fiction, tried to rescue Charles Brockden Brown (a feminist, as she read him) from oblivion, and gave a friendly notice to Typee, by an unknown Herman Melville. As for Emerson, though she generally praised his second volume of essays, she also found fault with his uncomplicated spirituality: "We doubt this friend raised himself too early to the perpendicular and did not lie along the ground long enough to hear the secret whispers of our parent life. We could wish he might be thrown by conflicts on the lap of mother earth, to see if he would not rise again with added powers." Privately and publicly Poe and Lowell satirized this "authoress," but in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, young Walt Whitman welcomed "right heartily" her Papers on Literature and Art, published in 1846. Deploring the "tone of supercilious contempt" with which serious writing by women was often greeted, he felt that the book demonstrated women's ability to "enter into the discussion of high questions of morals, taste, etc." Ultimately Emerson's influence was important for Fuller—and later for Whitman and Thoreau—as a springboard from which to leap to her quite separate fate. To understand her leap, we must remember that for Emerson the notion of the "inward" life turned on a pair of propositions. One was that the self (more precisely his self) was inherently "representative" both of his countrymen and of America. The other was that this representative self could evolve only through quiescent isolation. If the individual's "latent conviction" expressed the "universal sense," that person could best pursue that conviction and become a "representative"

WRITERS

American by self-insulation from compromising contact. The America that Emerson chose to represent was of course that creation unique in the experience of mankind that had analogues in the apocalyptic visions of John Winthrop and Thomas Jefferson and George Bancroft. For Winthrop, Jefferson, and Bancroft, the Author of this idea was God, while for Emerson, the author was the self—or, more accurately, Emerson. "His method of self-renewal," writes Sacvan Bercovitch, "consisted in arrogating the meaning of America to himself." America thus became an idea that sprang from no religious, political, or social institution, but from "the purest minds" only. Given this secularization, internalization, and intellectualization of the myth of American destiny, that destiny and individual integrity were to be secured by identical means: by isolation and abjuration of all action except that of the mind. Fuller had studied Jefferson with her father on the Groton farm, and in her New England years had no quarrel with the notion of the unique historical mission of America. But she never really believed that her self was representative or that it held any meaningful connection to America except in active participation. After rereading Nature, she confessed to Emerson that she delighted "more in thought-living than in living thought." Underlying her resistance to Emerson and representativeness was Fuller's sense of her irreducible otherness. Her ideological break with Emerson was initiated in what was, ironically, one of her most transcendentalist works. In her Dial essay "The Great Lawsuit," later expanded into Woman in the Nineteenth Century, she applied transcendentalist tenets to women, particularly the universal sacred right and duty to develop one's nature fully. That Fuller felt impelled to argue woman's humanity proves that however warmly she had been received by

MARGARET FULLER / 293 transcendentalist gentlemen, she experienced herself, next to them, as "other." Probably the earliest source of Fuller's feminism was her feeling for her mother. She wrote that after her father's nocturnal drills she often had nightmares of following her mother's corpse to the grave, just as she had followed her infant sister's body. In her biography Katharine Anthony made this dream the keystone of her oedipal reading of Fuller's career. But a fragmentary manuscript, in which Fuller fictionalizes her parents' marriage, suggests other readings. In this fragment she takes two stunning liberties with fact. She disguises herself, the narrator, as a son, and tells how the mother— weakened by the husband's neglect of her inner life and destroyed by grief over her second child's death—dies. (In actuality Fuller's mother survived her daughter by several years.) The narrator speculates: "Had she lived there was enough in me corresponding with her unconscious wants to have aroused her intellect and occupied her affections. Perhaps her son might have made up to her for want of that full development of feeling which youth demands from love." Fuller's fiction gives her real, recurrent nightmare of her mother's death a range of meanings: guilt over the father's greater attention to herself than to the mother; the death-in-life she saw in conventional wifery; the mother's real passivity and relative absence from the child's rearing; the mother's inability to provide a model for the growing girl to emulate; the killing of the internalized female in the child by the refusal of both parents to value and nurture it. In this way the dream captures Fuller's anger and sense of loss. The son's fantasized rescue then expresses variously the desires to atone for the father's perceived greater attention to herself, to take the father's place with the mother, to regain a lost closeness, to repair the deficien-

cies in her mother's life so that she would be able in turn to mother the child more deeply and richly—or, internally, to create a mothering self who would provide acceptance for "this Margaret Fuller" that she could not find elsewhere. Fuller was aware of the way in which her anomalous life made her fictionalize and internalize the whole range of human relationships: "I was always to return to myself, to be my own priest, pupil, parent, child, husband, and wife." As her mother was, spiritually, no predecessor, so society offered no precedent for Fuller; she would feel impelled to mold her "precedents" belatedly from the material at hand. Her friendships with other women were marked by these needs to transform the other in order to be loved and accepted. The fervency of the language of these friendships may in part be attributed to the cult of romanticism (much of it echoes the extravagant exchanges in the correspondence between Bettina von Arnim and her friend Karoline von Gtinderode that Fuller translated and published in 1842 in Gunderode; A Translation from the German). It may also be partly understood as a consequence of the rigorous separation of human qualities by gender that would encourage women to believe that only they could understand one another. But we should not explain away the intensity in Fuller's love of women, which came from a need to heal a wound sustained in childhood, and to enlarge women's mutual understanding and, hence, their capacities. "It is so true that a woman may be in love with a woman and a man with a man," she wrote of a friend whom she loved in youth, "with as much passion as I was then strong enough to feel." Looking back, Elizabeth Hoar of Concord said, "Had she been a man, any one of those fine girls of sixteen, who surrounded her here, would have married her: they were all in love with her, she understood them so well."

294 I AMERICAN Understanding women was not the same as endorsing them or their sphere. "Plain sewing is decidedly immoral," Fuller once put it succinctly. Although her sense of her own exceptionality was a habitual defense, gradually a desire to work for women—and thus for herself— replaced it. Her "conversations" for women, likely inspired by the heady sessions of the "Transcendental Club," nourished a sense of herself and of possible vocations that eventually led her far beyond the Concord circle and its aims. In a letter of 1839, Fuller proposed to assemble a circle of "well-educated and thinking women"; her object was to help them "systematize thought and give a precision and clearness in which our sex are so deficient, chiefly, I think, because they have so few inducements." Thus employing her father's standards, she aimed to answer the questions he could not. She felt confident of success if the women would abjure "coterie criticism" and "that sort of vanity in them which wears the garb of modesty." Her first series of "conversations" was on Greek mythology; in five winters she also treated fine arts, ethics, education, and women, especially their influence on family, school, church, society, and literature. Paying a small fee, about twentyfive women—eventually more than forty appeared—gathered at noon once a week for two hours in Elizabeth Peabody's bookstore. The participants were almost all from eminent families or accomplished in their own right or prominent later in the abolitionist and feminist struggles. For them the experience was plainly instructive and exhilarating. Yet Harriet Martineau's terse dismissal of these "gorgeous pedants" whose leader refused to discuss abolition is better remembered than their enthusiasm. From a short-range feminist perspective or a radical political one, one might agree with Martineau and find that this Yankee version of the salon both

WRITERS

overindulged the women and mystified the real issues of their lives. Contrasted with Angelina Grimke's speaking tour, which culminated in 1838 with an antislavery appeal before the Massachusetts state legislature, Fuller's "parlatorio," as Emerson styled it, was mild amusement indeed. But from a liberal or a long-range feminist point of view, Fuller's premise that women should nurture their serious responses to each other, as well as their obligations to family and society, was trailblazing. The "vindication of woman's right to think" that Elizabeth Cady Stanton later found in the "conversations" was subtly subversive; for thinking women the precincts of love stretched beyond the hearth, and morality was reinformed with free choice and personal responsibility. For Fuller the "conversations" were alternately gratifying and inadequate: "Oh that it gave me more pleasure to do a little good, and give a little happiness. But there is no modesty or moderation in me." Yet, in contrast with her tortured relationship with Emerson in 1840, Fuller was here actively fusing her enthusiastic feeling with disciplined thought. Triggered by her intimate experience of unused and directionless energy, her sympathetic work with the women began to show her the way to wholeness, the free exercise of her power. She would become whole, and her power real, in her intelligent and committed action for those who lacked such power. The "conversations" also helped Fuller with her peculiar writing problem. She had created a setting for "thought-living"—in which texts were acts and words were a matter of relationship—and, drawing on it, wrote her Dial essay on women. Thoreau precisely named her triumph when he praised the essay as "rich extempore writing, talking with pen in hand." To expand the essay into Woman in the Nineteenth Century, Fuller had further to give up the old

MARGARET FULLER / 295 intoxication, much of it self-induced, that came from straining for a unique, unprecedented form of expression. She had, in her words, to abandon her aspiration for "the sceptre or the lyre," with which, in her pose of sibyl or Corinne, she had loved to "mould many to one purpose," and to take up "the slow pen." Fuller understood better that ideas are not autonomous, that only massive cultural changes could permit the conception and articulation of some: ("We have not language ... to express such ideas with precision"). Meanwhile, she could use the pen merely to point to "something new" in "the life of man," for "hearts crave, if minds do not know how to ask it." Supported by this clarity, she wrote fast, and completed the book in mid-November 1844: "It kept spinning out beneath my hand." She felt her achievement with eloquent simplicity: "I had put a good deal of my true life in it ... should I go away now, the measure of my foot-print would be left on the earth." Fuller wrote this book at Fishkill, New York. She was about to start work for the New York Tribune, a job Horace Greeley had offered her after reading her Summer on the Lakes in 1843. The trip to the Great Lakes and Wisconsin had done much to wean her from the thought of New England; and her Woman reflects these changes in her quickened sense of independence and psychological integrity and in a new attention to the claims of society and politics. A measure of Fuller's psychological confidence is the relative ease of her treatment of the vexed question of whether female nature is distinct from male nature. Although she concurs with the cultural conviction that woman's nature is distinct, she insists that this female essence never appears unmixed: "two sides of the great radical dualism," male and female, "are perpetually passing into one another"; and "there is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman." Another measure is her por-

trait of her "friend" Miranda—really an idealized self-portrait—who seeks to dispose of once and for all these paralyzing classifications: "Let it not be said/wherever there is energy or creative genius, 'She has a masculine mind.'" Moreover, in Miranda's story Fuller reevaluates her father's training, and the contrast is sharp. In the 1840 autobiographical romance she had called it his "great mistake," but now she says it stems from "a firm belief in the equality of the sexes." Where previously she argued that she was cheated of her female nature, now she sees that he addressed her "as a living mind," not a plaything. Where the effect earlier was of a life "devoured in the bud," now it is of "a dignified sense of self-dependence." Although both versions are surely polemical exaggerations, the healing experience of the "conversations" that intervened between them must help to explain the change from despair to pride. The independence that Fuller stresses is a combination of the transcendentalist virtue of self-reliance and the activist virtue of "selfimpulse." She means that, believing woman was made for man, man disqualifies himself from representing woman, and that, until she represents herself, woman is "only an overgrown child." She means that celibacy among women is honorable and solidarity is essential. In analyzing society—the effects it has on women, the role women should take in society— Woman in the Nineteenth Century is curiously hybrid. Calls for various social reforms and even for militant action sound through the old music of pure transcendentalist individualism. Grafted onto the philosophy of romantic self-culture is the homely democratic faith of the Declaration of Independence. The latter leads Fuller to praise the abolitionist movement she had chosen to ignore in her "conversations" and to admire its activists, Angelina Grimke and Abby Kelley. In her revision she

296 I AMERICAN also calls upon women to respond en masse to the threatened annexation of Texas; and she heralds public speaking and petition carrying by women, widely censored as immodest and offensive, as the exercise of "moral power" that men have abjured. She also writes with a candor remarkable for the time on the double standard in marriage and on women's need to understand sexuality and prostitution. In the context of feminist thought, Woman presented a broader but much less singleminded attack on the question of woman than its chief predecessors had done. It represented an advance beyond Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman chiefly in its insistence that women must take responsibility for their own liberation. In America, Catharine Beecher and the Grimke sisters had very recently written with a political urgency that Fuller was only beginning to feel. The political difference between Beecher and Sarah and Angelina Grimke was polar. Enemies of the clergy and the vested interests of the nation, the abolitionist Grimkes argued for absolute equality and were the first to give the lie so clearly to de Tocqueville's fancy of the woman whose mature freedom lies in selfrepression. By contrast, Beecher endorsed and even extended de Tocqueville's reasoning. For her the emergency was the imminent dissolution of the nation, witnessed daily in the microcosm of the family. Only a firmly differentiated character in women and the discipline of deference could save the day, for such willed submission was the mark of a superior moral sensibility, the influence of which would spread irresistibly beyond the home to the nation at large. As conservatism bound Beecher to sexual stereotypes, so political radicalism freed the Grimkes from them. Fuller at moments echoes the thoughts of both, though she is closer to the

WRITERS

Grimkes, especially when she shows acid scorn for those who feel that women must be sheltered in an inner circle: "Those who think the physical circumstances of Woman would make a part in the affairs of national government unsuitable, are by no means those who think it impossible for negresses to endure field-work, even during pregnancy, or for sempstresses to go through their killing labors." At such moments, and with the calls to action, Fuller moves for the first time toward radicalism, though she appears not yet aware of its cost. Active feminism worked to clarify for Fuller the ways in which pure transcendentalism was inadequate for her: it showed her that there were vocations that drew on all her qualities and initiated her career of activist journalism; it was leading her into fuller engagement with the world. She never lost her feminist perspective, but it triggered a process of political analysis and action that carried her beyond the struggle for women alone. She never ceased caring for women, but the distancing, altruistic mode disappeared. At the same time, in her own life she at last recognized and claimed the freedom she needed for herself. In a sense, only by ceasing to be a leader of women could Margaret Fuller become—for those who could see the meaning of her life in its last years—a model. Fuller's intuitive identification of herself as "other" drew her increasingly to those who could not readily be subsumed under universals, let alone be represented by Emerson. In Summer on the Lakes, Fuller's preoccupation with the degradation of the contemporary Indians seems to derive sometimes from an inability to break through their discomforting otherness, sometimes from a kindred sense of oppression. Whatever their source, her shame and indignation at the crimes of her own race were gen-

MARGARET FULLER / 297 uine, and made her keen to find in books on Indians and in the whites she met the psychohistory of racism, the inevitable "aversion of the injurer for him he had degraded." As for the white settlers, to whom she looked for a "new order," they generally revealed far too littlfc otherness. Fuller deplored the importation of Yankee narrowness and calculation in the men and of European standards of culture in the unhappy women, who usually had been dragged unwilling and unprepared into the West. But by the end of this voyage—during which she had made her bed on a barroom floor and with aplomb shot the rapids in an Indian canoe—she called it "pleasant" to hear "rough men tell pieces out of their own common lives, in place of the frippery talk of some fine circle with its conventional sentiment, and timid, second-hand criticism." Perhaps such experiences helped make her style more lean and pointed. Surely they educated her tastes and readied her for the diversity of New York. Before Fuller left New England, Emerson had written to her from New York that the "endless rustle of newspapers" made him appreciate "not the value of their classes but of my own class—the supreme need of the few worshippers of the Muse—wild and sacred—as counteractions to this world of material and ephemeral interest." Her bias was the reverse. She celebrated this refuge of immigrants of all classes with its great harbor embraced by the "wood of masts" that she found better than any poem. Standing in the city, she felt "the life blood rushing from an entire continent to swell her heart." She liked living in New York, and wrote, "I don't dislike wickedness and wretchedness more than pettiness and coldness." Horace Greeley resisted Fuller's famous influence, and was therefore the first man in a

long while who could "teach" her many things. In her weekly column on social issues, she supported his causes—the Irish, Fourierism, antislavery, and opposition to the Mexican War— as well as generating some of her own. She attacked capital punishment; she welcomed the persecuted immigrant Jews and Germans; she sought more enlightened education and broader employment for the poor and for women. No longer preoccupied with ideal friendship or restricted to acquaintance in her class, Fuller's concern for women in trouble could flourish, and her feminism grew with her social awareness. She frequently visited the women in Sing Sing Prison at Ossining, New York; and with Isaac Hopper, an intrepid activist of the Underground Railway, planned the first halfway house for female convicts. Liberal as her reportage was for the time and revolutionary as it was in its familiarity with worlds hitherto closed to a woman of her class, it was still eminently genteel muckraking, and it should be read as apprentice work. She compared her visits with the prisoners with "my Boston classes," but she was beginning to see that self-culture was no longer adequate to solve the vast problems of New York. When the advent of an aggressive foreign policy was added to these experiences of social inequity, Fuller became increasingly doubtful about the myth of the special destiny of America. After the annexation of Texas and on the eve of war with Mexico, she wrote that the national eagle, in the coming time, "will lead the van, but whether to soar upward to the sun or to stoop for the helpless prey, who now dares promise?" She took an interest in the many varieties of nascent socialism, and she even published her translation from a German immigrant newspaper of one of the earliest discussions of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the United States. But no alternative ideol-

298 I AMERICAN ogy, no critical method, could replace the myth of moral destiny; and had Fuller not left the country in August 1846, to write about Europe for the Tribune, her perspective might simply have soured. In her Tribune column she took farewell of New York, "where twenty months have presented me with a richer and more varied exercise for thought and life than twenty years could in any other part of these United States." She sailed for England as one of the first American correspondents of either sex, and as companion to the philanthropist Marcus Spring, his wife Rebecca, and their young son Eddie. In Great Britain exploration of social conditions and new tendencies crowded out most of the time Fuller would earlier have spent with culture and "genius." She gave the British Museum one day, and the memory of Robert Burns's rebuke to the aristocracy earned more space than her visit to once-cherished Wordsworth. She regretted that Wordsworth's "habits of seclusion" deafened him "to the voice which cries loudly from other parts of England, and will not be stilled by sweet poetic suasion or philosophy, for it is the cry of men in the jaws of destruction.",She listened with interest to British reformers, and she wrote enthusiastically about the public baths of Edinburgh and public laundries of London, as well as the new educational institutions for working people created by British women. Galvanizing Fuller's attention to reform was the omnipresent shock of poverty in England. Dogging her progress through all the celebrated cities was the unforgettable sight of the industrial slums—"the underside of Europe's costly tapestry"—especially their worn female victims "too dull to carouse" and their children fed on opium. "Poverty in England has terrors of which I never dreamed at home," she wrote, yet we know she had toured the slums of Five Points in New York City with Channing. What

WRITERS

her unconscious adherence to the democratic rhetoric of America made her miss at home, the tradition abroad of critical political rhetoric laid bare. What Fuller had perceived as inequity in America began to look like hopeless class division, though like most of her contemporaries and all of her class, she could barely frame the problem in these terms. Then she visited France on the eve of the 1848 revolution. The life of the salons and the streets was crackling with rival socialist theories, heightening her sense of the urgency of action. An illuminating series of private events had kept pace with this stimulating public tour. As Europe heated up for revolution, experiences and encounters prepared Fuller for fundamental and irrevocable change in her personal life. In New York a troubling romance with an opportunistic aesthete and businessman, James Nathan, had tempted her to express, for the first and last time in her life, a longing for the vicarious existence then deemed woman's natural fate. When the relationship became too demanding or convoluted, Nathan, of German Jewish descent, retreated to Europe. If Fuller had come to Europe still hoping to join him, that hope was effectively killed when she received a letter announcing his engagement to a German woman. Shortly afterward, descending from Ben Lomond in Scotland after a four-mile climb, Fuller was separated from her hiking companion, failed to find the path, and was forced to spend a dangerous night alone on a narrow ledge, keeping in constant motion to survive the cold mist that mounted in visionary shapes. She resisted the lures of fatal passivity and was found in the morning by a rescue party. Her "mental experience," she wrote in her dispatch, was "most precious and profound," a "presentation of stern, serene realities"; and it is tempting to think it was cathartic. She not only relinquished pursuit of Nathan, but also effectively

MARGARET FULLER / 299 quit all longing for misty embraces, whether of man or of idea. At the same time Europeans who had admired her Woman and her newly issued Papers on Literature and Art were receiving Fuller handsomely and apparently were more comfortable with her in intellectual discourse than many had been at home. "I find myself in my element in European society," she wrote to Emerson. "It does not, indeed, come up to my ideal, but so many of the encumbrances are cleared away that used to weary me in America, that I can enjoy a freer play of faculty and feel, if not like a bird in the air, at least as easy as a fish in the water." Europe did not come up to her ideal, but made her freer: she all but confesses that idealism confined her. For Europe was offering Fuller two crucial sensations that America never did: the shock of class consciousness and the warm bath of personal (and implicitly physical) acceptance. De Tocqueville's knot was coming undone. She was more than ready for the liberating influences of Mazzini in London and of Sand and Mickiewicz in Paris, who would help her discover how to move against the two pressures, social and religious, that bound American women in place. Fuller's meeting with Giuseppe Mazzini during her last month in England helped to channel the powerful indignation that the tour of Britain had stirred. In exile, Mazzini was organizing for a war to oust the Austrian rulers and unite Italy's eight separate states in a democratic republic. If Emerson's goal of the inward transformation of man by spiritual example still held Fuller in its spell, Mazzini snapped that spell. He later wrote to her that he feared that Emerson would "lead man too much to contemplation." For all his soaring idealism, Mazzini understood that revolution was a matter of concrete and violent action. For all his personal charisma, he understood that it had to be the work of a mass of people, and he inveighed

against individualism in the interests of the "collective thought" he had adopted from the Saint-Simonians. Fuller did not give herself over to hero worship. Even in her first account of Mazzini ("the most beauteous person I have seen"), she remarked subtly, "He is one in whom holiness has purified, but somewhat dwarfed the man." Yet before she left England, she had enlisted in his cause and he had provided her with the addresses of his secret agents on the Continent. In France, Fuller met George Sand, whose work she had boldly defended in America, though always with parenthetical regret for her lapses in private virtue ("Would indeed the surgeon had come with quite clean hands!"). In the liberating atmosphere of France, Fuller was fired by Sand's personal freedom, a consequence of her happy fusion of mind, body, and spirit. "I never liked a woman better," she wrote to the Concord circle. "She needs no~defence, but only to be understood, for she has bravely acted out her nature, and always with good intentions." Acted out her nature—it was a moment of prophetic self-recognition, and Fuller was later to use almost the same words in explaining her liaison with Giovanni Angelo Ossoli. Also in Paris, the poet and revolutionary Adam Mickiewicz linked the influences of Sand and Mazzini. Lecturing on Emerson, Mickiewicz had ultimately found that the American "isolates us too much, not taking into account epoch, nation or earth. Emerson's man dangles one knows not where." Sharing many of Mazzini's political goals, Mickiewicz was also a modern feminist who exhorted Fuller to free herself of the bondage of celibacy. Pointedly she described him to Emerson as ™the man I had long wished to see with the intellect and passions in due proportion." Sand's and Mickiewicz's inspiration to give herself to physical and emotional intimacy, and Mazzini's to dedicate

300 I AMERICAN WRITERS herself politically, combined to propel her to the land and the city that her earliest study had taught her to love. In Rome historical events would join with Fuller's unleashed capacity for growth and change to undercut and alter the influence of transcendentalism, and to offer the most comprehensive definition of self and her most satisfying work. In the spring of 1847, when Fuller arrived in Italy, a state of optimistic excitement prevailed. The liberal Pope Pius IX, elected a year earlier, had proclaimed a universal amnesty for political prisoners, admitted laymen into a council of state, and authorized a civic guard. These measures both undermined the pope's temporal power and stimulated pressure for reform in the seven other states of Italy. The intellectuals whom Fuller met generally favored the moderate program of the exiled priest Vincenzo Gioberti, in which a reformed papacy would preside over a loose federation of Italian kingdoms and duchies protected by King Charles Albert of Piedmont. Armed with her own democratic convictions and Mazzini's vision of republican union, Fuller saw through the moderate scheme. Her journalistic commitments helped her to clarify her analysis. Most of her twenty-one dispatches from Italy have more concentrated force and shapeliness than anything else she wrote. She paints a European panorama: her quick sketches of conditions in Germany, Austria, and France include shrewd predictions of the political and social evolution to be expected in those countries; denser drawings of the mounting struggles throughout Italy feveal the interlocking dynamics of these situations; finally she concentrates on a changing series of detailed portraits of the pope and the people of Rome. She is especially absorbed by the pope's gradual decline in leadership and by the growth of consciousness in the people—their awaken-

ing need for autonomy and their learning to invest trust and responsibility in themselves, not in princes or divine destiny. Sometimes these dispatches are crabbed or obscure when her involvement was too intense or the departure of a steamer too imminent to permit leisurely exposition, but the old defensive attitudinizing is absent. More partisan than anything she did before, her writing in this last period is more intimately a part of her action and her feeling, and in no way expresses a choice in which something else is sacrificed. In these dispatches all her values are intact, and are so focused and actualized that they make her accounts of hopefulness, restlessness, political suspense, and battle riveting even now. Caught up in Mazzini's vision and the dazzle of events, she tends to overestimate the real limitations on Charles Albert's options and, for a while, the value of Giuseppe Garibaldi. But she is otherwise perspicacious. Urgency drives the old wishfulness out of her social analysis. And in her assessments of the motives of rulers and priests, she draws on a fund of skeptical insight wholly new in her writing. Something of the bite and flash said to characterize her conversation at last dominates her work. Although her friends included staunch Giobertians, Fuller sought out radicals in Genoa, Milan, Florence, and Rome. One of these, met by chance, was Giovanni Angelo Ossoli, a Roman nobleman of meager means who had received from the priests only the education necessary to fit him to follow his father and three older brothers into the pope's service. But, disapproving the pope's exercise of temporal power, Ossoli was a nascent Mazzinian when he met Fuller, now thirty-seven, ten years older than he. Moved by his tenderness and his intimate appreciation of nature, she was stirred also by his courageous defiance of his family in rejecting the only livelihood for which he had been prepared.

MARGARET FULLER / 301 Late in 1847, at about the same time that Ossoli joined the civic guard, the organization in which the radicals readied themselves for struggle, he became Fuller's lover. Their differences satisfied old needs of both. Ossoli, the youngest of six children and still grieving for the mother who had died when he was six, needed a confident, even authoritative, woman. And Fuller cherished in him, as she had in several men, the way he defeated "masculine" stereotyping. The surmise of an American acquaintance, W. H. Hurlbut, who found Ossoli an "underdeveloped and uninteresting Italian," though unsympathetic, is sound: "She probably married him as a representative of an imagined possibility in the Italian character which I have not yet been able to believe in." All her life Fuller had committed herself to "imagined possibilities"—in herself, her friends, the Indians, her students, the ladies of Boston, and the prostitutes of New York—but in Italy she gambled her all on possibility. "I acted upon a strong impulse," she later wrote to her sister. "I neither rejoice nor grieve, for bad or good. I acted out my character." The character thus discovered was neither that of the "true woman," the quintessential Victorian wife celebrated by her biographers in the nineteenth century, nor the prophet of modern sexual freedom celebrated by some in the twentieth century. It was, rather, a character existing but undisclosed before 1847 because, in its compound of passionate feeling, ardent thought, and thirst for action, it had not found the people and the occasion to release it whole. Fuller was eloquent on her opportunity. "It was no false instinct that said I might here find an atmosphere to develop me in ways I need. Had I only come ten years earlier!" she wrote, adding, "So much strength has been wasted on abstractions, which only came because I grew not in the right soil." The change in Fuller emerged sharply in her

transformation of a word indispensable to the transcendentalists. To Channing she wrote that "famous people" and "magnificent shows and places are only to me an illuminated margin on this text of my inward life." As the "inward life" was earlier implicitly transcendent, so now it was implicitly immanent, rooted in the material and the actual. This inward life required Fuller to turn from American idealism to the realities that Italy proffered: to respond to simple intimacy, to master the language of the "common people," to learn to economize, Roman style, and to discover as a participant the "great future" of Italy. In this rejection of art for the people of Rome, and in her wish to grow with them in making a revolution, Fuller stood on its head the bias characteristic of almost all American visitors. They distinguished between "eternal Rome," the temple of art, and its apparently unrelated and unworthy race of custodians and tenants, renowned for theft, beggary, and voluble lying. When this ideal and static Rome erupted in revolution in 1848, these pilgrims were devastated and their reflexes were conservative. The Italian crowd—in which Fuller now loved to mingle, scenting in it the stuff of heroic struggle—became for them a frightening rabble. Consequently she confided to Greeley, "I suffer more than ever from all that is peculiarly American and English." It seems paradoxical that she longed for a "divorce" from the language itself at the very time that she was pouring it out in exhortations to her countrymen. The paradox dissolves when we see that her experience in Italy clarified for Fuller the source of her frustrations with America. At home she now saw none to honor but the abolitionists, to whom she apologized in the Tribune for having found them "rabid and exaggerated" in tone. Except for them, she felt that the "spirit of America flares no more" in America, but had

302 I AMERICAN leaped the ocean to blaze in Italy. So, until 1850, she refused the entreaties of Emerson and her family to repatriate because she had most to say to Americans from Italy. This refusal speaks for the ways in which Fuller now repudiated Emerson's perspective. At stake was more than the rejection of the life of the mind for the life of action. She and Emerson now differed over nothing less than the relation of the individual to American destiny, the autonomy of that destiny, and their understanding of national growth. Emerson's identification of the individual's convictions with the "universal sense" of Americans, of the private dream with the national dream, despite the excitement it generated, could pose no critical cutting edge to established society. Fuller's rapport with the Italian revolutionaries signified the fundamental abandonment of her attempt to be a "representative" American in Emerson's sense, her acceptance of her otherness, and her wish to use that otherness to rescue an American essence that was being betrayed at home. For Emerson the greatness of America depended on her extracting "this tapeworm of Europe from the brain of our countrymen," on the achievement of an autonomy that was tantamount to national isolation. Fuller now denied the mythic specialness and autonomy of American destiny; she offered the actual struggle of a foreign people as a guide to completing the American Revolution and entering a brotherhood of nations. For Emerson growth of the nation, like that of the self-reliant individual, derived from a beneficent American nature. For Fuller it derived pragmatically from many dynamic processes; nations change under the pressure of challenges posed by other societies. So Fuller remained in Italy, held there by personal as well as political exigencies. In January 1848, when uprisings began to flare like a string of firecrackers lacing Europe, Fuller, nearly thirty-eight and chronically ill, discovered that she was pregnant. The prospect of sur-

WRITERS

vival was scarcely less fearsome than death, for Ossoli's marriage to a foreign Protestant radical would be illegal, and probably would be impossible without much more money than they had; moreover, Fuller had by then great reservations about marriage. She turned with relief from the impasse of the private struggle to the exhilaration of the public one. She devoured the news of the February revolution in Paris, the March rising in Vienna, and especially the "Five Glorious Days" in Milan when the Austrian garrison was expelled. "It is a time such as I always dreamed of," she wrote, and she began to contemplate becoming its historian. Meanwhile, for the Tribune she wrote acidly of the folly of a nationalist pope and a republican king. The behavior of Pius IX and Charles Albert bore out Fuller's predictions. The Italian in Pius IX blessed the troops marching to Milan from the papal states, and a month later the pope in him disavowed war against the Austrian Catholics. Charles Albert, or "Re Tentenna" ("King Wobbly"), refused to trust Giuseppe Garibaldi and his gaudy legion, and went to defeat. By summer it was over, and counterrevolution ruled Europe. Seeking seclusion, ostensibly to write her history, Fuller was then in the Abruzzi mountains. She awaited with equal anxiety the birth of her child and news of her radical friends in reconquered Milan. (Thus a letter to Ossoli begins by raging, "Oh! how unworthy the Pope is!... And this traitor of a Carlo Alberto! they'll be damned for all the centuries to come," and ends "I love you in these important days better than ever. The moon has been so beautiful these last nights, it has pained me not to have your company.") Angelo Eugenio Filippo Ossoli was born September 5,1848, in the village of Rieti. Though her joy in motherhood was unforeseen and overwhelming, Fuller's need actively to support the revolution made her leave the child two months later with a wet nurse in the hills. She rejoined

MARGARET FULLER / 303 Ossoli in Rome just in time to celebrate in the pages of the Tribune the murder of the pope's dictatorial minister Pellegrino Rossi, the ensuing flight to Naples of the terrified pope, and the noble behavior of the Romans in the first flush of self-determination. On the eve of the declaration of the Roman Republic in February 1849, Fuller begged America—through the Tribune—to send a sensitive and statesmanlike ambassador, adding, "Another century and I might ask to be made Ambassador myself." Even after Mazzini returned to Rome as one of the presiding triumvirs of the new republic, the cautious United States sent only a charge d'affaires. Then France, in the full sway of reaction, sent its army to defeat the isolated Rome. "We will wait, whisper the nations, and see if they can bear it," wrote Fuller scornfully. "//* they can do without us, we will help them." During the long siege of June, while news about her child was cut off and the last Americans fled Rome, Fuller stayed with Ossoli, who now commanded a battery. The sight of Rome under bombardment, Mazzini's suffering, and the wounded made her "forget the great ideas" and confess that she was not of the heroic "mould." But she insisted on spending what she thought would be the last night of the Roman Republic with Ossoli at his post, and she worked long hours to organize one of the hospitals in Rome. In this role she subverted the official detachment of her country and acted as ambassador for the potential America that she kept urging to life in Tier dispatches. In all this she was a faithful supporter of Mazzini and heir to an American revolution that few others, despite their rhetoric, saw as a living force in the world. But there was a moment in 1848 when she went beyond both these sources and the Utopian socialists as well. She saw in the February revolution in Paris the struggle of classes, and welcomed the merging of social with political revolution though it

would "break many a bank, many a heart, in Europe." She held up this ominous model to her American readers, urging them to "learn in time for a preventative wisdom" how to forge a "true democracy" by guarding the "true aristocracy of a nation," the "laboring classes." That spring even Mazzini failed Fuller. She wrote that his vision of political liberation, unaccompanied by broader social transformations, was inadequate. Then, in the need to defend the beleaguered Roman Republic, she suspended all criticism. But after Rome fell—when Fuller, Ossoli, and their child moved in the autumn of 1849 to exile in Florence—she seems to have picked up the threads of a broader social critique. In Florence she returned mentally to Paris. "There is the cream of all the milk," she had written. Now she studied what had happened in its more critical revolution, examining both its liberal sources in Alphonse de Lamartine and its socialist roots in Louis Blanc. This work suggests that she was preparing to write something more broadly historical and possibly more theoretical than her impressions of the Italian struggle. Fuller's private experience also fed her thinking. There is no minimizing her loss. "Private hopes of mine are fallen with the hopes of Italy. I have played for a new stake and lost it," she wrote. Had the Roman Republic triumphed, work for Fuller and Ossoli might have emerged and continued to give form to their lives. But even defeated and living in a Florence again in despotic hands, facing a future emptied of promise, Fuller and Ossoli tasted a happiness that probably neither had known since childhood. Fuller wrote of the "power and sweetness" of Ossoli's presence, and rejoiced in the "unimpassioned" love of the child: "It does not idealize," she wrote with hard-won wisdom, "and cannot be daunted by the faults of its object." Nothing but a child "can take the worst bitterness out of life." Ossoli's love also freed Fuller for self-

304 I AMERICAN WRITERS acceptance, from the curse of "anticipating" her life. Writing to Channing, she distinguished between those like him, who "loved me with a mixture of fancy and enthusiasm, excited by my talent at embellishing life," and Ossoli, who "loves me from simple affinity." Most illuminatingly she compares the tenderness of Ossoli's love for her with that of her mother, and expresses confidence that those two, in particular, will love each other when they meet. Yet there were problems surrounding Fuller's proudly laconic announcement of her marriage and motherhood in the summer of 1849. Her friends begged her for details but to no avail; others were gossiping about "a Fourierist or Socialist marriage, without the external ceremony." In his notebook for the Memoirs, Emerson wrote "1847 ... married perhaps in Oct., Nov, or Dec," then canceled the "perhaps." No document or reliable account survives. Fuller was either lying and avoiding embroidery as much as possible, or telling the truth in such a way as to signal the unorthodox view she held of her union and to fend off the stifling initiation into "true womanhood." Ossoli's lack of intellectuality did not bother her, but she knew that "to many of my friends, Mr. Emerson for one, he will be nothing." She held advanced notions of freedom: "Our relation covers only a part of my life," but "I do not feel constrained or limited." She thought that Ossoli, being younger, might come to love another; in such a case "I shall do all that this false state of society permits to give him what freedom he may need. I have thought a great deal about this." Intrigued but not convinced by Brook Farm during her American years, Fuller had shown increasing interest in Fourierism in Europe. Her inquiries during her last year about the North American Phalanx in Red Bank, New Jersey—where the "relation of the sexes" was a question freely to be settled "by woman herself"—suggest that she might have considered

living there to correct in some measure this "false state of society." In the 1840's two notions of socialism—organization of the working class and reorganization of the family—lay, as it were, side by side in the cradle. It is barely possible that Fuller meant to bring both notions together in her book, in which case its loss is greater than generally imagined and Mrs. Browning's fear about wolves quite justified. As it was, the little family was dogged by fear of police surveillance and poverty; and Fuller, the breadwinner, felt she could no longer rely on presents and loans. Her work for the Tribune had, inexplicably, stopped. She had played out her hand. She believed that her book was the most important project she had undertaken, and that it would best be sold by her in America. She knew they would face "the social inquisition of the United States"; that she was too tired for the "pain of conquest"; and that Ossoli, like her, had a superstitious dread of sea travel. Moreover, on the eve of her departure in May, her most forward-looking friends, the Springs—in consultation with Emerson and Channing—urged her to remain in Italy. All the signals were clear: the person Fuller had become could not return to America. The long trajectory of her short life was not circular. To respect herself, she had first had to use what was at hand in America, to go the route of idealism, transcendence of the material aspects of her condition. When this had made her strong enough, Fuller left New England and in New York began to apply her energy more directly to the material reality of her self and her world. But her repressed or diverted sexuality and her dependence on notions of divinely ordained national destiny show that she was still subject to American limitations of mind. Only in Italy did Fuller learn that love, made of generous commitment to the autonomy of both persons, had been obscured by her obsession with ideal passion, and that the need to recast relations be-

MARGARET FULLER / 305 tween sexes and between classes had been obscured by the proud idealism of her country. Only now could she come to understand the meaning of her most intimate prayer, "Give me truth: cheat me by no illusion." Even Fuller's death still calls out for interpretation. We know that during the twelve hours between the time the ship struck the sands off Fire Island and the time it was submerged, she was on deck watching some swim safely to shore and others drown. We know that she repeatedly refused to save herself. We know that she saw the lifeboat brought to the beach by people unwilling to risk a rescue. We may imagine that they reminded her sharply that none in America had run the risks she had run. We know that she said to the ship's cook, "I see nothing but death before me." We cannot know if she was speaking of her immediate extremity or her larger condition. Reports conflict, and we do not know whether at the last she tried to swim ashore, clinging to a board. We know that Emerson wrote in his journal, on receiving news of her death, "I have lost in her my audience," failing thus to know how many years earlier he had suffered that loss. As for her audience, it remained to be created.

Selected Bibliography WORKS OF MARGARET FULLER

Summer on the Lakes in 1843. Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1844. Reprinted Nieuwkoup: B. De Graaf, 1972. Woman in the Nineteenth Century and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition and Duties of Woman, edited by Arthur B. Fuller. Boston: John P. Jewett, 1845. Reprinted Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1972. Woman in the Nineteenth Century reprinted separately New York: W. W. Norton, 1971. Papers on Literature and Art. New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1846. Reprinted New York: AMS Press, 1972. At Home and Abroad, or Things and Thoughts in America and Europe, edited by Arthur B. Fuller. Boston: Crosby, Nichols, 1856. Reprinted Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1971. Life Without and Life Within, edited by Arthur B. Fuller. Boston: Brown, laggard, and Chase, 1860. Love-Letters of Margaret Fuller, 1845-46. Introduction by Julia Ward Howe. New York: D. Appleton, 1903. Reprinted Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1969. The Dial: A Magazine for Literature, Philosophy, and Religion. 4 vols. New York: Russell and Russell, 1961. (Contains many of Fuller's writings.)

ANTHOLOGIES Chevigny, Bell Gale. The Woman and the Myth: Margaret Fuller's Life and Writings. Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1976. (Also contains six critical biographical essays and writings on Fuller by her contemporaries.) Miller, Perry. Margaret Fuller: American Romantic. New York: Doubleday, 1963. Reprinted Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1970. Wade, Mason, ed. The Writings of Margaret Fuller. New York: Viking Press, 1941.

BIBLIOGRAPHIES

SEPARATE WORKS

Conversations with Goethe in the Last Years of His Life, Translated from the German ofEckermann. Boston: Milliard, Gray, 1839. Gunderode;A Translation from the German. Boston: E. P. Peabody, 1842.

Myerson, Joel. Margaret Fuller: A Secondary Bibliography. New York: Burt Franklin, 1977. . Margaret Fuller: A Descriptive Bibliography. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1978.

306 I AMERICAN WRITERS BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL STUDIES Allen, Margaret V. The Achievement of Margaret Fuller. University Park: Penn State University Press, 1979. Anthony, Katharine. Margaret Fuller: A Psychological Biography. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Howe, 1920. Reprinted Folcroft, Pa.: Folcroft Press, 1969. Blanchard, Paula. Margaret Fuller: From Transcendentalism to Revolution. New York: Delacorte/ Seymour Lawrence, 1978. Braun, Frederick A. Margaret Fuller and Goethe. New York: Henry Holt, 1910. Brown, Arthur W. Margaret Fuller. United States Authors series. New York: Twayne, 1964. Cargill, Oscar. "Nemesis and Nathaniel Hawthorne." PMLA, 52:848-62 (Summer 1937). Chevigny, Bell. "The Long Arm of Censorship: Mythmaking in Margaret Fuller's Time and Our Own." Signs, 2:450-60 (Winter 1976). Conrad, Susan Phinney. Perish the Thought: Intellectual Women in Romantic America, 1830-1860. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976. Dall, Caroline Healey. Margaret and Her Friends, or Ten Conversations with Margaret Fuller upon the Mythology of the Greeks. Boston: Roberts Bros., 1895. Deiss, Joseph Jay. The Roman Years of Margaret Fuller. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1969. Detti, Emma. Margaret Fuller Ossoli e i suoi correspondents Florence: Le Monnier, 1942. Douglas, Ann. The Feminization of American Culture. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977. Memoirs of Margaret fuller Ossoli., edited by R. W. Emerson, W. H. Channing, and J. F. Clarke. 2 vols. Boston: Philips, Sampson, 1852. Reprinted New York: Burt Franklin, 1972. Higginson, Thomas Wentworth. Margaret Fuller Ossoli. American Men of Letters series. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1884.

Howe, Julia Ward. Margaret Fuller. Boston: Roberts Bros., 1883. James, Henry. William Wetmore Story and His Friends. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1903. Jones, Alexander. "Margaret Fuller's Attempt to Write Fiction." Boston Public Library Quarterly, 6:67-73 (April 1954). Kearns, Francis E. "Margaret Fuller and the Abolition Movement." Journal of the History of Ideas, 25:120-27 (January-March 1964). McMaster, Helen Neill. "Margaret Fuller as Literary Critic." University of Buffalo Studies, 7:35100 (December 1928). Myerson, Joel. "Margaret Fuller's 1842 Journal: At Concord with the Emersons." Harvard Library Bulletin, 21:320-40 (July 1973). Randel, W. P. "Hawthorne, Channing, and Margaret Fuller." American Literature, 10:472-79 (January 1939). Rostenberg, Leona. "Margaret Fuller's Italian Diary." Journal of Modern History, 12:209-20 (June 1940). Stern, Madeleine B. The Life of Margaret Fuller. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1942. Strauch, Carl F. "Hatred's Swift Repulsions: Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Others." Studies in Romanticism, 7:65-103 (Winter 1968). Wade, Mason. Margaret Fuller: Whetstone of Genius. New York: Viking Press, 1940. Warfel, Harry R. "Margaret Fuller and Ralph Waldo Emerson." PMLA, 50:576-94 (June 1935). Welliscz, Leopold. The Friendship of Margaret Fuller df Ossoli and Adam Mickiewicz. New York: Polish Book Importing Co., 1947. Welter, Barbara. Dimity Convictions: The American Woman in the Nineteenth Century. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1976.

-BELL GALE CHEVIGNY

Allen Ginsberg 1926-

I

"Ginsberg, this poem 'Howl' will make you famous in San Francisco," shouted Jack Kerouac after that historic first reading in 1955. "No," corrected San Francisco poet-patriarch Kenneth Rexroth, "this poem will make you famous from bridge to bridge." But "Howl" made Ginsberg famous around the world. Without "Howl" and the notoriety it received when it was ill-advisedly seized and prosecuted as an obscene book by U. S. Customs and San Francisco police in 1956, Ginsberg's other poems might never have been published. Almost surely Ginsberg would never have burgeoned so grandly as public personality-guru-prophetpaterfamilias-spokesman for several generations of beats, hippies, war protestors, environmentalists, and counterculturists of various sorts. "Howl" is a volcanic eruption, a breakthrough in the cultural crust, a turning point in the life of the poet and American poetry. It is an "eli eli lamma lamma sabactahani saxophone cry" of the "suffering of America's naked mind for love" and a passionate throwing-off of the guilt and self-hatred imposed by a culture whose proper image is Moloch, that ancient Hebrew deity who demanded blood sacrifices of the young. But while "Howl" purports to speak for a mid-1950's generation of American youth suf-

n 1855 in "Song of Myself," Walt Whitman promised he would "become undisguised and naked" and "permit to speak at every hazard, / Nature without check with original energy." Almost exactly 100 years after Whitman's startling personal declaration of independence, Allen Ginsberg stood before a lively crowd of friends at the Six Gallery in San Francisco and passionately declaimed a new song of the self, a poem that had to be howled instead of sung, about a self that had to be retrieved from madness before it could be celebrated. Whereas Whitman could proclaim and celebrate a transcendent self in a healthy universe ("Clear and sweet is my soul, and clear and sweet is all that is not my soul"), Ginsberg had first to confess and reclaim a perverted and nearly annihilated self from the ravages of an insane world: "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, / dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawiv looking for an angry fix, / angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night...." "Howl" created a shock wave in American poetry and culture, but it was only a first noisy step in Allen Ginsberg's lifelong struggle to "become undisguised and naked" and to "permit to speak at every hazard" his own nature, however strange.

307

308 I AMERICAN fering in a "lacklove" nightmare of "robot apartments" and "demonic industries," such a generation did not actually emerge until the Vietnam war years in the middle 1960's. If poets are, as Ezra Pound claimed, "the antennae of the race," then Ginsberg's antennae need not have been uncommonly long to have described the '60's Zeitgeist a mere ten years early; but in fact "Howl" is a uniquely personal poem dealing primarily with the poet's own past. While a few of the relative clauses of the single long sentence of part I do refer to a narrow circle of friends (Peter Orlovsky, Jack Kerouac, Carl Solomon, Herbert Huncke, Lucien Carr, William Burroughs, and Neal Cassady), most are thinly veiled autobiography. It is Ginsberg himself who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war, who were [was] expelled from the academies [Columbia] for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull, who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telepathy and bop kaballa because the cosmos instinctively vibrated at their [his] feet in Kansas, . . . who thought they were [he was] only mad when Baltimore [Harlem] gleamed in supernatural ecstasy,

who lost their [his] loveboys to the three old shrews of fate . . .

who were [was] burned alive in their [his] innocent flannel suits on Madison avenue amid blasts of leaden verse . . .

WRITERS

who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who came back to Denver & waited in vain,... who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed,... to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet confessing out the soul.... "Howl" is not, then, about the best minds of a generation but about the "majestic flaws" of Ginsberg's own mind. "Howl" is a poem of pathology, and the pathology was at least as much private as public. Assuredly, there was madness enough in the complacent 1950's, but it was usually corked tight. The tongue tied in our mouth began to be loosened in Ginsberg's primarily because Moloch had visited him more terribly. In separate prefaces to Howl and Other Poems (1956) and Empty Mirror, Early Poems (1961), William Carlos Williams speaks of Ginsberg's poetry as a trip through hell and marvels that Ginsberg ever survived to write a book of poems. If we are ever adequately to understand a poetry so unabashedly confessional and obsessed, we will have to look unblinkingly at the private hell that Ginsberg has had to live through. Allen Ginsberg was born in Paterson, New Jersey, the son of Louis and Naomi Ginsberg, on June 3, 1926. His father, a high school English teacher with modest poetic talents in the tradition of Longfellow and Whittier, was a man of fairly orthodox and limited mind. His mother, a Russian emigree and a political activist in her youth, became irrevocably insane during Ginsberg's formative years. According to his own frank and compassionate portrait of her

ALLEN GINSBERG / 309 in Kaddish and Other Poems. 1958-1960 (1961), she was a paranoid schizophrenic who believed she was in danger from assassins and was spied upon and plotted against by Stalinists, Hitlerians, and members of her own family: 'Allen, you don't understand—it's—ever since those 3 big sticks up my back—they did something to me in Hospital, they poisoned me, they want to see me dead—3 big sticks, 3 big sticks— The Bitch! Old Grandma! Last week I saw her, dressed in pants like an old man, with a sack on her back, climbing up the brick side of the apartment 4 On the fire escape, with poison germs, to throw on me—at night—maybe Louis is helping her—he's under her power—' In the home, her careless nakedness and seemingly seductive conduct became a source of severe conflict and obsession for her son: One time I thought she was trying to make me come lay her—flirting to herself at sink— lay back on huge bed that filled most of the room, dress up round her hips, big slash of hair, scars of operations, pancreas, belly wounds, abortions, appendix, stitching of incisions pulling down in the fat like hideous thick zippers— ragged long lips between her legs— The boy is "revolted a little, not much— seemed perhaps a good idea to try—know the Monster of the Beginning Womb—Perhaps— that way. Would she care? She needs a lover." Numerous poems connect Ginsberg's fear of women with obsessive memories of his mother—"I can't stand these women all over me / smell of Naomi," he writes in "Mescaline"—and the only set of asterisks in "Howl"

("With mother finally ******,") almost implores the reader to infer actual incest. At age twelve Ginsberg had the traumatic experience of escorting his screaming, hallucinating mother on a five-hour bus trip to a Lakewood, New Jersey, rest home. Returning to Paterson alone late at night, Ginsberg "Went to bed exhausted, wanting to leave the world (probably that year / newly in love with R my high school mind hero " Ginsberg later followed "R " to Manhattan and Columbia University, where he met and confessed his love for Jack Kerouac. The heterosexual Kerouac, who was playing on the Columbia football team at the time, . . . was very handsome, very beautiful, and mellow—mellow in the sense of infinitely tolerant, like Shakespeare or Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, infinitely understanding his tolerance gave me permission to open up and talk He wasn't going to hit me. He wasn't going to reject me, really, he was going to accept my soul with all its throbbings and sweetness and worries and dark woes and sorrows and heartaches and joys and glees and mad understanding of mortality But, if we are to believe the myth that Ginsberg builds everywhere in his supposedly naked poetry, it was with Neal Cassady that Ginsberg began an exuberant odyssey of heroic love. However, it is not heroic love that the early Cassady-Ginsberg correspondence reveals but a tense and often brutal symbiosis. Cassady, the irrepressible, fun-loving, fast-moving "cocksman and Adonis of Denver" in Ginsberg's poems and Kerouac's novels, is here quite out of his element—self-conscious, nervous, defensive, and clearly not telling the whole truth. He is troubled that he doesn't feel for Allen the genuine love that Ginsberg so desperately needs; he fears that he may be unable to love anyone; he tries to talk himself into believing this "objec-

310 I AMERICAN WRITERS tivity of emotionality" has enabled him "to move freely in each groove as it came" and thus proves he is not dangerously and parasitically dependent on Allen: "I've brought this out so you can see an example of my lack of compulsive, emotional need for anyone." Ginsberg is the soul-genius who will educate and sensitize NeaPs spirit; but the more experienced Cassady is in the driver's seat physically and is scarcely able to conceal a patronizing attitude toward the tortured young man who "trembles" for love ("Love & Kisses, my boy, opps!, excuse, I'm not Santa Claus am I? Well then, justLove & Kisses"). When the inevitable break finally came at the end of 1947 (after Ginsberg had "journeyed to Denver," "died in Denver," and come "back to Denver & waited in vain"), Allen abjectly begged Neal for the love he so desperately believed in and needed: You know you are the only one who gave me love that I wanted and never had What must I do for you to get you back? I will do anything. Any indecencies any revelations any creation, any miseries, will they please you I mean to bend my mind that knows it can destroy you to any base sordid level of adoration and masochistic abnegation that you desire or taunt me with.... I hate & fear you so much that I will do anything to win your protection again, and your mercy. I am lonely, Neal, alone, and always I am frightened. I need someone to love me and kiss me & sleep with me; I am only a child and have the mind of a child I have always been obedient & respectful, I have adjusted my plans to yours, my desires to your own pattern, and now I do ask—I pray—please neal, my neal, come back to me, don't waste me, don't leave me. I don't want to suffer any more, I have had my mind broken open over and over before, I have been isolate and loveless always. I have not slept with anyone since I saw you not because I was

faithful but because I am afraid and I know no one. I will always be afraid I will always be worthless, I will always be alone till I die and I will be tormented long after you leave me. Such letters illuminate Ginsberg's poetry more than any number of interviews and critical analyses. This isolation, fear, self-disgust, and extraordinary hunger for love lie everywhere at the heart of his work. After the break with Cassady, Ginsberg endured long months of severe depression and isolation alone in a Harlem apartment. His friends were all temporarily out of touch—Burroughs was in Mexico, Huncke in jail, Kerouac holed up on Long Island writing a novel, and Cassady in California about to get married. Ginsberg's mother had once again been incarcerated in a mental hospital. In the midst of this dark night of the soul, unable to act, near catatonia or suicide, Ginsberg was masturbating in his bed one afternoon, idly looking over William Blake's "Sick Rose" and "Ah, Sunflower," when he suddenly began to understand the poems and simultaneously "heard a very deep earthen grave voice in the room," which he immediately assumed was Blake's own voice. It was as if God spoke tenderly to his son: Ginsberg's body "felt light, and a sense of cosmic consciousness, vibrations, understanding, awe, and wonder and surprise." Looking out the window, he "saw into the depths of the universe, by looking simply into the ancient sky. The sky suddenly seemed very ancient. And this was the very ancient place that he [Blake] was talking about, the sweet golden clime, I suddenly realized that this existence was ft/" Ginsberg saw the "living hand" in the blue of the sky and the craftsmanship of the carved cornices of Harlem, and understood that "existence itself was God." This was the initiation into consciousness that he was born for, and he vowed that he would "never forget, never renig [sic], never deny. Never deny the voice—no, never forget

ALLEN GINSBERG / 311 it, don't get lost mentally wandering in other spirit worlds or American or job worlds or advertising worlds or war worlds or earth worlds." But Ginsberg does seem to forget, or at least repeatedly to mistranslate and misapply the Blakean message that this world is the "sweet golden clime." Instead of turning to love of the world, Ginsberg turned to the quest of the mystical experience itself and to the use of drugs as "obviously a technique for experimenting with consciousness." In an early poem (1948-1952) of Empty Mirror ("The Terms in Which I Think of Reality"), Ginsberg reminds himself that "Time is Eternity" and that a first step toward adjusting to "Reality" is "realizing how real / the world is already." But although he can view the flux and variety of the world as marvelous and will in time learn to be its skillful cataloger (never with Whitman's expansive joy), the world is so full of unpleasant detail that he is "overwhelmed" and turns to "dream again of Heaven." The inescapable fact for Ginsberg is that "the world is a mountain / of shit" and the human predicament is unfortunate at best: Man lives like the unhappy whore on River Street who in her Eternity gets only a couple of bucks and a lot of snide remarks in return for seeking physical love the best way she knows how, never really heard of a glad job or joyous marriage or a difference in the heart: or thinks it isn't for her, which is her worst misery. Among Ginsberg's special miseries was his arrest and prosecution in 1948 as an accomplice to Huncke, drug addict and thief, who had moved in with the hospitable student and used

his New York apartment to stash stolen goods. Ginsberg managed to escape a jail sentence by pleading insanity (he had talked to Blake and seen God!) and spending eight months in the Columbia Psychiatric Institute. The poems of Ginsberg's troubled early years (1948-1952) are gathered in Empty Mirror (1961) and The Gates of Wrath; Rhymed Poems (1972). The rhymed poems of the latter show us not the wild madman-prophet-orgiast of "Howl" and later poetry, but the Columbia honor student and English major, the cleanshaven, youthful Dr. Jekyll desperately busy keeping Mr. Hyde locked in the basement with meter and rhyme. They are neither very honest nor very good poems. Among them are several written to Neal Cassady. Carefully avoiding gender pronouns and explicit sexuality, they speak in all-too-familiar love-poem abstractions and cliches—"my heart was broken in your care; / I never suffered love so fair" ("A Western Ballad"). When they do deal in particulars, as in "Do We Understand Each Other?" they reveal a twenty-two-yearold poet who is as silly as a thirteen-year-old: My love was at the wheel, And in and out we drove. My own eyes were mild. How my love merrily Dared the other cars to rove: Sexual content is disguised and anesthetized by polysyllabic abstraction and contorted syntax, as in "A Lover's Garden": As seconds on the clock do move, Each marks another thought of love; Thought follows thought, and we devise Each minute to antithesize, Till, as the hour chimes its tune, Dialectic, we commune. The argument our minds create We do, abed, substantiate....

312 I AMERICAN WRITERS Considering the repression and dishonesty of such poems, it is easy to understand Ginsberg's subsequent turn to a spontaneous poetics that refuses revision and seeks to record the "naked activity" of the mind. "Now if you are thinking of 'form' or even the Veil made poem' or a sonnet when you're lying on the couch, you'll never say what you have on your mind." In a few poems truth threatens to break through as a "shroudy stranger" or "shadow." According to Carl Jung, there is in each of us an archetypal "darker brother" who must be recognized and embraced if we are to achieve psychic health and wholeness. In contemporary Western culture, that shadow or repressed self is almost always associated with the body and the libido; the "bright self" or public persona is usually associated with the head and rational faculties. The shadow figures in Ginsberg's poems are beyond his understanding and control, and seem full of unconscious contents relating to his ambivalent feelings about his own body. Ginsberg consciously connects the "stranger" who haunts his dreams with the voice of the Blake visions, with the presence of God, and with his own desire to die. Thus the Blake of the auditory hallucinations sometimes seems to be Ginsberg's alter ego, one who asks the young poet in "Psalm" to convert the energy of his Harlem pentecost into substance or "bone." I saw it here, The Miracle, which no man knows entire, Nor I myself. But shadow is my prophet, I cast a shadow that surpasses me, And I write, shadow changes into bone Sometimes the shadow seems to be the Divine One hiding inside Ginsberg and looking out through his eyes: "What a sweet dream! to be some incorruptible / Divinity, corporeal without a name, / Suffering metamorphosis of flesh" ("Psalm"). While both of these interpre-

tations of the dream shadow point Ginsberg toward the need to accept his life in the real world, he characteristically strays into longing for death because he "cannot go be wild / or barken back to shape of child" ("Ode: My 24th Year"). Though the Harlem vision told him this was it, he persists in "Psalm" in wanting the it without the this: Ah, but to have seen the Dove of still Divinity come down in silken light of summer sun In ignorance of the body and bone's madness. Given Ginsberg's desire to pass from the world into pure vision or pure voice, and given his desperate and frustrated hunger for physical tenderness and love, it is perhaps inevitable that the dream figures should suggest the homoerotic attractiveness of death. The dream stranger in "A Dream" is sometimes a pale boy with beautiful hair and eyes "Walking in a winding sheet, / As fair as was my own disguise" who invites the dreamer to follow him safely "through the grave": "And we will walk the double door That breaks upon the ageless night, Where I have come, and must once more Return, and so forsake the light." The darkness that is half disguised In the Zodiac of my dream Gazed on me in his bleak eyes.... Ginsberg is both attracted and frightened, tempted and repulsed by those bleak eyes. Either suicide or homosexuality means death; death by one is but a means of avoiding death by the other. Ginsberg would rather die than live with that dark self, but death and that self already seem inextricably fused. Sometimes, as in "The Shrouded Stranger," it appears as a nightstalker with reddened eye who follows old men and young boys and peeps in at windows

ALLEN GINSBERG / 313 ready to take with him anyone who would succumb to his strange attraction: Maid or dowd or athlete proud May wanton with me in the shroud Who'll come lay down in the dark with me Belly to belly and knee to knee Who'll look into my hooded eye Who'll lay down under my darkened thigh? Ginsberg's dreams are haunted because he cannot accept the dark self that his unfortunate childhood created in him but which society will not bless. As late as 1963, in "The Change: Kyoto-Tokyo Express," he admits that he has always denied his "own shape's loveliness" and felt his sexual desire "to be horrible instead of Him." Thus despite the dream stranger's attractive connection to Blake or God, or death, Ginsberg wrestled with him as a fearful adversary who "holds me in his keep / and seeks the bones that he must find"; who "cries out in my name; / he struggles for my writhing frame" ("The Voice of Rock"). If the early rhymed poems conceal Ginsberg, the more prosaic journal jottings of Empty Mirror reveal him. These are not poems so much as desperate notes to the self: I feel as if I am at a dead end and so I am finished. All spiritual facts I realize are true but I never escape the feeling of being closed in and the sordidness of self, the futility of all that I have seen and done and said. Maybe if I continued things would please me more but now I have no hope and I am tired. In these last lines and elsewhere Ginsberg urges himself to adjust and "make a home in

wilderness" ("A Desolation"), but he can experience life only as "A Meaningless Institution" wherein he has been given "a bunk in an enormous ward / surrounded by hundreds of weeping, / decaying men and women," and abandoned without friends or instructions. No matter how much he lectures himself as he does in "Metaphysics" ("This is the one and only / firmament; therefore / it is the absolute world. / There is no other world. / The circle is complete. / I am living in Eternity. / The ways of this world / are the ways of Heaven"), he cannot make his peace with "ruinous, vile, dirty Time." In "Walking home at night" he thinks of himself in company with obscure Bartlebys and Judes, cadaverous men, shrouded men, soft white fleshed failures creeping in and out of rooms like myself. Remembering my attic, I reached my hands to my head and hissed "Oh, God how horrible!" Oppressed by his sense of how ill he is, Ginsberg wonders in "Marijuana Notation" "Is it this strange / for everybody?" In "I Have Increased Power" he sees that his illness comes from having "no active life / in realworld"; his "dreamworld and realworld / become more and more / distinct and apart," but the real world contains no "consummation forseeable / in ideal joy or passion." "Tonite all is well" shows Ginsberg at the verge of breakdown: .. .1 am ill, I have become physically and spiritually impotent in my madness this month. I suddenly realized that my head is severed from my body....

314 I AMERICAN For Ginsberg and for all of us, this is a key perception. Ginsberg's may be a private pathology bordering on clinical hebephrenic schizophrenia, but it is shared to a greater or lesser degree by nearly everyone living in a highly systematized technological urban culture. It is closely related to the "dissociation of sensibility" that T. S. Eliot described in Western culture a halfcentury earlier, and which has become an increasingly important subject for a multitude of poets as widely different as John Crowe Ransom ("Painted Head"), Gary Snyder ("Milton by Firelight"), and Robert Bly ("A Man Writes to Part of Himself" and all of his work). Ginsberg's head has been severed from his body. The result, inevitably, is both spiritual and physical impotence, because all potency or power requires a yin-yang admixture or dynamic interchange. Moreover, such a "horizontal" cleavage does not occur without a "vertical," or lateral, bifurcation of the self as well. The "head" in Ginsberg is split between his consuming focus on intuitive mystical experience (Blake, God, eternity—"the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo") and his rigidly patterned superego posing as the rational, thinking self (the machinery in "the machinery of night"); the "body" is torn between the seething shadow of repressed feeling and its nearly catatonic shell, the practical self paralyzed in an empty, meaningless life. The dismembered Ginsberg cannot translate or convert his direct intuitive knowledge from the Blake visions into action or affection in the real world; his reason tells him "all spiritual facts are true," but they are inert and without mana; his feelings are condemned by his superego and fill him with disgust; and his sensations and practical abilities are numbed by the falseness of his life in the nine-to-five world. These mutilated, alienated "selves" roughly correspond to the four functions of the Jungian mandala (intuition, thinking, feeling, sensation); but the unify-

WRITERS

ing fifth or "transcendent function," the Self at the center, is missing. That is the Self that Whitman sang, joining body and soul, outer and inner, good and evil, male and female, animal and angel, in an erotic and mystical union. Ginsberg is "at a dead end," torn apart, one of the hollow men. He has no Self, and thus it is that the Empty Mirror is empty. The gods of his head and the daemons of his body are in conflict: the Old Testament, judging Father struggles against the benevolent "living hand" of the Blake visions; the dionysiac shadow is "burned alive" in the "flannel suit" of the market-research analyst. The superego and the id, the visionary and the "responsible" citizen are all in arms against one another. It should be no surprise, then, that "war" emerges as the primary metaphor of all of Ginsberg's poetry and that his poetry can best be understood as a lifelong search for the missing center, for the Self or Soul or Sacred Heart that bridges the gaps between mind and body, Eternity and Time. It is of course the classic work of poetry to put the severed self together again, to show that the Self and the world are the body of God, the Incarnate Word, and that the Self is not separate from but coextensive with the natural world. That precisely was Whitman's glorious achievement in "Song of Myself." In only one of Ginsberg's early "East Coast" poems does he find enough strength or enough self to confront and challenge the "realworld." In "Paterson" (1949) the line lengthens and the breath deepens. The poem moves as if the poet is at last on his feet, pacing his tenement room in anger, choosing for a change to condemn marketplace America rather than himself. Why should he try to fit in? What, after all, does he "want in these rooms papered with visions of money?" Why should he enter that "war" for such a "prize! the dead prick of commonplace obsession, / harridan vision of electricity at night and daylight misery of thumb-sucking

ALLEN GINSBERG / 315 rage" (a rather unpleasant portrait not only of the business world but of married life). He would rather go mad, take drugs, suffer any kind of crucifixion, "rather crawl on my naked belly over the tincans of Cincinnati; / rather drag a rotten railroad tie to a Golgotha in the Rockies." Here at last is the first tentative sound of the angry "Hebraic-Melvillean bardic" voice that will break forth in fury in "Howl." It is also the moment when Ginsberg begins to embrace the "beatness" and "beatitude" that comes from accepting one's failure to fit in and "make it" within the acceptable patterns and values of the dominant culture. Ginsberg has tried mightily to be straight and "normal" ("to tame the hart / and wear the bear"), but he has not succeeded. For more than twenty years he has blamed himself, introjecting the guilt for his unhappiness. In "Paterson" he looks outside himself to notice the enemy in the culture at large. In 1953 Ginsberg abandoned the emotionally dark environs of New York and New Jersey to travel, via Cuba and Yucatan, to a fresh beginning in San Francisco. Within the next year several important events radically altered his life. The first of these was his meeting with Peter Orlovsky, who is the subject of "Malest Cornifici Tuo Catullo" (Reality Sandwiches, 1953-60) and who would become his life companion: Fm happy, Kerouac, your madman Allen's finally made it: discovered a new young cat, and my imagination of an eternal boy walks on the streets of San Francisco, handsome, and meets me in cafeterias and loves me. Ah don't think I'm sickening. You're angry at me. For all of my lovers? It's hard to eat shit, without having visions; when they have eyes for me it's like Heaven. Ginsberg is still perhaps not equal to love (Peter is too easily lost in the "they" of the last

line), but he is clearly in love with being loved, and the physical tenderness and attention seem to validate and energize him. Nevertheless, he continues to seek escape from the everyday world (which he perceives as "eating shit") through visions and sex, and he fears and assumes the negative judgment of Kerouac. Ginsberg cannot accept the world or himself. In his own mind he is still really "meat-creephood." If the Moloch of "Howl," part II, is a "heavy judger of men," then Moloch exists as much inside Ginsberg as outside him. He is not only the reification of "mind" in the nation, but is also the disapproving father, Louis Ginsberg in Paterson, New Jersey, and the superego of Allen Ginsberg himself. But the relationship with Peter Orlovsky is the beginning of Moloch's overthrow. The second event that freed Ginsberg to write "Howl" is the session with a psychiatrist who, Ginsberg claims, "gave me the authority, so to speak, to be myself." (As James Breslin has noted, Ginsberg had not been able to give himself that permission.) He had previously consulted with a long procession of analysts, Freudians, Reichians, Jungians, Adlerians, and Sullivanians. After multiple sessions exploring Ginsberg's unhappiness, this psychiatrist asked simply, "What would you like to do? What is your desire really?" Ginsberg was almost too embarrassed to say. What he wanted to do was quit his job and never work again, to keep living with someone, "maybe even a man," and give himself completely to exploring visions and relationships. (In other words, to be lazy, immoral, and a failure in the eyes of the Father.) The psychiatrist's answer was simply, "Well, why don't you?" Ginsberg did. The result was "Howl." Ginsberg arranged to be fired from his job so that he could collect unemployment, moved into an apartment with Orlovsky, and one long weekend, with the aid of amphetamines and

316 I AMERICAN peyote, began to wail. "Howl" cannot be imitated. It has to be lived and suffered. It is not a creation of art but an event in the life of a man. It is a therapeutic disburdening, a shucking off and breaking free of guilt and self-hatred, an attempt to retrieve and affirm a self that had all but disappeared. It is a personal "confessing out the soul" and a cultural cleansing as well, because it named and to a degree exorcised some of the madness growing in everyone since the Industrial Revolution. In part II of "Howl" Ginsberg turns on his accuser; in open rebellion against the Father, he names and confronts the monster-God-machine who bashes open the skulls and eats up the brains and imagination of its children: Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb! Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smokestacks and antennae crown the cities! Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind! In the face of such a vicious God, the first and perhaps only act of affirmation available to us is to commit ourselves in friendship and sympathy to a fellow victim. This Ginsberg does in

WRITERS

part III in a litany of assurances to Carl Solomon, who had been his fellow inmate at Rockland State Mental Hospital: I'm with you in Rockland where we hug and kiss the United States under our bedsheets the United States that coughs all night and won't let us sleep I'm with you in Rockland where we wake up electrified out of the coma by our own souls' airplanes roaring over the roof they've come to drop angelic bombs the hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls collapse O skinny legions run outside O starry-spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is here O victory forget your underwear we're free In the love of these madmen-victims for each other, there is even a little tenderness left over for the body of Moloch himself, for the United States who is otherwise a rather sickly lay. And once the war against desire and the Self has been abandoned, the soul's weapons can be turned outward to the war against "walls" and repressions, and the Self can forget its underwear and be innocently naked. (It is as if the emaciated legions of Buchenwald and Auschwitz were suddenly liberated by Ginsberg's poetic air raid against der Ftihrer.) In "Footnote to Howl" (functionally "Howl," part IV), Ginsberg celebrates his escape from the concentration camps of Moloch and sings a long litany of praise proclaiming the holiness of all things: "Holy time in eternity holy eternity in time holy the clocks in space holy the fourth dimension holy the fifth International holy the Angel in Moloch!" Ginsberg's embrace of "time in eternity ... eternity in time" seems genuine here, as if for the moment his life with Orlovsky and his permission to be himself have lifted him to new self-acceptance and a sense of well-

ALLEN GINSBERG / 317 being. The poem and "Footnote" form a kind of Divine Comedy in which Ginsberg descends through the agonies of hell to face and name the satanic God wedged at the center of the vortex, before ascending the holy mountain of purgatory through his healing sympathy with Carl Solomon. The "Footnote" is the Paradiso of the piece, where Ginsberg seems to have achieved a new level of at-one-ment. "Howl" is easily Ginsberg's most important, passionate, and unified poem. Likewise, the nine shorter poems in Howl and Other Poems (1956) are generally superior to his later work. In "Sunflower Sutra" for example, Ginsberg is able to forget himself long enough to see with clear eyes "the gray Sunflower poised against the sunset, crackly bleak and dusty with the smut and smog and smoke of olden locomotives in its eye— / corolla of bleary spikes pushed down and broken like a battered crown, seed fallen out of its face, soon-to-be-toothless mouth of sunny air, ..." and can recognize its besmutted but beautiful blossom as an image of his own soul, which had once thought it was "an impotent dirty old locomotive" instead of a flower. "—We're not our skin of grime, we're not our dread bleak dusty imageless locomotive, we're all beautiful golden sunflowers inside. ..." This is for the poet not a trite preachment but an exciting discovery; there is a becoming innocence and boyish fascination caught in the spontaneous spill of language that names the trash and litter of urban ash heaps and finds an inextinguishable truth growing adamantly among it. In "America" too, the poet has gained enough emotional distance to attack the country's faults with humor, mimicking the foolishness of the public and the government and recognizing himself as a strange outsider with considerably different thoughts and "national resources": "My national resources consist of

two joints of marijuana millions of genitals an unpublishable private literature that goes 1400 miles an hour and twentyfive-thousand mental institutions." Ginsberg faults his country for its greed, mechanization, xenophobia, gullibility, exaggerated seriousness, puritanical morality, and enslavement to Time magazine, but pretends to take the country's fears and programs seriously and vows that he, too, had "better get right down to the job" and put his "queer shoulder to the wheel." Anyone who can thus attack evil is no longer so helplessly its victim. Even the insatiable hunger and preoccupation with physical love seem quieted and disciplined in this volume. In contrast to his later work, "Song" is almost understated: The warm bodies shine together in the darkness, the hand moves to the center of the flesh, ^he skin trembles in happiness and the soul comes joyful to the eye— yes, yes, that's what I wanted, I always wanted, I always wanted, to return to the body where I was born.

Whereas the "return to the body" that seems to be sought in other volumes is a retreat to infancy and the womb, an escape from life, here it seems almost a Whitmanesque realization of the body electric.

318 I AMERICAN The long lines of Howl and Other Poems mark a second major shift in Ginsberg's poetics. Beginning before Columbia and continuing into the early 1950's, Ginsberg had been fascinated with formally rhymed and metered poetry imitative of Donne, Marvell, Shakespeare, and others. As a boy he had accompanied his father to meetings of the Poetry Society of America and heard "mostly old ladies and second-rate poets" praise Longfellow while denouncing Pound, Eliot, and Williams. "Their highwater mark was, I guess, Edwin Arlington Robinson, 'Eros Turannos' was considered, I guess, the great highwater mark of twentieth-century poetry." According to Ginsberg, his poetic education did not fare much better at Columbia. There the "supreme literary touchstones" were John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate. The values were those defined by the New Criticism. Whitman "was considered like a creep." Pound was taught only as a "freak-out," and William Carlos Williams, who lived a few miles away from Ginsberg, was almost completely unknown. Williams was known to his fellow townsman, however. Ginsberg showed him his rhymed poems and was told that "in this mode perfection is^ basic" and these were not perfect. Williams advised the young poet to become a more careful and detailed observer and to record what he saw more simply and honestly. Looking back over his journals, Ginsberg discovered that there were such poems hidden in his jottings. The best of these discoveries is "The Brick Layer's Lunch Hour" (Empty Mirror), describing a young workman whom Ginsberg had watched fromliis apartment window. The poem shows Ginsberg's talents of observation and is refreshingly clean of the self-consciousness and concern of his other early poems. But all of the prosy short-line poems in Empty Mirror also show that Ginsberg had very little feel for "the variable foot" and poetic line of Williams. Moreover, while these clumsily divided short

WRITERS

lines might contain the feelings of the moribund East Coast poet, they could not contain the volatile emotions of the more robust Ginsberg of the West Coast. Although the more expansive, confessional impulse had always been strong in Ginsberg, he had never felt free to indulge it: "The beginning of the fear in me was, you know, what would my father say to something I would write." The spill of long lines in "Howl" was possible because Ginsberg never intended his father or any other judgers to see it ("I wouldn't want my daddy to see what was in there. About my sex life "): "I suddenly turned aside in San Francisco, unemployment compensation leisure, to follow my romantic inspiration—Hebraic-Melvillean bardic breath. I thought I wouldn't write a poem, but just write what I wanted to without fear, let my imagination go, open secrecy, and scribble magic lines from my real mind—sum up my life—something I wouldn't be able to show anybody, write for my own soul's ear and a few other golden ears." One of the "few other golden ears" he was writing for was Jack Kerouac, who Ginsberg knew would hear "the long saxophone-like chorus lines ... taking off from his own inspired prose line really a new poetry." Ginsberg was also shaping his sounds to ear echoes of Illinois Jacquet's "Can't Get Started," Lester Young's "89 choruses of Lady Be Good," as described by Kerouac, and "an extreme rhapsodic wail I once heard in a madhouse." The long line of "Howl" and Ginsberg's later poetry has its literary origins in William Blake's "Marriage of Heaven and Hell," Christopher Smart's "Jubilate Agno," and Whitman's Leaves of Grass; but it is also explained in part by physiology—the "neural impulses" and "the breathing and the belly and the lungs" of a poet whose "movement" and "feeling is for a big long clanky statement"; and perhaps in part by abnormal psychology—the oral and anal

ALLEN GINSBERG / 319 erotic's enjoyment of explosive purgations (see Edmund Wilson's "Morose Ben Jonson"). Subsequent volumes of poetry indicate that the wholeness or at-one-ment of Howl and Other Poems is at best only temporary and at worst perhaps more illusory than real. The seemingly unified self that speaks in these poems may be only a more simplified self, one in which the warring elements have suddenly been reduced from four to two. By abandoning his market research job and "straight" lifestyle, and by repudiating the mental Moloch, Ginsberg has cut away one half of the fragmented self ("sensation" and "thinking"), leaving only the mystic and the "darker brother" ("intuition" and "feeling"). Ginsberg has rejected the systematized moral world of mind and the organized practical world of work. What is left in too much of his later poetry is a Ginsberg who is interested in pure consciousness or pure meat, sainthood or sex, vision or venery. In this he is no different than in The Gates of Wrath or Empty Mirror, except that there his energy level is down, his movement slow, and his ambience small; after Howl and Other Poems his energy is high, his speed rocketing, and his orbit is the world. While I cannot agree with Reed Whittemore that the "Howl" stage of Ginsberg's career is calamitous, or anything other than healthy for poetry and American culture, it is easy to share some of his other concern that

is terror for me in their misconceptions of what inner fantasy-life can make of the stony world; and Ginsberg is one of the breeders of that terror. Saintly he may indeed be as a private sinner—I do not question his private credentials—but he has also been a most influential loudmouth, an eccentric evangelist for an apocalyptic faith (and aesthetic) that has in my opinion competed pretty well with Moloch in mind-destroying.

... this second stage in the Ginsberg saga has been even more calamitous than the "Howl" stage. The first had the genuineness of anger and despair about it—it was home grown and home felt—but the second has been clouded by great expectations, expectations that Ginsberg himself sometimes manages to temper with solid observations and with his striking deathobsession, but that his devotees infallibly leave raw: nirvana in the pad, nightly, forever. There

Ai! ai! we do worse! We are in a fix! And you're out, Death let you out, Death had the Mercy, you're done with your century, done with God, done with the path through it—Done with yourself at last—Pure—Back to the Babe dark before your Father, before us all— ..."

Only twice again in a long, prolific career does Ginsberg approach the power and significance of "Howl," and in each case—"Kaddish" and "Wichita Vortex Sutra"—he is pushed to powerful utterance by overwhelming emotions. Ginsberg's genius lies not in his craft (of which he claims to have none) but in the authenticity of his feelings. In the title poem of Kaddish and Other Poems the poet who had still felt a need to camouflage his biography behind the "best minds" of his generation in "Howl" confronts himself and his subject with an honesty that is at once brutal and compassionate. The first two long sections of "Kaddish" are meditations on death (and life) as well as stream-of-memory narrative detailings of his mother's madness and death. Death is "that remedy all singers dream of," a release from the dream where we are all trapped "sighing, screaming ... buying and selling pieces of phantom...."

But in spite of "all the accumulations of life, that wear us out," our tortured existences are significant, almost even beautiful, when seen

320 I AMERICAN with the intensity of Ginsberg's love for his mother: to have been here, and changed, like a tree, broken, or flower—fed to the ground— but mad, with its petals, colored, thinking Great Universe, shaken, cut in the head, leaf stript, hid in an egg crate hospital, cloth wrapped, sore—freaked in the moon brain, Naughtless. No flower like that flower, which knew itself in the garden, and fought the knife— lost.... A pivotal image in the poem (and for Ginsberg's life) lies in a letter written by his mother just before her death: "—2 days after her death I got her letter— / Strange Prophecies anew! She wrote—The key is in the window, the key is in the sunlight at the window—I have the key—Get married Allen don't take drugs—the key is in the bars, in the sunlight in the window.'" Paradoxically, Ginsberg's mad mother may indeed have had the key for him, a symbolical insight going well beyond the advice to give up drugs and homosexuality. The key is not in the bright sky or the darkness of the room but at the threshold where light enters the material house. But for Ginsberg the bars that stripe and pattern the light have become Moloch, bars that imprison and separate the visionary and erotic self. "The Lion for Real" offers a humorous account of Ginsberg's predicament after the Blake visions—the difficulty of telling his analyst and friends about the divine lion in his Harlem room. "To Aunt Rose" is a sympathetic identification with another lonely, buried self. The short-lined "Europe! Europe!" and the prophetic long-lined "Death to Van Gogh's Ear!" build on the war metaphor and continue the attack on Moloch. Most of the remaining poems of Kaddish and Other Poems are written under the influence of drugs—nitrous oxide, aya-

WRITERS

hausco, LSD, mescaline. Though their message may be (as Ginsberg claims) to "widen the area of consciousness," they do little to widen the reader's. "Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy" promises the subtitle-epigraph of Reality Sandwiches, 1953-60 (1963), a book more interesting as autobiography than as poetry. It reveals both the before "Howl" and after "Howl" Ginsberg—the former a love-starved, death-obsessed businessman pondering escape in death or "the total isolation of the bum" ("Over Kansas," 1954), the latter a nostalgic isolatee walking "in the timeless sadness of existence," looking at his "own face streaked with tears in the mirror / of some window," feeling a "tenderness" toward everything but cut off from ordinary people and ordinary life by his lack of desire to own the bonbons and dresses and "Japanese lampshades of intellection" that are at the busy but empty heart of American culture ("My Sad Self," 1958). "On Burroughs' Work" is an important early statement of Ginsberg's developing poetics, an insistence (influenced by both Burroughs and Kerouac) that poetry become an honest and spontaneous transcript of consciousness, "purest meat and no symbolic dressing," a naked lunch of reality sandwiches without any kind of lettuce to "hide the madness." "My Alba" (1953) also contains an early and brilliant example of image juxtaposition that Ginsberg had learned from the paintings of Paul Cezanne. Studying Cezanne in 1949, Ginsberg "suddenly got a strange shuddering impression looking at his canvases, partly the effect when someone pulls a Venetian blind, reverses the Venetian—there's a sudden shift, a flashing that you see in Cezanne's canvases." The flash was a moment when the two-dimensional plane of the canvas seemed to shift into three dimensions and the juxtaposed planes of color suddenly became solid-space objects; in

ALLEN GINSBERG / 321 that flash Ginsberg could see through the canvas into cosmic space and feel a sensation like that of his Blake hallucinations. He later discovered that Cezanne had spoken about his attempt to "reconstitute the petites sensations" or flashes of perception that he got from nature after his senses had become so refined that he could stand on a hill and merely by moving his head half an inch "the composition of the landscape was totally changed." For Cezanne, this petite sensation was the experience of pater omnipotens aeterna Deus. Just as Cezanne worked in two-dimensional planes and trusted to the perceptual leap of the viewer to create the deep space of the painting and the experience of pater omnipotens aeterna Deus, so Ginsberg hoped that by simple juxtaposition of disparate images, he might prompt the reader's perception to leap the gap between words and see through the poem to God. Such an intention is behind the "hydrogen jukebox" and "winter midnight smalltown street-light rain" in "Howl," and the "mad locomotive riverbank sunset Frisco hilly tincan evening sitdown vision" of "Sunflower Sutra." But the technique also seems to justify "the unexplainable, unexplained nonperspective line," Ginsberg's jamming together of longer bits, disconnected phrases, glimpses, fragments, subjects in a single poem, separating or joining them only by dashes, line breaks, or open spaces instead of the usual grammatical and logical connections. For all its other virtues, the technique does not work as Ginsberg intended. His poetry seems to have very little success at this mystical flicking of Venetian blinds or opening the reader's senses to the immediate apprehension of God. But the technique is a marvelously effective shorthand and can flash the mind with brilliant cultural silhouettes. The "hydrogen jukebox" of "Howl," for example, is a wonderfully radioactive image, throwing off a frenzy of implication and backlighting a huge moral, political,

and emotional landscape reaching from the Pentagon to the Six Gallery. But an earlier and perhaps even stronger example of this Cezanne technique is found in "My Alba," where Ginsberg regrets the five years he wasted in Manhattan as advertising copyist and market researcher with "mental / sliderule and number / machine" deceiving "multitudes / in vast conspiracies / deodorant battleships." The multiple resonances of "deodorant battleships" are too rich for exploration here, but the startling juxtaposition compresses volumes of commentary on the connections between Madison Avenue, war, deception, greed, prudery, fear and hatred of the body, and national paranoia. It also carries the intensity of Ginsberg's repugnance for a world he experienced primarily as an attack on his own flesh. Planet News: 1961-1967 (1968) contains "Wichita Vortex Sutra," a poem comparable in power to "Howl" and "Kaddish." It is a vehement protest against the war in Vietnam and a concentration of Ginsberg's continuing poetic attack on Western culture's perpetual war against the flesh. The war that Ginsberg finds most intolerable is the "war on Man, the war on Woman," the war of "cold" more destructive than the international cold war, the mentality that would freeze the blood and desire: "the imposition of a vast mental barrier on everybody, a vast antinatural psyche. A hardening, a shutting off of the perception of desire and tenderness which everybody knows and which is the very structure o f . . . the atom!" The perception of this "imposition" is not new, nor is the war against it. It is essentially the battleground defined by Blake and the romantics, broadened beautifully by Whitman, D. H. Lawrence, E. E. Cummings, and others. But Ginsberg's outcry is more anguished, his anger more personal, his own foot caught in the trap most painfully. As early as "Paterson" (1949) and "My Alba," Ginsberg had described the Madison

322 I AMERICAN WRITERS Avenue-Wall Street world as a "war." He expanded the metaphor in "Howl," where those stalking-horse "best minds" were "burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse & the tankedup clatter of the iron regiments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors " Ginsberg sees society as a vast, violent conspiracy of greed, repression, and control that sears the soul and mutilates the flesh as surely as flamethrowers and fragmentation bombs. In "Death to Van Gogh's Ear!" (1958) Ginsberg shouts like Cassandra against an unhearing "war-creating Whore of Babylon bellowing over Capitols and Academies! / Money! Money! Money!" The moans of the poet's soul go unheard because "they" are too busy "fighting in fiery offices, on carpets of heartfailure, screaming and bargaining with Destiny / fighting the Skeleton with sabres, muskets, buck teeth, indigestion, bombs of larceny, whoredom, rockets, pederasty, / back to the wall to build up their wives and apartments, lawns, suburbs, fairydoms " Other poems, such as "Europe! Europe!" (1958), depict this "war" as one overwhelming international industry, cowing everyone into meek underground crowds of creeps and perishing saints, mistreated lacklove whores, neglected spouses, hardened children with calcified senses: electricity scares downtown radio screams for money police light on TV screens laughs at dim lamps in empty rooms tanks crash thru bombshell no dream of man's joy is made movie think factory pushes junk autos tin dreams of Eros mind eats its flesh in

geekish starvation and no man's fuck is holy for man's work is most war Here as everywhere where war is the subject or the metaphor, the lines rush the reader with the noisy broken rhythms of armed attack. The conspiracy is obviously to stun and annihilate all genuine Eros and sell it back to the mutilated self as think-factory junk and tin dreams. In Western culture the "mind eats its flesh in / geekish starvation," and despite Ginsberg's claim in "The Green Automobile" (1953) that he had "cashed a great check in my skull bank / to found a miraculous college of the body," he has been among the most terribly wounded casualties of the "war." Ginsberg's body-hatred is visible everywhere in the poems, both where he confesses it and where he professes its opposite. "Oh how wounded, how wounded" exclaimed a holy man the first time he saw Ginsberg. The idiopathic hunger for tenderness and love in Ginsberg's poems is so extreme because Ginsberg has found it difficult to grant himself that love; and the persistent virulence of his attack against the warmakers is a projection of his unfinished struggle to excise the cruel Moloch from his own head. Just as Ginsberg's "darker brother" rose in rebellion against Moloch in "Howl," so does the god of orgy, Dionysus, frequently overthrow the god of war in Ginsberg's dreams and poems. Thus in "To an Old Poet in Peru" (1960) Ginsberg prophesies the dying man a reward "Brighter than a mask of hammered gold / Sweeter than the joy of armies naked / fucking on the battlefield." In other poems, the warfear-law-moneymakers (the U. S. Congress, President Lyndon Johnson, J. Edgar Hoover, Francis Cardinal Spellman) are accused of not sleeping with their wives, having shriveled testicles or shamefully tiny penises, while favored revolutionaries like Chairman Mao are cited for

ALLEN GINSBERG / 323 their genital blessings ("Che Guevara has a big cock I Castro's balls are pink—"). "Who Be Kind To" (1965) is both a childlike plea and a Buddhalike benevolence that urges us all to "be kind to" the "lackloves of Capitals & Congresses" and the "Statue destroyers & tank captains, unhappy / murderers in Mekong & Stanleyville" so that a "new kind of man" might "come to his bliss" and "end the cold war he has borne / against his own kind flesh / since the days of the snake." The days of the snake are not merely the days after the Fall in Eden (the birthday of good and evil, judgment, reason, polarity, righteousness, schizophrenia, dyads, and binary computers), but especially the days since the culture has become dominated by science, industry, and abstraction ("Moloch whose name is the Mind"), by the "mind-snake" that threatens to engulf the Buddha of Mercy like those snaky banyan roots in Ankor Wat (1968) that enclose the sacred temple in an inexorable death grip. The mind abstracts, forgets the realities of suffering and desiring flesh: "Man cannot long endure the hunger of the cannibal abstract" ("Death to Van Gogh's Ear!"). In "Wichita Vortex Sutra" the abstractions and lies of language are as much a target as is America's participation in the Vietnam conflict. The poem, like so much of Ginsberg's later work, is "composed" by speaking into a tape recorder while traveling cross-country. But unlike so many "Poems of These States" in The Fall of America: 1965-1971 (1972) that randomly notate the passing phenomena almost as if a videotape camera were mounted on the car fender, Ginsberg is selective, noticing primarily the examples of language that swirl before his senses here in the heart of the nation—language from television, newspapers, magazines, radios, billboards, railway boxcars, grain elevators, department stores, street signs, songs, news conferences, and "N-B-C-B-S-U-P-

A-P-I-N-S-L-I-F-E." Words are the poet's tool, his magic, but the words that swirl around Ginsberg are meant not to reveal truth but to manipulate and conceal it. It is language that has designs on its audience, language originating in greed, smug pride, blind patriotism, chamber of commerce boosterism, political and military dishonesty. He enters this vortex of language as a poet and prophet, as representative of the living Word, but language has been so abused that he is "almost in tears to know / how to speak the right language—." He sees himself almost as a Christ, as the savior longing to speak a healing language of forgiveness and love. "Joy, I am I / the lone One singing to myself / God come true—." His call is to come back out of the wars of money and power and language to the erotic, ecstatic body: Come lovers of Lincoln and Omaha, hear my soft voice at last As Babes need the chemical touch of flesh in pink infancy lest they die Idiot returning to Inhuman— Nothing— So, tender lipt adolescent girl, pale youth, give me back my soft kiss Hold me in your innocent arms, accept my tears as yours to harvest No more fear of tenderness, much delight in weeping, ecstasy in singing, laughter rises that confounds staring Idiot mayors and stony politicians eyeing Thy breast, O Man of America, be born! The antiword or opposite language is the language of news headlines that claim "Vietnam War Brings Prosperity" and "Rusk Says Toughness / Essential for Peace"; of Senator John Stennis, who urges "Bomb China's 200,000,000"; of General Maxwell Taylor and

324 I AMERICAN newscasts that repeat "Vietcong losses leveling up three five zero zero / per month" like "the latest quotation in the human meat market—"; of Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara who made "A bad guess" about the number of troops that would be needed to handle the war. Ginsberg builds the tide of incoming language to a rhythmic, hysterical chant: "Put it this way on the radio / Put it this way in television language / Use the words / language, language: / 'A bad guess.'" Ginsberg's extraordinary success in capturing the insanity of such language makes painfully clear what most American poets were discovering about Vietnam: that it was a war on language, as all wars inevitably are. As far back as the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides had noticed how war corrupted language because the ordinary meanings of words were changed to fit man's actions: when man's actions were noble, so was his language; when ignoble, his language was prostituted to lie and ennoble his actions. Ginsberg's poem makes us feel the tragedy of language once used for alchemy and transformation, for sacrament and atonement, now used for greed and power by mad and inept sorcerers: Communion of bum magicians congress of failures from Kansas & Missouri working with the wrong equations Sorcerer's Apprentices who lost control of the simplest broomstick in the world: Language Both the Vietnam war and the language war are part of the larger war of Apollo and Dionysus in America's lopsided culture. In a brilliant visual and historical metaphor, Ginsberg imagines a spreading tornado of violence spiral-

WRITERS

ing outward from the symbolic and geographical heart of the nation, Wichita's Hotel Eaton: Carry Nation began the war on Vietnam here with an angry smashing axe attacking Wine— Here fifty years ago, by her violence began a vortex of hatred that defoliated the Mekong Delta— Proud Wichita! vain Wichita cast the first stone!— The allusion to the Hebrews who were about to stone the woman taken in adultery suggests once more that war and most human misery flow from judgment (Moloch the heavy judger of men), from the blind righteousness of those who have forgotten or denied their own flesh. Ginsberg writes as one who has himself cringed and trembled before such stones of judgment all his life. If the black-magic language of politicians and generals can create war, then an opposite language of love spoken fervently enough by a sufficient poet ought to have power to bring the war to a halt. Thus Ginsberg is not indulging in literary or symbolic gesture when he declares an end to the war but is raising a prophetic voice in the linguistic wilderness, calling on "all powers of the imagination," all Gods, Seraphim, Prophets, shamans, and holy men of all time and space, and invoking the magic power of the Word: "I lift my voice aloud, / make Mantra of American language now, / pronounce the words beginning my own millennium, / I here declare the end of the War!" Though Ginsberg's serious act of language was largely smiled at by both supporters and detractors at the time, it is perhaps his one act of extraordinary genius. In a time and place where no one believed in such powers (but where they were nevertheless negatively at work), Ginsberg possessed the single imagination remaining in Mol-

ALLEN GINSBERG / 325 och that was "crazy" enough to take language and poetry seriously. The long series of cross-country car-planebus-train tape-recorder compositions, "Poems of These States," constitutes the bulk of The Fall of America: 1965-1971 (1972), winner of the National Book Award. As a tribute to Ginsberg's life and work, the award is well deserved; as witness to the excellence of the poetry in The Fall of America, the award is of less certain probity. The poems are largely transcripts of the "movie of the mind" and the passing show outside the window. Ginsberg's notations are precise but undiscriminating; he gives us the face of the nation but as an ant crawling across Mt. Rushmore might give us the face of Washington, with every pebble, pimple, and scar: cornstalks standing in the fields, smoking factories, dead rabbits on the highway, road signs, junkyards, hamburger stands, polluted streams, tail-lights, hogs in the sun. And interspersed with these objects of the passing landscape are the myriad "objects" of the media-mind-bodyscape: radio evangelists, ax murders in Cleveland, Sunday comics, leg pains, sexual reminiscences, self-congratulations on having given up smoking, Vatican pronouncements, bits of myth, racial tensions, newscasts, international politics, Bob Dylan songs, vomiting, the war in Southeast Asia, assassinations, depleted natural resources, and everything that a man of Ginsberg's mind and history might think, feel, hear, see, taste, touch, remember, and imagine. These notations become random lists rather than Whitmanesque catalogs. There is no recognition that the phenomenal world and the self are one and the same thing. Ginsberg does not "assume" the world or put it on like flesh as Whitman does. He is "out of the game," not "both in and out of the game watching and wondering at it" like his predecessor. The window does not connect but cuts him off, insulates

him from a world that is bulging with insane clutter. Ginsberg is Isaiah as a nonparticipant, and steadily losing energy. That Ginsberg should relate to the self and the world differently than Whitman is not a criticism of Ginsberg but a revelation of his time and culture. Both poets are representative—I want to say symptomatic—of the human possibility and human circumstance in their time. Ginsberg cannot participate or enter in, because the "game" has begun to have such devastating implications. Whereas Whitman could put the Self together by naming the particulars of the world, for Ginsberg too much of the self is already fragmented and lost in those multitudinous crowdings of things outside the window and inside the head, as if the self needed to be defended from, rather than joined with, the world. Where Whitman could reach out to touch the Oversoul, Ginsberg's reach touches everywhere the stony face of the monster god. Most of the last half of The Fall of America is a section titled "Ecologues of These States 1969-1971." The poems are both "ecologues" (bucolic and shepherdly meditations centered at Ginsberg's farm in Cherry Valley, New York) and "eco-logues," words for the ecology and the mother that is earth. They show a tiring poet withdrawing from the world, wondering "Who can prophesy Peace, or vow Futurity for any but armed insects." The Molochians seem unstoppable in their power and greed, their killing of whales and polluting of streams: "murder of great & little fish same as self besmirchment short hair thought control, / mace-repression of gnostic street boys identical with DDT extinction of Bald Eagle—." (Again the underlying implication is that the self and the world ought to be One, but because we are severed from our own bodies we are cut off from the world; hatred of self equals the abuse of nature.)

326 I AMERICAN WRITERS The calmest and sanest poem in The Fall of America is "Ecologue," where the details of the road are replaced by those of the farm—heifer, billy goat, windmill, moon, & last week one Chill night summer disappeared— little apples in old trees red, tomatoes red & green on vines, green squash huge under leafspread, corn thick in light green husks, sleepingbag wet with dawn dews & that one tree red at woods' edge! Sanity grows in Ginsberg and in the poem because there is genuine work for the hands and the mind, things to be done, participated in: "Shelf the garage! / Where stack lumber handy to eye? / Electric generator money? Where keep mops in Wintertime?" If The Fall of America saw "Death on All Fronts," Mind Breaths: Poems 1972-1977 (1977) also carries titles like "Yes and It's Hopeless." Ginsberg seems a second time to have been defeated by the "world," as he was in 1954; he is not twice-born, but twice-beat, and this time he is left even more humble, gentle, and "beatific" than before. Although we have come to like the man behind them, most of these poems are so poor they will not bear discussion. They are written by a man who has given up his prophetic and messianic role and does not believe he can change anything. The fervor has fled. Mostly he is writing because it has become a habit. One of the few good poems of Mind Breaths is the title poem, where Ginsberg sits in his newly discovered vipasyana meditation, paying attention to the space into which his breath flows. In a manner evocative of Whitman's grand, slow flights of the imagination across the national landscape, Ginsberg follows his moving breath out into the world. This too is a notation poem, but it is an imagined and much

less bumpy ride than the car-plane-bus-train compositions—the lines flow even and slow like the calm breathing of the poet. The moving breath does not merely pass by but surrounds and laves and participates with its objects; and the poem and self seem whole and unified because the breath circles the globe and returns to the breather, who is thus encompassed with a single breath/world. A second worthy poem of Mind Breaths, "Sad Dust Glories," is separately published with six additional poems in Sad Dust Glories: Poems Written Work Summer in Sierra Woods (1975). In these, as in "Ecologue," Ginsberg gathers grace from the work of his hands, through the physical labor that has been missing in his life. He is helping to build a cabin in the Sierras on land near Gary Snyder's home and relishes the new pleasure of being virtuous tired glasses slipping off my blurry nose hitting the shining steel mushroom head First time a chisel in my hand— He feels a new sense of self, wonders who he is "wandering / in this forest building / a house," he who has never worked or planted—"Words my seeds." But now he is caught up in the new body rhythms and sensations: "Work! Work! Work! This / inspiration / proves I have dreamed" ("Energy Vampire"). The Sierras and the work tie Ginsberg at last to the here and now, to the "realworld": Could you be here? Really be here and forget the void? I am, it's peaceful, empty, filled with green Ponderosa swaying parallel tops

ALLEN GINSBERG / 327 fan like needle circles glittering haloed in sun that moves slowly lights up my hammock heats my face skin and knees. Ginsberg's best poems succeed brilliantly and his worst fail utterly because of his poetics of "First Thought, Best Thought" and "Mind is Shapely, Art is Shapely." Because he sought self-revelation instead of poem-as-made-object, Ginsberg stopped revising poems or making clear discriminations between poems and other kinds of language jotted in journals, spoken into tape recorders, written in letters to friends, or hallucinated on drugs. Following the lead of Kerouac, Ginsberg "got into" the "existential thing of writing conceived of as an irreversible action or statement, that's unrevisable and unchangeable once it's made." This finally leads to the rejection of distinctions between life and art, and to the idea that "everything we do is art." Because there can be no craft in the usual sense, no working over of the poems, the poem's quality depends indeed on how shapely the poet's mind happens to be at the moment the poem gets made. Shapely mind usually coincides with authentic passion, as in Ginsberg's best work—"Howl," "Kaddish," "Wichita Vortex Sutra," and a few others where strong feelings lift him above his obsessive ego concerns and psychological debilities; but the great bulk of his work is neither shapely nor impassioned. Ginsberg believes that the proper subject of poetry is the "action of the mind," and the only craft is in learning to observe the mind and "flashlight" its activity. If the poetic rendering is faithful to the motions and rhythms of the poet's mind and body, it should stir similar motion and feeling in the reader. Ginsberg admits that when such rendering is truly spontaneous,

"I don't know whether it even makes sense sometimes. Sometimes I do know it makes complete sense, and I start crying." His desire is to "write during a prophetic illuminative seizure" where he would be in a "state of such complete blissful consciousness that any language emanating from that state will strike a responsive chord of blissful consciousness from any other body into which the words enter and vibrate." Ginsberg is obviously not a poet of ideas but of emotional states; one who sees poetry as "a form of meditation or introspective yoga," a sacrament where one pays complete attention and tries to record and communicate moments of "high epiphanous Mind." But as with his ideas about Cezanne, Ginsberg's theory does not work in practice (readers report few "high epiphanous" moments); instead, Ginsberg's spontaneous compositions communicate not the mystical experience but the naked man, sometimes profound, sometimes beatific, often boring and silly, often obsessed and polymorphously perverse. Ginsberg admits that he is only rarely blessed with "the heat of some truthful tears" and that usually he is "just diddling away." Ginsberg was greatly excited by Kerouac's idea that future literature would consist of what people actually wrote rather than what they deceived people into thinking they wrote after they revised later on: "And I saw opening up this whole universe where people wouldn't be able to lie any more!" But, as is top often the case, Ginsberg's enthusiasm is exaggerated and illogical. One can tell lies all day without ever revising a word. Honesty has to come at some deeper level. What is logically implied, however, is that Ginsberg believes any control over the mind is dishonest, that thinking is not something a man does but that does him; he is not a thinker but a vehicle for thoughts that think through him like ticker tape. Thus to insist on art as an unedited "actual movie of the mind"

328 I AMERICAN is to insist that the active thinker step aside from the task of sorting and discriminating among the images of half-formed thoughts that stream through him, and to embrace and record them all as of equal validity. This apparently carries over, too, into one's life—all actions are equally significant so long as they are spontaneous, not controlled by that Moloch whose name is the mind. In "Today" (1964) Ginsberg tells of such "significant" actions: "I rode in a taxi! / I rode a bus, ate hot Italian Sausages, Coca Cola, a chiliburger, Kool-Aid I drank— / All day I did things!" And after various and random thoughts of fascism, Buster Keaton, Samuel Beckett, pink shirts, Kali-Ma, "vaginal jelly rubber instruments" discovered in his parents' closet, and the note—"Also today bit by a mosquito (to be precise, toward dawn)"—the poem swells to its climax for Ginsberg: "I took a crap once this day—How extraordinary it all goes! recollected, a lifetime! / Imagine writing autobiography what a wealth of Detail to enlist! / I see the contents of future magazines— ..." Unbelievable as it may seem, this is more serious than ironic, more program than parody. The literature of the future, then, is to be autobiography—and autobiography that refuses to make discriminatory judgments among the events of our lives. But again, the logical result of such thinking is not a new literature but the end of literature. Where art and literature exactly duplicate life and are identical with it, they are no longer necessary. It is not merely that everyone could write his own book, but that there would be no use for books at all; and where all thinking and utterance is a "transcript of consciousness" as ticker tape, there is no longer a need for language at all. Such a literature is ultimately a literature of silence. That is one way to silence Moloch, but it is an extravagant one. At the very least Ginsberg's poetics lead toward a literature of "om," the universal sound

WRITERS

containing all possible sounds that, by containing all particulars, erases all particulars. Ginsberg's poetry includes everything and, except for a few great poems, fades in the reader's memory to a great blur of static or background hum. Ginsberg's poetics are another aspect of his reluctance to deal with the exigencies of time and the responsibilities of his own humanness (which is not at all to say that he is not among the most generous and decent of men). Anything less than a completely open, spontaneous poetics requires the imposition of order and the making of judgments. Not only is judgment an attribute of Moloch, but the imposition of order slows down the motion of the mind and threatens to bring it to a dead stop. A fear of stasis, of ossification, obviously haunted all of the "Dharma Bums" and "On the Readers" of the 1950's and 1960's who sought to keep constantly on the move and at high speed. As Randall Patrick McMurphy (R. P. M.) of Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962) knew so well, the moment a person stands still Big Nurse and The Combine (additional aliases for Moloch) are at him with their institutional thermometers. William Burroughs, too, had written Ginsberg that "The most dangerous thing to do is to stand still." The defining quality in Kerouac's prose style ("how you decide to 'rush' yr statement determines the rhythm") and Ginsberg's poetics is speed. (In his essay on projective verse, Charles Olson had also advised "get on with it, keep moving, keep in, speed," and his motives, too, were to escape the drying cement of the rational mind.) But random perpetual motion, whether physical or mental, is not conducive to wholeness or humanness. Randall Patrick McMurphy finally has to accept "commitment" and confront Big Nurse. But Ginsberg has not wanted to deal with this complex "real world" inside or outside of the head. He sees that world

ALLEN GINSBERG / 329 of patterns and judgments as a threat of death by ossification, and usually seeks to escape it by climbing into a cloud or diving into bed, seeking the patternless purities of disembodied vision or mindless sexuality. He avoids what Joseph Campbell would call the "death of petrifact" by fleeing to the opposite "death of chaos." These very choices seem embodied in the images of "Paterson" where Ginsberg refuses the paralysis of Madison Avenue and opts for a death of chaos (in eros, ecstasy, and motion), "rolling over the pavements and highways / by the bayoux and forests and derricks leaving my flesh and my bones hanging on the trees." Ginsberg clearly has a problem focusing his energies on the "world between." His attention characteristically slips to either side of the rich world of daily human interchange and work. When asked if he ever contemplated writing an epic poem, his first reactions take the familiar leap and dive: "Yeah, but it's just... ideas, that I've been carrying around for a long time. One thing which I'd like to do sooner or later is write a long poem which is a narrative and description of all the visions I've ever had.... And another idea I had was to write a big long poem about everybody I ever fucked or slept with." In another interview, while discussing his theories of spontaneous composition and the importance of telling the truth no matter what archetypal thought comes into our minds, Ginsberg's first example of an "archetypal thought" is "I want to fuck my mother." A few minutes later he realizes his example might be shocking enough to "wave a red flag in front of understanding" so he substitutes another: "I want to go to heaven." (Is this another of the child-man's ways of saying I want to be touched and held by my mother or by my father?) What this adds up to is a poetry with four basic contents: the poetry of vision (almost always involving drug use); the poetry of sex (usually frenzied and obsessive); the poetry of

the "world between" as mind-movie or passing show; and the poetry of prophecy against Moloch. And running through all of these, but most especially in the last, is the reiterated plea for tenderness and love. But only in Ginsberg's most recent and new poetry of physical work do these four isolated poetries draw together in a more satisfying and stable harmony. At Cherry Valley and in the Sierras, Ginsberg has at last found some measure of the Soul or Sacred Heart or Self that he has searched for and misunderstood most of his life. He found it not in drugs or sex but in the physical body and the physical world of work that combines intuition and sensation and tames the darker brother into quiet thoughtfulness. In a tiny poem of Empty Mirror Ginsberg had claimed "I made love to myself / in the mirror, kissing my own lips, / saying, 1 love myself, / I love you more than anybody.'" And in the neurotic dis-ease of "Sather Gate Illumination" in 1956, he urgently reiterated his self love ("I believe you are lovely, my soul, soul of Allen, Allen— / and you so beloved, so sweetened, so recalled to your true loveliness, / your original nude breathing Allen"). Methinks he doth protest too much. Years later, after an obsessive search for vision through drugs, and after traveling around the world and consulting holy men who urged him to emphasize the human and to "let your own heart be your guru," Ginsberg became a devotee of the Sacred Heart and announced that he had at last "Come sweetly / now back to my Self as I was—" ("The Change: Kyoto-Tokyo Express," 1963). However, Ginsberg persisted in understanding the "pure delight" and "very lovely doctrine" of the Sacred Heart as teaching that the way to wholeness and bliss "is to give yourself, completely, to your heart's desire," an interpretation that once again dismissed every kind of control and rational discipline. But of course the doctrine of the Sacred

330 I AMERICAN Heart has no such easy implications and is much more closely allied to the idea of a difficult struggle to mediate and to love the freckled Incarnation of the Divine in the material world. Immediately after his Blakean hallucinations in Harlem in 1948, Ginsberg had rushed to his bookcase with a suddenly doubled comprehension to reread St. John of the Cross and Plato and "Plotinus on the Alone." But Ginsberg admitted, "The Plotinus I found more difficult to interpret." A central doctrine in Plotinus is, I believe, that the Soul or Heart is the intermediary between pure spirit and pure matter, between eidos and sensation. For Plato, too, the Heart related to the warrior class that stood between the philosopher-kings (head) and the laborers, women, and children (body/genitals). Soul reaches upward toward intellect and divine forms to bring them more surely into embodiment and influence in matter, and reaches downward into the variety and massiveness of matter to lift it upward toward the nous and unity. Soul is not lost in the Many, nor does it reside in the One. It is mediator, operating at the level of discursive thought, exerting a rigorous self-discipline by which we awake from the alienation of our lower state and rise again to a knowledge of our true selves. But because in our time Moloch has invaded and occupied the whole area of rigorous moral and intellectual self-discipline and changed the heart (the cow-age) of the warrior into the metal of tanks and money, he has in a very literal way robbed Ginsberg of his Heart and Soul, his Selfhood. The "world between" matter and spirit belongs to the monster god, who allows modern men only two possibilities—to become mechanical hollow men who have forgotten the ecstasies of vision and sex; or to become crazy, schizophrenic, head-and-body-severed poets who have "consciousness without a body," "millions of genitals," and "an unpublishable private liter-

WRITERS

ature that goes 1400 miles an hour and twentyfive-thousand mental institutions." Ginsberg was the first of the crowd of writers who emerged in the 1950's and 1960's as "confessional poets"—Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Dianne Wakoski, and others—who to a surprising degree share similar backgrounds and psychological problems involving an eroded self-image, compulsive behavior and imagery, death obsession, attempted or actual suicide, time spent in rehabilitative alcoholic and mental institutions, a splitting or doubling of the self in poetic figures, and the traumatic early loss of a parent through madness, abandonment, suicide, or death. These common characteristics should make it clear that "confessional poetry" is not after all merely another movement or school, like the Black Mountain, New York, or Deep Imagist, but an efflorescence of decay, the growing shine of the perishing republic. There has been a tremendous surface complexity and activity in Ginsberg's life, and indeed he has been more important as an active public figure than as a maker of poems. By the general public he has perhaps been variously viewed as dangerous, obscene, quixotic, or silly; as an advocate and user of drugs; as a leader in the Vietnam war protest; as a mantra-chanting peacemaker, riot-calmer, and holy man; but for a large segment of the aroused population he has stood as a representative of poetry as an art that will not be put to sleep or truckle under to the dull viciousness of "business as usual." Ginsberg has never been a poet of idea or of craft. His only craft has been emotional honesty; his single "idea" has been tenderness—its scarcity, denial, necessity, beauty, and blessedness. He has crisscrossed the United States, traveled the world, organized the Human Be-In at Berkeley, swallowed peyote and LSD, testified before congressional committees, quieted

ALLEN GINSBERG / 331 the rioters at the Democratic National Convention in 1968, "om"'d the judge at the Chicago Seven trial, led the movement of resistance to the Vietnam war, read and taught in colleges, consulted with holy men, adopted Eastern philosophies, chanted mantras, sat in meditation (he has "pried through strata,... counseled with doctors and calculated close"; he has "wept and fasted, wept and prayed"); and after all this his one wisdom is honesty, his one virtue is compassion. As a poet his voice has been prophetic and loud (and finally ignored by those most in need of prophecy). His greatest power has come from the magnitude of his own suffering and his own psychological infirmities. These infirmities are multiple and severe, and can be documented everywhere in his poetry. They make him seem "a deliberately shocking, bourgeois-baiting celebrator of a kind of sexuality which the most enlightened post-Freudian man-of-the-world finds it difficult to condone" (Leslie Fiedler); and account for an imagery of sexual behavior that is "hysterically frenzied, suggesting a compulsive search for love and acceptance through ceaselessly self-defeating, external, almost automatic activity" (M. L. Rosenthal). What Rosenthal sees as "a childishly aggressive vocabularity of obscenity" sometimes seems almost a case of pathological coprolalia or Tourette's Syndrome. But while these sexual obsessions are a recurring infection in the poems, it is paradoxically just this extraordinary and insatiable hollowness and compulsive hunger for love that makes Ginsberg such a formidable opponent to Moloch, and makes us realize how "lacklove" and devoid of tenderness the culture has become. In the war between Moloch and the flesh, Ginsberg is no loudmouth-know-it-all-stateside-civilian but a veteran of the trenches with a gaping stomach wound. His power is what he shows

us about the truth of that war. It is hardly a sufficient response to dismiss Ginsberg's poetry as a poetry of neurosis without looking to the neurotic ambience or understanding that a neurotic poetry is the most telling criticism of the culture. The pathology is personal, but not merely personal. Ginsberg is in this sense truly "the biographer of his time" (Helen Vendler). Like Whitman, when Ginsberg gives us his book of poems, he gives us not a book but a man. Not a pretty man, but a man. Ginsberg may be Whitman as Quasimodo, but he is a modern-day Whitman nonetheless. His song is the Song of the Modern Self, twisted to the point of perversion, eroded almost to the point of invisibility. Ginsberg's great contribution as poet and man has been to confess for us his own need and to raise for us his own uniquely personal eli eli lamma lamma sabactahani cry of the naked mind for love.

Selected Bibliography WORKS OF ALLEN GINSBERG POETRY

Howl and Other Poems. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1956. Kaddish and Other Poems, 1958-1960. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1961. Empty Mirror, Early Poems. New York: Totem Press/Corinth Books, 1961. Reality Sandwiches, 1953-60. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1963. Wichita Vortex Sutra. San Francisco: Coyote Books, 1967. T. V. Baby Poems. New York: Grossman/Orion Press, 1968.

332 I AMERICAN Ankor Wat. London: Fulcrum Press, 1968. Airplane Dreams; Compositions from Journals. Toronto: Anansi, 1968; San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1969. Planet News: 1961-1967. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1968. The Gates of Wrath; Rhymed Poems: 1948-1952. Bolinas, Calif.: Grey Fox Press, 1972. The Fall of America; Poems of These States. 19651971. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1972. Iron Horse. Toronto: Coach House Press, 1972; San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1974. Sad Dust Glories: Poems Written Work Summer in Sierra Woods. Berkeley, Calif.: Workingman's Press, 1975. Mind Breaths: Poems 1972-1977. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1977. Collected Poems 1947-1980. New York: Harper and Row, 1984. PROSE JOURNALS, INTERVIEWS, CORRESPONDENCE

"Notes for Howl and Other Poems" In The New American Poetry, 1945-1960, edited by Donald M. Allen. New York: Grove Press, 1960. Pp. 41418. The Yage Letters. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1963. Written with William S. Burroughs. "The Art of Poetry VIII." Paris Review, no. 37:1355 (Spring 1966). Indian Journals: March 1962-May 1963. San Francisco: Dave Haselwood/City Lights Books, 1970. "A Talk with Allen Ginsberg." Partisan Review, 38, no. 3:289-309(1971). Allen Verbatim: Lectures on Poetry, Politics, Consciousness, edited by Gordon Ball. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974. As Ever: The Collected Correspondence of Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady. Berkeley, Calif.: Creative Book Arts, 1974. "Craft Interview with Allen Ginsberg." In The Craft of Poetry, edited by William Packard. Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, 1974. Pp. 53-78. Gay Sunshine Interview. Bolinas, Calif.: Grey Fox Press, 1974. The Visions of the Great Rememberer. Amherst, Mass.: Mulch Press, 1974. Chicago Trial Testimony. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1975. Journals: Early Fifties Early Sixties, edited by Gordon Ball. New York: Grove Press, 1977.

WRITERS

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL STUDIES Breslin, James. "Allen Ginsberg: The Origins of 'Howl' and 'Kaddish.'" Iowa Review, 8, no. 2:82107 (Spring 1977). Carroll, Paul. The Poem in Its Skin. Chicago: Follett, 1968. Pp. 81-108. Dowden, George. A Bibliography of Works by Allen Ginsberg: October, 1943 to July 1, 1967. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1971. Davie, Donald. "On Sincerity: From Wordsworth to Ginsberg." Encounter, 31, no. 4:61-66 (October 1968). Fiedler, Leslie. "Master of Dreams: The Jew in a Gentile World." Partisan Review, 34:339-56 (Summer 1967). Hahn, Stephen. "The Prophetic Voice of Allen Ginsberg." Prospects: Annual of American Cultural Studies, 2:527-67 (1976). Heffernan, James A. "Politics and Freedom: Refractions of Blake in Joyce Cary and Allen Ginsberg." In Romantic and Modern: Revaluations of Literary Tradition, edited by George Bornstein. Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 1977. Pp. 177-95. Hoffman, Steven K. "Lowell, Berryman, Roethke, and Ginsberg: Communal Poetry." Literary Review, 22, no. 3:329-41 (Spring 1979). Howard, Richard. Alone With America. New York: Atheneum, 1969. Pp. 145-52. Hunsberger, Bruce. "Kit Smart's Howl." Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, 6:34-44 (Winter 1965). Kramer, Jane. Allen Ginsberg in America. New York: Random House, 1969. Kramer, Jane. "Paterfamilias." 2 pts. New Yorker (August 17, 1968), pp. 32-73; (August 24, 1968), pp. 38-91. Merrill, Thomas F. Allen Ginsberg. New York: Twayne, 1969. Mersmann, James F. Out of the Vietnam Vortex: A Study of Poets and Poetry Against the War. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1974. Pp. 3175. Parkinson, Thomas F., ed. A Casebook on the Beat. New York: Crowell, 1961. Portuges, Paul. The Visionary Poetics of Allen Ginsberg. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Ross-Erikson, 1978.

ALLEN GINSBERG / 333 Rosenthal, Macha L. The New Poets: American and British Poetry Since World War II. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967. Pp. 89-112. The Modern Poets: A Critical Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 1960. Simpson, Louis. A Revolution of Taste. New York: Macmillan, 1978. Pp. 43-82. Tytell, John. Naked Angels: The Lives and Litera-

ture of the Beat Generation. New York: McGrawHill, 1976. Vendler, Helen. Review of Planet News. New York Times Book Review, August 31, 1969, p. 8. Whittemore, Reed. "From 'Howl' to OM." New Republic, My 25, 1970, pp. 17-18. —JAMES

MERSMANN

Bret Harte 1836-1902 T

JL HE HI

birth of Tommy Luck in Bret Harte's short story "The Luck of Roaring Camp" (1868) was more than the birth of an illegitimate baby in a California mining camp. In a very real sense it was the birth of a new genre in American letters—the local-color genre, with which the name Bret Harte has become synonymous over the years. While some may debate the assertion that "The Luck of Roaring Camp" represents the beginning of the localcolor movement, no one can deny that through his voluminous literary output Bret Harte made a strong contribution to local-color writing. Countless readers, both American and foreign, have obtained their first impressions of the California gold-rush days from his stories, and there is little doubt that such a pattern will continue. Whetted by a curiosity regarding the manners, speech, customs, and habits of thought of the diverse regions of America, reader appetite for local-color stories in the later nineteenth century was virtually insatiable. And no region stirred more interest than the West. Although not a child of the West, Harte made a timely move to California on the heels of the gold rush of 1849 that proved to be a fortunate "union of the man and the hour." Combining the sketch technique of Washington Irving and the gargoyled characters and romantic sentiment of

Charles Dickens with his own wide-open receptivity to the boiling surface of life in the California gold camps, Harte produced a series of stories and poems that during the late 1860's and early 1870's attracted a large number of adoring readers. The contrast between the social and cultural environment from which Harte came and that about which he wrote is striking. Born Francis Brett Harte on August 25, 1836, in Albany, New York, he was descended on his mother's side from among the first settlers in America— and his pride in that descent never dimmed. His father, Henry Harte, was a teacher at the Albany Female Academy and also operated his own private school. After the panic of 1837 and the failure of his school, Henry Harte became a wandering schoolmaster, moving from city to city. While such wandering made young Frank's (he did not use his middle name until the publication of his first story) formal education rather chaotic and brought it to a close after his thirteenth year, his precocity was wellnourished in the Harte home, where there was a small but excellent library. Beginning at age six, the youngster read his way through William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollett, Oliver Goldsmith, Miguel de Cervantes, Washington Irving, and Alexandre Dumas the elder.

335

336 I AMERICAN Henry Harte's death in 1845 forced Elizabeth Rebecca Ostrander Harte to appeal to both sides of the family for support for her and the four children. Richard O'Connor describes their attempt to maintain their self-respect: They were conscious of a necessity to maintain the standards of gentle birth and lineage. In the process, undoubtedly, Bret acquired those slightly haughty traits which afterward caused people less conscious of the demands of breeding to call him a snob; they were a defense against the shabbiness of his boyhood and the suspicion that people would look down on him unless he looked down on them first. Young Harte's first literary accomplishment came when he was eleven, with the publication of a poem titled "Autumn Musings" in the New York Sunday Morning Atlas. Unfortunately, the poem brought ridicule rather than praise from the family. Harte never forgot that unhappy experience, commenting later that he sometimes wondered "that I ever wrote another line of verse." O'Connor writes that the hurt felt by the youngster was deeper because his mother joined in the derision: "He and his mother were never particularly close, possibly because of her subsequent remarriage and also her disapproval of the woman Bret married. In none of his work was there any warm appreciation for motherhood, though he could wax sentimental enough about whores and madams." In 1853, Elizabeth Harte and Colonel Andrew Williams, a college friend of her late husband's, announced their engagement, and a short time later she journeyed to San Francisco for the marriage. Harte and his sister Margaret were left behind. Several months later they followed her to California, making the journey by boat via Nicaragua and Mexico. It was an exciting trip, marked by. storms that threatened disaster to the ship and by a Mexican revolution. The experience provided the impressiona-

WRITERS

ble Harte with background that he would use years later for a long story titled "The Crusade of the Excelsior," a tale of revolution and intrigue in Mexico. The first three years that Harte spent in California have been the subject of much speculation by biographers. The absence of sound documentation has given rise to various legends and counterlegends—the former, according to George Stewart, viewing Harte as "the two-gun hero of a Western epic," and the latter calling him "an effeminate young 'squirt' who never even entered the mining country." Like most legends and counterlegends, neither view represents the truth. Stewart builds a strong case for Harte's having spent time as a schoolteacher, probably near La Grange, California. Certainly Harte used a schoolmaster character a number of times in stories. As to Harte's mining experiences, the story "How I Went to the Mines" might be assumed to have some autobiographical base. The main character is a jobless young schoolmaster who decides to try his luck in the mines. He sets out to find an acquaintance in a certain mining district. After a hard two-day journey he reaches a mining camp and goes into a bar to ask about his friend. While drinking a glass of whiskey that he doesn't really want, he finds himself in the middle of a gunfight. Not wanting to show his greenness, he simply stands where he is. After the shooting is over, he discovers that a bullet has shattered his glass, and he calmly asks for another whiskey. At this point he meets his friend's partners, who take him in with them for luck. The story closes thus: "Then we worked at the claim daily, dutifully, and regularly for three weeks. We sometimes got 'the color,' we sometimes didn't, but we nearly always got enough for our daily 'grub.' We laughed, joked, told stories, 'spouted poetry,' and enjoyed ourselves as in a perpetual picnic." Stewart points to two other stories—"A

BRETHARTE / 337 Treasure of the Redwoods" and "Captain Jim's Friend"—as further corroboration for Harte's engaging in at least some amateurish mining. These stories, he suggests, ... mutually support one another, and all together gain support from their consistency with Harte's character and from their own unheroic nature. This was scarcely a sort of experience which one would take the trouble to invent once, much less to invent and then repeat twice after ten years and claim as one's own. Moreover, Harte's own youthful enthusiasm would no doubt have driven him to thrust himself—even if only briefly—into the vital and scenic turbulence of the mining camps. Although the gold-rush days of 1849 were over and San Francisco and the Bay area were becoming commercialized, life in the mining areas was still raw and close to the surface. In the introduction to Tales of the Argonauts (volume II of the standard edition), Harte describes early California: It is a country unlike any other. Nature here is as rude, as inchoate, as unfinished, as the life. The people seem to have come here a thousand years too soon, and before the great hostess was ready to receive them. The forests, vast, silent, damp with their undergrowth of gigantic ferns, recall a remote carboniferous epoch. The trees are monstrous, sombre, and monotonously alike. Everything is new, crude, and strange. The grass blades are enormous and far apart, there is no carpet to the soil; even the few Alpine flowers are odorless and bizarre. There is nothing soft, tender, or pastoral in the landscape. Nature affects the heroics rather than the bucolics. Theocritus himself could scarcely have given melody to the utterance of these Aetnean herdsmen, with their brierwood pipes, and their revolvers slung at their backs. There are vast spaces of rock and cliff, long intervals

of ravine and canon, and sudden and awful lapses of precipice. The lights and shadows are Rembrandtish, and against this background the faintest outline of a human figure stands out starkly. It was to this setting that the Forty-Niners— or Argonauts, as Harte called them—came from every part of America. Fur trappers, wellbred easterners, chivalric southerners—all joined the mad search for gold, leaving, according to Harte, . . . families, creditors, and in some instances even officers of justice, perplexed and lamenting. There were husbands who had deserted their own wives,—and in some extreme cases even the wives of others,—for this haven of refuge. Nor was it possible to tell from their superficial exterior, or even their daily walk and action, whether they were or were not named in the counts of this general indictment. Some of the best men had the worst antecedents, some of the worst rejoiced in a spotless puritan pedigree. Social distinctions gave way easily enough to a pragmatic frontier democracy that judged a man on his conduct and not on his ancestry or background. Loyalty, generosity, and practical sagacity were among the most noticeable traits of the Argonauts. To be sure, they were not all the dashingly romantic types that have flickered across countless movie and television screens, but, as Harte once said, the "faith, courage, vigor, youth, and capacity for adventure necessary to this migration produced a body of men as strongly distinctive as were the companions of Jason." From this life Harte was to select the material that he would fashion into stories good enough to capture the popular imagination and to establish a tradition for the western story that continues undiminished today.

338 I AMERICAN Before he turned his literary talent to such material, Harte tried several other endeavors, ranging from tax collector to Wells Fargo messenger to assistant editor of the Northern Callfornian, a newspaper in the small town of Union. In this latter position he came face to face with the potential for violence in early California. The editor, Colonel S. G. Whipple, made a trip to San Francisco at the end of February 1860, leaving Harte in charge of the paper. During Whipple's absence a small group of white men massacred some sixty Indians, mostly women and children. Harte was incensed and wrote a scathing editorial condemning the atrocity, saying in part: Little children and old women were mercilessly stabbed and their skulls crushed with axes. When the bodies were landed at Union, a more shocking and revolting spectacle never was exhibited to the eyes of a Christian and civilized people. Old women, wrinkled and decrepit, lay weltering in blood, their brains dashed out and dabbled with their long gray hair. Infants scarce a span long, with their faces cloven with hatchets and their bodies ghastly with wounds. No resistance was made, it is said, to the butchers who did the work, but as they ran or huddled together for protection like sheep, they were struck down with hatchets. Because feeling against the Indians ran high in the area, Harte was none too popular. Henry Merwin describes a long evening during which Harte, armed with two pistols, awaited the coming of a mob fired up to do him great bodily harm. Only the timely arrival of a few members of the United States Cavalry calmed the dangerous situation. Although the scene as described may be somewhat exaggerated, Harte left Union within a month. Throughout his life—and in his writings— Harte was sensitive to the wrongs done to ani-

WRITERS

mals, children, and oppressed races. And, as Stewart points out, "Sometimes his feelings were to spoil his art by making him picture these creatures too pathetically." In "Three Vagabonds of Trinidad," set in the Union, California, area, Harte depicts the struggle of the oppressed—in this case a dog, an Indian, and a Chinese boy—as they face a man named Skinner, who at one point in the story gives vent to his views of those not of the white race: ... but I kin tell you, gentlemen, that this is a white man's country! Yes, sir, you can't get over it! The nigger of every description—yeller, brown, or black, call him "Chinese," "Injin," or "Kanaka," or what you like—hez to clar off of God's footstool when the Anglo-Saxon gets started! It stands to reason that they can't live alongside o' printin' presses, M'Cormick's reapers, and the Bible! At the end of the story the Indian and the Chinese boy are shot, but the dog gains some revenge by fastening his jaws on the throat of the man who shot them. After the incident at Union, Harte ended his wandering. Returning to San Francisco, he felt that "the great mass of primary impressions" on his mind had become "sufficiently clarified for literary use." He took a position as typesetter with the Golden Era, one of the most highly respected newspapers in the West. Before long he was promoted to the editorial staff, and he had his springboard into the world of letters. Harte at this period was fortunate to be introduced to Jessie Benton Fremont, daughter of a famous senator and wife of a popular hero. Interested in literature, she was taken with the lonely and sensitive young writer. Soon Harte was dining weekly with the Fremonts. There he met Thomas Starr King, a highly cultured Unitarian minister. At every chance Harte would read his manuscripts to Mrs. Fremont

BRETHARTE / 339 and King, who were both keen critics. Mrs. Fremont exerted a strong positive influence on Harte and was instrumental in getting his story "The Legend of Monte del Diablo" published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1863. He once wrote to her: "I shall no longer disquiet myself about changes in residence or anything else, for I believe that if I were cast upon a desolate island, a savage would come to me next morning and hand me a three-cornered note to say that I have been appointed Governor at Mrs. Fremont's request." In 1860-1861 Harte wrote a weekly column on current events under the pen name "The Bohemian"—one of several pseudonyms he used in his early career. His first story, "My Metamorphosis," was published in the Golden Era on April 29, 1860, and was signed Bret Harte. A clever little piece, the story tells of a young man just out of school who, while walking by a lake near a private mansion whose residents seem to be away, decides to take a nude swim. As he is swimming, floating, and diving in carefree abandon, he hears voices and realizes that he is about to be discovered. With the daring and aplomb of youth, he leaves the water and leaps to a pyramidal pedestal of statues and poses as one of them. All goes well except that one young lady, though she says nothing, apparently realizes that one of the statues is alive. Years later the two accidentally meet again and fall in love. Although not a major accomplishment, "My Metamorphosis" was nevertheless a start. Harte's first published story using the California setting was "The Man of No Account," which appeared in the Golden Era in 1860. The story—really a sketch—is about a young man who, with a group of gold seekers, goes to California in 1852. His dull demeanor makes him the butt of the group's jokes, and when they arrive in California, they forget him. But in two

years he has struck it rich. Competing with one of the group (who really is of no account) for the affections of a young lady, he aids the man financially and then steps out of the romantic triangle to return to the East. Even though he drowns in a shipwreck, he has proved that he was a man of some account. The first significant story that Harte published was "The Work on Red Mountain," more commonly known as "M'liss." It originally appeared in the Golden Era in 1860, but was revised and republished in the same newspaper three years later under the title "M'liss: An Idyl of Red Mountain." Harte always preferred the first version, writing in a letter to James Osgood, one of the owners of the Atlantic Monthly, in 1873 that "at the request of the proprietor, Colonel Lawrence, I attempted to create a longer story or novel of it, but after writing nine or ten chapters I wound it up in disgust. As I always preferred my first conception, I adopted that when I put it in The Luck.'" In the same letter Harte angrily complained that the Golden Era was printing a third version of the story, lengthened by fifty chapters and completed by someone else. He was furious: "I regret to say that they are quite capable of doing either in California, and, as I have received no notice from them, I expect the worst." The main character in "M'liss" is a young schoolmaster from the East who, armed with a carpetbag, umbrella, and Harper's magazine, arrives in California looking for Smith's Pocket, a small settlement where he is to be master of the school. Smith's Pocket was founded by a veritable Smith, who discovered a pocket of gold that yielded $5,000 worth in less than an hour, then gave out. Search as he might, Smith found no more gold. His money soon gone, he turned to quartz mining, then to quartz milling, then to hydraulics and ditching, then to saloon

340 I AMERICAN WRITERS keeping—ending up a drunkard with nothing but a miserable cabin and a motherless child. But Smith's Pocket, unlike its namesake, prospered. One evening, as the new schoolmaster is working in the school, a dirty and shabbily dressed young girl enters. It is Melissa Smith— old Smith's motherless child. Just as her father is categorized by all as a no-good drunk, M'liss is categorized as an incorrigible urchin. She makes a pitiful plea: "I come here to-night because I knew you was alone. I would n't come here when them gals was here. I hate 'em and they hates me. That's why. You keep school, don't you? I want to be teached!" Had her plea been extended with tears, the master would have offered nothing but pity. But he is touched by her boldness, and feels "that respect which all original natures pay unconsciously to one another in any grade." After warmly encouraging her, he watches her bent little figure stagger down the path. M'liss does come to school, and the master begins to draw her "out of the shadow of her past life, as though it were but her natural progress down the narrow path on which he had set her feet the moonlit night of their first meeting." The relationship between master and student grows stronger as the months go by; and when old Smith dies, the master arranges for M'liss to stay with a Mrs. Morpher, a kindhearted woman who in her youth was known as "Per-rairie Rose," but who "by a long series of self-sacrifices and struggles, had at last subjugated her naturally careless disposition to principles of 'order,' which she considered, in common with Mr. Pope, as 'Heaven's first law.'" Among her children is fifteen-year-old Clytemnestra, a neat, orderly, and dull child. It is she whom Mrs. Morpher sees as a model for M'liss. It is also she who competes with M'liss for the attention of the young master. As M'liss continues in school, the master is

struck by her restless and vigorous perception and the audacity with which she gives answers. But he is concerned that in spite of her sincerity, she is revengeful, irreverent, and willful. The master decides to call on the Reverend McSnagley for advice, even though the two of them are hardly friends. But McSnagley can only talk of the great attributes of Clytemnestra—thus causing M'liss to suffer by comparison. At examination time, when "the savants and professionals ... were gathered to witness that time-honored custom of placing timid children in a constrained position, and bullying them as in a witness box," M'liss and Clytemnestra are preeminent and share public attention equally—the former with her clearness of material perception and self-reliance, and the latter with her self-esteem and correctness of deportment. The Reverend McSnagley interrupts M'liss as she is talking about the revolution of the earth around the sun: "Meelissy! ye were speaking of the revolutions of this yere yearth and the move-merits of the sun, and I think ye said it had been a doing of it since the creashun, eh?" When M'liss agrees, McSnagley turns to Clytemnestra, who responds, "Joshua commanded the sun to stand still, and it obeyed him!" In the face of McSnagley's triumphant look, M'liss slams her fist on the table and retorts, "It's a d—n lie. I don't believe it!" When a traveling dramatic company visits Smith's Pocket, M'liss is inclined to run away with the group. The master, attempting to discourage one of the group from enticing M'liss away, becomes involved in a brawl and is almost shot. When he faces M'liss afterward, he asks her to go away with him that very night. She agrees. And, hand in hand, they passed into the road,— the narrow road that had once brought her weary feet to the master's door, and which it

BRETHARTE / 341 seemed she should not tread again alone. The stars glittered brightly above them. For good or ill the lesson had been learned, and behind them the school of Red Mountain closed upon them forever. In the longer version of the story, M'liss does not go off with the schoolmaster, but remains in Smith's Pocket. A mysterious stranger named Waters appears, and secretly works old Smith's claim. He shoots the Reverend McSnagley and is about to be lynched when M'liss helps him to escape. From him she learns that she has inherited a valuable mine. At this point, in another twist of the plot, M'liss's mother returns. She is a strikingly attractive woman whose "eyes, which were dark and singularly brilliant, were half closed, either from some peculiar conformation of the lids, or an habitual effort to conceal expression." M'liss goes to live with her mother, and becomes less wayward and more conventional in her demeanor. Harte was correct in preferring the first version of the story. The second one is obviously flawed by the attempt to lengthen it. What was a tightly knit and fairly moving plot becomes in the longer version a loosely structured series of episodes and character intrusions, with the result that the character M'liss, sharply and poignantly drawn in the first version, is considerably diminished. But the second version of the story did become quite popular, and was the basis of four dramatizations and three motion pictures—one with Mary Pickford playing the role of M'liss. An artist of the Royal Academy even painted a portrait of the imaginary M'liss. Out of his friendship for Starr King, Harte had begun attending the Unitarian church where King was minister. There he met, and became attracted to, Anna Griswold, a singer in the choir. She was a few years his senior and had already established a musical career. Neither family approved of the match, but both

Harte and Anna were determined to wed. On August 11, 1862, they did so. Because of Harte's meager salary and the inflationary pressures brought on by the war, setting up a new home was not easy. To complicate matters, a baby was soon on the way, and it was not long before Anna Harte began to complain bitterly to her friends about the family's financial condition. Never one to mingle much in San Francisco society, Harte continued to follow a quiet, studious life after his marriage. Even so, he was establishing friendships and associations with people who would be quite instrumental in furthering his literary career. Among these were Charles Henry Webb, literary editor of the San Francisco Bulletin; Charles Warren Stoddard, a twenty-year-old writer who was to become Harte's most intimate friend; and Ina Coolbrith, a young woman with whom Harte developed a close platonic relationship. O'Connor sees this attachment to Ina Coolbrith as an indication that Anna Harte did not supply whatever it was that Harte desired from a woman. Most of Harte's acquaintances probably could understand his inclination to spend much time at Coolbrith's flat on Russian Hill. Few had anything good to say about Anna. Josephine Clifford McCrackin, another friend of Harte's, described Anna as one who "never seemed a lovable woman.... There was a morose, stubborn expression on her face which invited neither cordiality nor sympathy; and when she put her foot down her husband had to 'toe the mark.'" Harte, in O'Connor's view, may have been lordly outside his home, but in it he was indeed a henpecked husband "who increasingly sought refuge from domestic tyranny at his office, in the Mercantile Library or Miss Coolbrith's cozy flat overlooking the Bay. ..." While with the Golden Era Harte published several other stories in that paper and also began his "condensed novels," some eighteen

342 I AMERICAN stylistic parodies of such writers as Victor Hugo, Charles Dickens, James Fenimore Cooper, Charlotte Bronte, Alexandre Dumas, and Edward George Bulwer-Lytton. These were written between 1863 and 1865. The first two were published in the Golden Era and most of the others in the Californian, a newspaper for which Harte worked for about a year after leaving the Golden Era. In 1867, Harte put these "condensed novels" together and published them as Condensed Novels and Other Papers. The "condensed novels" are really sketches, running only a few pages each, but they are true gems of parody—so much so that, as Patrick Morrow points out, "they are not only humorous in their own right but they also constitute a dimension of literary criticism." The North American Review, in commenting on Harte's parodies in 1866, called him "a parodist of such genius that he seems a mirror into which novelists may look and be warned." Unlike many other parodists Harte did not choose to parody only novelists he did not like. Dickens and Dumas, for instance, were two of his favorite writers. Harte's parody of Cooper's The Pioneers, titled "Muck-A-Muck," although not as smugly scathing as Mark Twain's "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences," nevertheless reflects his distaste for the type of romance that Cooper wrote. Although Harte was not a true westerner, he could not, for example, accept Cooper's penchant for superimposing the accoutrements of civilization on the frontier. Genevra Octavia Tompkins, the heroine of "Muck-A-Muck," on one occasion fears for her father's safety and, after playing (on a piano) and singing an old Irish ballad, sets out after him: But as the ravishing notes of her sweet voice died upon the air, her hands sank listlessly to her side. Music could not chase away the mysterious shadow from her heart. Again she rose.

WRITERS

Putting on a white crape bonnet, and carefully drawing a pair of lemon-colored gloves over her taper fingers, she seized her parasol and plunged into the depths of the pine forest. On her journey Genevra is threatened by a grizzly bear, a California/lion, a wildcat, a buffalo, and a Spanish bull—all coming at her in single file. As she is preparing to faint, Natty Bumpo arrives on the scene and dispatches these predators with a single shot: Five animals bounded into the air and five lifeless bodies lay upon the plain. The well-aimed bullet had done its work. Entering the open throat of the grizzly, it had traversed his body only to enter the throat of the California lion, and in like manner the catamount, until it passed through into the respective foreheads of the bull and the buffalo.... While parody is hardly a major literary form, it is not an easy one to master. The "condensed novels" show that Harte had the insight and critical acumen to produce a number of parodies that economically dissect an author without resorting to the high level of ridicule that so many practitioners of that form reach. Stewart is correct when he says that even today the "condensed novels" are excellent reading. The Civil War, though fought a long way from California, was nevertheless a matter of great concern in that area. Starr King, according to Merwin, deserved much credit for holding California in the Union. Southern sentiment was strong on the Pacific slope, stimulating a movement to divide California into two states, one free and the other slave. After the firing on Fort Sumter, King called upon Harte to write a poem to be read at a mass meeting in San Francisco, on the question of California's remaining in the Union. The poem, "The Reveille," was a stirring call for loyalty to the nation, closing with

BRETHARTE / 343 Thus they answered,—hoping, fearing, Some in faith, and doubting some, Till a trumpet-voice proclaiming, Said, "My chosen people, come!" Then the drum, Lo! was dumb, For the great heart of the nation, throbbing, answered, "Lord, we come!" After "The Reveille" Harte wrote a number of other patriotic poems that reflect his views of the war—from "John Burns of Gettysburg," who put aside his farm chores to stand steadfast in a white hat with the Union troops, to a poem in commemoration of the fourteenth anniversary of the admission of California to the Union (September 9, 1864). These poems were published in various California newspapers, including the Golden Era and later the Californian. In May 1864, Charles Webb had finally raised enough money to begin a new magazine—the. Californian, the chief contributors to which were Webb himself, Ina Coolbrith, Mark Twain, Charles Stoddard, and Harte. The magazine was larger than the Golden Era and had a much more urban and cosmopolitan air. "These ingenuous young men," said William Dean Howells, referring to the contributors named above, "with the fatuity of gifted people, had established a literary newspaper in San Francisco, and they brilliantly cooperated to its early extinction." The Californian died on February 1, 1868. Harte had stopped contributing to it two years earlier. In December 1865, Harte became involved in an incident that in some ways bordered on the ridiculous. Anton Roman, a bookseller, had been urging him to edit an anthology of California poems. Roman had a large collection of verse that he had obtained from Mary Tingley, a young Oakland woman who over the years had assiduously clipped poems from newspapers

and magazines. In "My First Book" Harte recalls that he and Roman "settled to our work with fatuous self-complacency and no suspicion of the trouble in store for us, or the storm that was presently to hurtle around our devoted heads." The title of the anthology was Outcroppings, and the storm that broke upon Harte and Roman came from poets who had not been included in the book. The December 9, 1865, News Letter mentioned the publication and the rumor that a delegation of 300 or 400 unanthologized poets was descending on San Francisco, seeking "dire vengeance against Harte." A number of reviews—some pro and many con—kept the California literary circle occupied for some time. By Christmas the book had nearly sold out, and the affair faded away. About this time a miner in Calaveras County discovered a skull 250 feet down a mine shaft. The skull found its way into the hands of Professor J. D. Whitney, who promptly concluded that it was the skull of a human being who died before the lava flowed over northern California. Whitney read a paper to the California Academy of Natural Sciences, theorizing that the skull might change the accepted notions of man's development. Harte, who could not let such pomposity pass, published a poem two weeks later titled "To the Pliocene Skull," in which, figuratively speaking, he reburied the skull. After nine stanzas in which he exhorts the skull to speak and identify itself, he closes with Even as I gazed, a thrill of the maxilla, And a lateral movement of the condyloid process, With post-pliocene sounds of healthy mastication, Ground the teeth together. And from that imperfect dental exhibition, Stained with express juices of the weed nicotian,

344 I AMERICAN Came these hollow accents, blent with softer murmurs Of expectoration: "Which my name is Bowers, and my crust was busted Falling down a shaft in Calaveras County; But I'd take it kindly if you'd send the pieces Home to old Missouri!" Also during this period Harte was secretary of the United States Mint in San Francisco, a position arranged for him by Robert B. Swain, superintendent of the Mint and a benefactor of Harte's. The duties were anything but demanding, and did not interfere with Harte's literary endeavors. Harte met Mark Twain at the Mint. The men were equally impressed with each other, and a month later Twain visited Harte again at the Mint. Harte described that meeting thus: In the course of conversation he remarked that the unearthly laziness that prevailed in the town he had been visiting was beyond anything in his previous experience. He said the men did nothing all day long but sit around the barroom stove, spit, and "swop lies." He spoke in a slow, rather satirical drawl, which was in itself irresistible. He went on to tell one of those extravagant stories, and half unconsciously dropped into the lazy tone and manner of the original narrator. I asked him to tell it again to a friend who came in, and then asked him to write it out for "The Californian." He did so, and when published it was an emphatic success. It was the first work of his that had attracted general attention, and it crossed the Sierra for an Eastern reading. The story was "The Jumping Frog of Calaveras." It is now known and laughed over, I suppose, wherever the English language is spoken; but it will never be as funny to any one

WRITERS

in print as it was to me, told for the first time by the unknown Twain himself on that morning in the San Francisco Mint. Later, in a letter to Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Twain paid tribute to Harte, saying, "Bret Harte trimmed and trained and schooled me patiently until he changed me from an awkward utterer of coarse grotesqueness to a writer of paragraphs and chapters that have found a certain favor in the eyes of even some of the very decentest people in the land." The relationship between Harte and Twain, unfortunately, was not to remain on such a friendly basis over the years. The year after his first collection of poems— The Lost Galleon and Other Tales (1867) —was published, Harte joined the Overland Monthly, a new magazine founded by Anton Roman. Not only was Harte the first editor, but he also selected the name of the magazine and designed its cover logo—a bear standing on a railroad track. This illustration, wrote Mark Twain, was "the ancient symbol of California savagery snarling at the approaching type of high and progressive Civilization, the first Overland locomotive!" Because he felt that the Overland needed a romance of California on its pages, Harte wrote for the second number the story that eventually won him wide acclaim—"The Luck of Roaring Camp." The story, though, was not to make a smooth entry into print. The printer, shocked at its frank content, sent proofs directly to Anton Roman, with the comment that the story was indecent and irreligious. Harte, after much discussion, persuaded Roman to let the story appear as written. It received a cool reception from the secular press of California and a very hostile one from the religious press, causing Harte to remark later, "It had secured an entrance into the world, but like

BRETHARTE / 345 its own hero, it was born with an evil reputation, and to a community that had yet to learn to love it." It is true that if the life and reputation of the story had depended on its reception in California, it would have died then and there. Fortunately for Harte, the Overland was widely distributed around the country; and Fields, Osgood, and Company, publishers of the Atlantic Monthly, were impressed enough to ask Harte for a similar story for their own publication. Harte felt that he had proved himself and was not content to follow the advice of some of his friends that he not "tempt criticism again." On the contrary, in describing himself in the introduction to the standard edition of his works, he says that with ... reinvigorated confidence in himself and some conscientious industry, he managed to get together in a year six or eight of these sketches, which, in a volume called "The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Sketches," gave hirfi that encouragement in America and England that has since seemed to justify him in swelling these records of a picturesque passing of civilization into the compass of the present edition. Included among the six works of the volume Harte mentioned were three of his best short stories: "The Luck of Roaring Camp," "The Outcasts of Poker Flat," and "Tennessee's Partner." All three merit discussion. The setting of "The Luck of Roaring Camp" is one of both stark isolation and natural beauty. Roaring Camp lies in a triangular valley, between two hills and a river—and in the opening scene is focused upon by a rising moon. It is indeed a world unto itself. On this particular evening in 1850, the camp stirs with a commotion that could not have been caused by a fight, because fights are so common that they arouse little if any notice.

The entire population of the settlement stands like a Greek chorus before the rude cabin of Cherokee Sal, the only woman in Roaring Camp. Although it is never stated explicitly, Cherokee Sal is undoubtedly a prostitute, and at this moment is in an awkward situation for one of her profession. "Dissolute, abandoned, and irreclaimable,'' she is "suffering a martyrdom hard enough to bear even when veiled by sympathizing womanhood, but now terrible in her loneliness." Cherokee Sal is giving birth. The men assembled before the cabin are like those of so many of Harte's stories. Living for the present in a crude and reckless fashion, they "exhibited no indication of their past lives and character. The greatest scamp had a Raphael face, with a profusion of blond hair; Oakhurst, a gambler, had the melancholy air and intellectual abstraction of a Hamlet; the coolest and most courageous man was scarcely over five feet in height, with a soft voice and an embarrassed, timid manner." But as they stand before the cabin, they are nonplussed at what is occurring inside. Cherokee Sal, who no doubt often opened her legs to the men of Roaring Camp in paid-for love, now opens them to bring new life into the world. And the men do not know how to react to this new set of circumstances. Although they are not aware of it, the "sharp, querulous cry,—a cry unlike anything heard before in the camp," sets in motion a change in Roaring Camp that will in some way touch them all. Cherokee Sal dies, but her baby is born. A miner named Stumpy is more or less appointed custodian of the new arrival, and he takes his responsibility in the most sober way. Stumpy places the child in a candle box on a table beside the bunk where Cherokee Sal lies dead, and invites all to "pass in at the front door, round the table, and out at the back door. Them as wishes to contribute anything toward

346 / AMERICAN the orphan will find a hat handy." The gifts range from a revolver to a Bible to $200 in loose coin. As the curious procession files by, an incident occurs that touches one of the group deeply. Kentuck, one of the least sentimental of the miners, bends over the candle box, and the baby reaches up and grabs his groping finger, whereupon Kentuck held "that finger a little apart from its fellows as he went out, and examined it curiously.... 'He rastled with my finger,' he remarked to Tipton, holding up the member, 'the d d little cuss!'" And a relationship is cemented between man and child that lasts until death. Since there is no woman to nurse the baby, Stumpy decides that Jinny, a jackass, will serve just as well. And so she does. The baby thrives—perhaps because in ... that rare atmosphere of the Sierra foothills,—that air pungent with balsamic odor, that ethereal cordial at once bracing and exhilarating,—he may have found food and nourishment, or a subtle chemistry that transmuted asses' milk to lime and phosphorus. Stumpy inclined to the belief that it was the latter and good nursing. "Me and that ass," he would say, "has been father and mother to him! Don't you," he would add, apostrophizing the helpless bundle before him, "never go back on us." A month later Oakhurst the gambler says during a discussion of a name for the child, "It's better to take a fresh deal all round. Call him Luck, and start him fair." And Tommy Luck— in a very real sense the son of the whole camp— is "christened as seriously as he would have been under a Christian roof, and cried and was comforted in as orthodox fashion." The Luck, as the miners call him, is given his own cabin that, under the watchful eye of Stumpy, is kept scrupulously clean and whitewashed. His cradle is a rosewood casket, packed eighty miles by mule. The regeneration of

WRITERS

Roaring Camp has begun. The whole camp takes on stricter habits of personal cleanliness—even Kentuck, who "in the carelessness of a large nature and the habits of frontier life, had begun to regard all garments as a second cuticle, which, like a snake's, only sloughed off through decay." Hard and crude as they may seem, the men of Roaring Camp are all touched by the subtle influence of the Luck as his presence awakens their finer sentiments. On summer days, for example, they take him with them to the diggings and spread a blanket for him on pine boughs. And through the day flowers and sweet-smelling shrubs appear as decorations for his bower. Tractable and quiet, the Luck appears securely happy, even though "there was an infantine gravity about him—a contemplative light in his round gray eyes—that sometimes worried Stumpy." A true child of nature, the Luck is sung to and chattered to by birds and squirrels—and, as Kentuck attests, he even seems able to talk back to them. The Luck becomes a kind of god to the men of Roaring Camp. Less than a year later, Roaring Camp is inundated by floodwaters and literally swept away. After a frantic search the survivors find the Luck dead in the arms of Kentuck, who is also dying. His last words are "'He's a taking me with him,—tell the boys I've got the Luck with me now'; and the strong man, clinging to the frail babe as a drowning man is said to cling to a straw, drifted away into the shadowy river that flows forever to the unknown sea." The challenge that Harte faced in writing "The Luck of Roaring Camp" was to take a rather trite plot—that of the lowly prostitute giving birth to a baby who may be seen as the son of man (in this case the son of all the men of Roaring Camp)—with a sentimental ending, and to rescue it from itself. He accomplishes the rescue in two ways. First, by not allowing a single event or a single character—not even the

BRETHARTE / 347 Luck—to dominate the story, he gives himself the freedom to focus clearly on the specific setting and on the general characteristics of the miners, so that the reader has the feeling that only at this given place, at this given time, and with these given people could the events occur. Second, by deftly blending humor and sentiment so that each either undercuts or highlights the other at just the right moments, he keeps the story from falling into cheap sentimentality or low comedy. Artistic restraintT humor, and sentiment, then, may be said to be the ingredients of "The Luck of Roaring Camp"—ingredients that combine to present the theme of the story: the universal regenerative power of human love in a world where nothing can be assumed. Despite the degree to which he often extolled the pioneers of California, Harte knew that in reality they, like most human beings, could take moral stances that were often hypocritical and bigoted. And in many of his stories he attacked such stances and the people who took them. Although the theme of "The Outcasts of Poker Flat" is not an iconoclastic attack on moral hypocrisy and bigotry, it is an ironic contrasting of pseudo morality and true morality. The main character in the story is John Oakhurst, the gentleman gambler who appears in several Harte stories. As he steps into the main street of Poker Flat on a November morning in 1850, he notes a "Sabbath lull in the air, which, in a settlement unused to Sabbath influences, looked ominous." The community has lately experienced some thefts and a killing; and in the righteous indignation that such acts have aroused, a secret committee has decided to drive all improper persons from Poker Flat. That he is one of these neither surprises nor dismays Oakhurst. Too much the gambler to question fate, he philosophically accepts his excommunication. He and three companions are escorted to the outskirts of the settlement. The

companions are the Duchess and Mother Shipton, obviously prostitutes, and Uncle Billy, a confirmed drunkard. As these violators of the fresh moral sanctity of Poker Flat leave their escort, "their pent-up feelings found vent in a few hysterical tears from the Duchess, some bad language from Mother Shipton, and a Parthian volley of expletives from Uncle Billy." Only Oakhurst maintains a stoic silence. They head for Sandy Bar, a settlement that has not yet felt the need for regeneration. The road lies over a steep mountain range. By noon the Duchess refuses to go further, and the party stops well up in the mountains and away from Poker Flat but less than halfway to Sandy Bar. Qakhurst cannot convince the others of the folly of stopping so soon—and "Uncle Billy passed rapidly from a bellicose state into one of stupor, the Duchess became maudlin, and Mother Shipton snored." Oakhurst leans against a tree, calmly surveying his weaker companions, and "the loneliness begotten of his pariah-trade, his habits of life, his very vices, for the first time seriously oppressed him." Upon this scene come Tom Simson (the Innocent) and Piney Woods, his fiancee, who are running away to get married. Against Oakhurst's advice the two lovers decide to camp with the outcasts. And so the stage is set for the tragedy that follows. The women take refuge in a ruined cabin nearby, while the men sleep on the ground. Oakhurst awakens early, only to discover that a heavy snow is falling and that Uncle Billy has run off with the horse and mules. The group is now stranded with only the supplies that the Innocent and Piney brought with them, enough for no more than ten days. A week passes, and the snow continues to build up. Singing and storytelling are the only pastimes the group has, with Piney and the Innocent doing most of the honors. The Duchess becomes more cheerful

348 I AMERICAN WRITERS and takes over the care of Piney. Mother Shipton, though, begins to fade, and on the tenth day tells Oakhurst that she is dying. She asks him to take the small bundle from under her head. When he does so, he finds that it contains her rations for the past week. She points to Piney and asks Oakhurst to give them to her. With that she dies. At Oakhurst's insistence the Innocent heads back to Poker Flat for help. Piling up enough firewood for a few days more, Oakhurst, too, leaves the cabin. The Duchess and Piney are left alone. The former asks Piney if she can pray. When Piney answers no, the Duchess seems relieved, putting her head on Piney's shoulder. "And so reclining, the younger and purer pillowing the head of her soiled sister upon her virgin breast, they fell asleep." And they are found that way—dead—when the Innocent returns with help. Oakhurst is found not far from the cabin, with his gun in his hand and a bullet through the heart—"who was at once the strongest and yet the weakest of the outcasts of Poker Flat." Interestingly, one of the items that the Innocent has with him is Alexander Pope's translation of the Iliad, and the outcasts spend one night listening as he retells the tale for them. One of Pope's poems has a comment that is perhaps appropriate for the predicament in which the outcasts find themselves: "Act well your part for there all honor lies." That all the out*' casts except Uncle Billy, in contrast with the "moral" residents of Poker Flat, act their parts well is a point made obvious in the story. Seen by some as the lowest elements in Poker Flat society, Oakhurst, the Duchess, and Mother Shipton succeed, along with the Innocent and Piney, in setting up a community, temporary though it is, that is based not on hypocrisy and pseudo morality, but on love and respect. Just as the miners in Roaring Camp are regenerated by the Luck, so the outcasts of Poker

Flat are regenerated by the beauty of innocence and love in the face of death. If Ernest Hemingway was correct in his belief that morality is something you feel good after, then the unselfish acts of the outcasts in this story should have, in their last moments, made them feel very good indeed. In the introduction to Tales of the Argonauts, Harte speaks of the loyalty of friendship found among the men of the California mining camps. "To be a man's 'partner,'" he says, "signified something more than a pecuniary or business interest; it was to be his friend through good or ill report, in adversity or fortune, to cleave to him and none other.... The heroic possibilities of a Damon and a Pythias were always present." "Tennessee's Partner" is the story of a partnership that, at least on one side, reflects the kind of loyalty delineated above. The main character in this story has no name other than Tennessee's Partner, almost as if his identity is submerged within that of Tennessee. Such is not really the case. Early on, Harte says about Tennessee's Partner, "That he had ever existed as a separate and distinct individuality we only learned later." Since the story is told in retrospect, "later" is not really relevant. What is relevant is the premium that Tennessee's Partner places on the second half of his name—Partner. He is a true partner, who, if given the chance, might well play the role of the fourth-century B.C. Damon. Tennessee's loyalty to his partner, on the other hand, is questionable, though in one sense one could say it is not really tested. Tennessee's Partner returns to Sandy Bar with a wife, and Tennessee "one day took occasion to say something to the bride on his own account, at which, it is said, she smiled not unkindly and chastely retreated,—this time as far as Marysville, where Tennessee followed." Tennessee's Partner takes the loss of his new wife "simply and

BRETHARTE / 349 seriously," and evidently somewhat philosophically. When the errant wife retreats with someone else, Tennessee returns to Sandy Bar and, to the dismay and disappointment of many, is welcomed with great affection by his partner. Tennessee, though, soon gets into trouble by stealing things other than wives. At his trial his partner comes to speak in his behalf. Tennessee's Partner's comments are almost eloquent in their utter simplicity: I come yar as Tennessee's pardner,—knowing him nigh on four year, off and on, wet and dry, in luck and out o' luck. His ways ain't allers my ways, but thar ain't any p'ints in that young man, thar ain't any liveliness as he's been up to, as I don't know. And you sez to me, sez you,— confidential-like, and between man and man,— sez you, "Do you know anything in his behalf?" and I sez to you, sez I,—confidential-like, as between man and man,—"What should a man know of his pardner?" His defense and his subsequent offer of $1,700 to make amends for Tennessee's actions fail to sway opinion, and Tennessee is hanged. Apparently unmoved, Tennessee's Partner arranges a primitive funeral for Tennessee, inviting all who are interested to join him. Reflecting the sense of humor common in Sandy Bar, a large number accept the invitation. After depositing Tennessee in the ground, Tennessee's Partner speaks: "When a man," began Tennessee's Partner, slowly, "has been running free all day, what's the natural thing for him to do? Why, to come home. And if he ain't in a condition to go home, what can his best friend do? Why, bring him home! And here's Tennessee has been running free, and we brings him home from his wandering." He paused, and picked up a fragment of quartz, rubbed it thoughtfully on his sleeve, and went on: "It ain't the first time that I've packed

him on my back, as you see'd me now. It ain't the first time that I brought him to this yer cabin when he couldn't help himself; it ain't the first time that I and * Jinny' have waited for him on yon hill, and picked him up and so fetched him home, when he couldn't speak, and didn't know me. And now that it's the last time, why—" he paused, and rubbed the quartz gently on his sleeve—"you see it's sort of rough on his pardner. And now, gentlemen," he added, abruptly, picking up his long-handled shovel, "the fun'l's over; and my thanks, and Tennessee's thanks, to you for your trouble." The story, if written today, might have ended there, but Harte continued it to include Tennessee's Partner's death and his last words: "Thar—I told you so!—thar he is,—coming this way, too,—all by himself, sober, and his face a-shining. Tennessee! Pardner!" Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren have accused Harte of ignoring the psychological implications of the wife-stealing episode and not bringing it into real focus—thus making the whole story seem anticlimactic and illogical. What Brooks and Warren miss, though, is that Tennessee's Partner defines his role as partner on his own terms. It is, moreover, those terms that give him his individuality. In his mind the partnership has nothing to do with his wife, errant or not. Nor is it dependent on any reciprocation by Tennessee. A grave man, Tennessee's Partner applies himself steadily to detail, according to Harte, and his partnership is the greatest detail in his life. Thus he applies himself to that partnership until his death. Illogical? Perhaps—though if Harte is to be believed in his comments about the loyalty of partners, logic is irrelevant. Anticlimactic? No. The story hinges on Tennessee's Partner's maintaining his loyalty to the very end, for he is really symbolic of the very nature of partnership as the Argonauts con-

350 I AMERICAN ceived of it—or at least as Bret Harte says they conceived of it. "The Luck of Roaring Camp" may have given Harte a literary reputation, but it was a sixty-line poem titled "Plain Language from Truthful James," or "The Heathen Chinee," as it came to be called, that really made him famous. The poem was one of those pieces a writer never seriously intends to publish. But when an issue of the Overland was short of material, Harte pulled out his poem and sent it to the printer. Copied by newspapers in America and England, the poem increased the circulation of the Overland to the point that one New York news company sold 1,200 copies. The New York Globe reported that "Nothing like this has ever been seen on Broadway We have been obliged to produce it twice in the Globe to answer the demands of the public, and we venture to say there is not a secular paper in the United States which has not copied it." Why was the poem such a popular success? Not even Harte could answer that question. Perhaps Merwin is right when he says that the poem came "at a fortunate moment when the people of this country were just awakening to the fact that there was a 'Chinese problem,' and when interest in the race was becoming universal in the East as well as the West." Or perhaps it was just one of those quirks of literary history that touches a common chord among readers— and nonreaders—of all kinds. The poem is a parody. Truthful James, the narrator, and Bill Nye start a card game with Ah Sin, a Chinese man, with the idea of cheating him. Pensive and childlike and supposedly ignorant of the game of euchre, Ah Sin overcomes the cards up Nye's sleeve with his own trickery: But the hands that were played By that heathen Chinee,

WRITERS And the points that he made, Were quite frightful to see,— Till at last he put down a right bower, Which the same Nye had dealt unto me.

At this turn of events Nye goes for Ah Sin with the shout, "We are ruined by Chinese cheap labor." In the struggle that follows, nothing is said regarding the fate of Ah Sin. The poem closes with Which is why I remark, And my language is plain, That for ways that are dark And for tricks that are vain, The heathen Chinee is peculiar,— Which the same I am free to maintain. In his monograph on Harte, Patrick Morrow sees the poem as an effort at social criticism: "In a comic instead of didactic way, Harte showed that Ah Sin quite literally played the American game and beat the masters. That the clever Chinese is run out of the game shows the hypocrisy ... that formed the basic beliefs of men such as Bill Nye and Truthful James." Thus, Morrow categorizes the poem as a powerful statement against injustice. If Harte had an attack against injustice in mind when he wrote the poem, his feeling after it made such an auspicious entry into the world of letters was something less than overjoyed. He was concerned that the poem was being read as a justification for cheating Chinese, or worse. "The worst of it was," says Stewart, "that he seems never to have liked the poem or to have seen why people made such a fuss about it, and to his dying day he was a little embarrassed when people referred to him as the author of the famous Heathen Chinee or talked about it in his presence." Vigorously opposed to racial injustice in general and to its application to the Chinese in particular, Harte struck out at such injustice on

BRETHARTE / 351 numerous occasions. In the introduction to Tales of the Argonauts, he eulogizes the virtues of the Chinese: He claimed no civil right; he wanted no franchise. He took his regular beatings calmly; he submitted to scandalous extortion from state and individual with tranquillity; he bore robbery and even murder with stoical fortitude. Perhaps it was well that he did. Christian civilization, which declared by statute that his testimony was valueless; which intimated by its practice that the same vices in a pagan were worse than in a Christian; which regarded the frailty of his women as being especially abominable and his own gambling propensities as something originally bad, taught him at least the Christian virtues of patience and resignation. One of the best of Harte's stories dealing with the Chinese is "Wan Lee, the Pagan." Published in Scribner's magazine in 1874, it is about a Chinese boy, Wan Lee, who at the age of ten is sent to the narrator by one Hop Sing, a respected friend. The boy is to work as a printer's devil on the narrator's newspaper. Good-natured and mischievous, Wan Lee is both a trial and a pleasure to the narrator. After two years he is sent to a missionary school for Chinese children in San Francisco. Staying with a widow and her young daughter, Wan Lee becomes good friends with the latter. The two of them get "along very well together—this little Christian girl with her shining cross hanging around her plump, white, little neck, and this dark little pagan, with his hideous porcelain god hidden away in his blouse." But Wan Lee's happiness is short-lived. He is stoned to death in the street "by a mob of half-grown boys and Christian schoolchildren!" As the narrator looks upon the battered body of Wan Lee, he puts his hand on the boy's chest and feels something crumble beneath his shirt:

"It was Wan Lee's porcelain god, crushed by a stone from the hands of those Christian iconoclasts." Harte, while establishing a reputation with his writing, was carefully and patiently performing his editorial duties on the Overland. Though frank in his critical estimates, he was ever kind in his remarks to contributors. One of many aspiring writers that Harte aided, his friend Charles Stoddard, was deeply appreciative of his help: "Fortunately for me he took an interest in me at a time when I was most in need of advice, and to his criticism and his encouragement I feel that I owe all that is best in my literary efforts." On March 22, 1869, Harte wrote to Stoddard regarding some material the latter had submitted to the Overland: "I have used the best you have sent me, Charley; you would not have thanked me for publishing some which was not so good.... You do not want my advice; I should give you more than I should take myself." Another time Joaquin Miller, who also won fame writing about the West, submitted two poems to Harte for the Overland. Harte rejected both with the following comment: Although I shall not be able to use either of your poems, I think that I fairly appreciate the merit of their performance and promise. I cannot say that I greatly admire your choice of subjects, which seems to me to foster and develop a certain theatrical tendency and feverish exaltation, which would be better under restraint, just now. I see nothing in you worse than faults of excess, which you can easily check by selecting less emotional themes for your muse. You are on your way to become a poet, and will, by and by, learn how much strength as well as beauty lies in repose. His duties on the Overland and at the Mint provided him with a fairly respectable income but, as was true through most of his life, finan-

352 I AMERICAN WRITERS cial problems haunted him. These problems, combined with friction between himself and John H. Carmany, the new publisher of the Overland, and a general dissatisfaction with the lack of interest in art and literature exhibited by the inhabitants of San Francisco, made Harte discontented with his life in California. With a lucrative offer of $10,000 from the Atlantic Monthly for a year's output of stories, he decided that he would return to the East. Merwin comments on this decision: No wonder, then, that, with tempting offers from the East, harassed with debts, disputes, cares and anxieties, disgusted with the atmosphere in which he was living,—no wonder Bret Harte felt that the hour for his departure had struck. Had he remained longer, his art would probably have suffered. A nature so impressionable as Bret Harte's, so responsive, would insensibly have been affected by his surroundings, and the more so because he had in himself no strong, intellectual basis. His life was ruled by taste, rather than by conviction; and taste is a harder matter than conviction to preserve unimpaired. Of all the criticisms passed upon Bret Harte there has been nothing more true than Madame Van de Velde's observations upon this point: "It was decidedly fortunate that he left California when he did, never to return to it; for his quick instinctive perceptions would have assimilated the new order of things to the detriment of his talent. As it was, his singularly retentive memory remained unbiassed by the transformation of the centres whence he drew his inspiration. California remained to him the Mecca of the Argonauts." In February 1871, Harte and his family left San Francisco for New York. The journey was interrupted by a brief stop in Chicago, where Harte was to meet with some prominent men interested in his becoming editor of the Lakeside Monthly. He failed to appear at a dinner where the possibilities of his editorship would be

discussed because, he said, no one called for him to escort him to the dinner. Whatever the cause of his failure to attend, the men involved lost interest in Harte as an editor. He later wrote to a friend in California that "The childishness and provincial character of a few of the principal citizens of Chicago spoiled the project." And so the Hartes moved on to New York. Because of the fame his stories and the poem "The Heathen Chinee" had brought him, Harte's progress eastward was, according to Merwin, "detailed by the newspapers with almost as much particularity as were the movements of Admiral Dewey upon his return to the United States after the capture of Manilla." The New York Tribune reported that the verdict of the popular mind regarding Harte's writings "only anticipated the voice of sound criticism." Following his arrival in New York, Harte journeyed to Boston to dine with the famous Saturday Club and to visit with the publishers of the Atlantic Monthly. James Russell Lowell was then editor of the magazine, and William Dean Howells, assistant editor. The latter was Harte's host. Howells described his impression of Harte in his "Literary Friends and Acquaintances": Of course, people were glad to have him on his own terms.... There was never a more charming companion, an easier or more delightful guest. It was not from what he said, for he was not much of a talker, and almost nothing of a story-teller; but he could now and then drop the fittest word, and with a glance or smile of friendly intelligence express the appreciation of another's word which goes far to establish for a man the character of born humorist. Howells' comments on Harte are an interesting contrast with the comments that Mark Twain was to make a bit later. Harte, for the most part, made a good

BRETHARTE / 353 impression on the literary lions of the East, and he himself enjoyed meeting such personages as Howells, Lowell, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Louis Agassiz, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. He was particularly taken with Longfellow. Stewart describes a walk the two took in Cambridge: A fine contrast they were—the younger man black-haired, dressed to the line of foppery, with that walk which some called mincing; the elder, patriarchal, hair silvery as the winter night, a voice of deep baritone, his whole presence mellowed by age and long-enjoyed honors into a gentle and modest dignity. For once, Harte bowed down in reverence; he offered no satire of Longfellow to Howells [as he did of some others]; on the contrary, the memory of the midnight walk through the snowy streets of Cambridge remained one of his cherished recollections. With the $10,000 from the Atlantic Monthly, Harte was free from his usual financial worries for a while. During the spring and summer of 1871, he did little work, causing some to label him lazy. Whether his lack of production came from a concern that he might not be able to maintain his previous level of quality is a question only Harte could have answered. But he was enjoying his reputation and the role in which it cast him. His contributions to the Atlantic Monthly numbered seven—more than the number with which Howells later credited him, but fewer than the minimum of twelve called for in the contract. This failure, says Stewart, "was a real blow to Harte, the first he had received since he had founded the Overland and begun his career of greatness." Despite his strong antipathy toward public speaking, Harte agreed to a lecture tour in order to stabilize his financial position. He prepared a lecture called "The Argonauts of '49, California's Golden Age." It proved a success when he presented it in Boston on December 13,

1871—while, according to O'Connor and Stewart, a sheriff was waiting in the wings with a writ of attachment on the proceeds. Mrs. Thomas Bailey Aldrich reported that the lecture had to be lengthened until Harte's friends could arrange a rescue. Just how he was rescued has never been explained. In the next three years Harte presented the Argonaut lecture some 150 times, from Canada to Nebraska to the Deep South. His letters to his wife during this time reflect his dislike of the lecture business and bemoan the lack of financial success of the tour. On March 25, 1873, he wrote to her from Ottawa, Canada, saying in part: I did not want to write this disappointment to you as long as there was some prospect of better things. You can imagine, however, how I feel at this cruel loss of time and money—to say nothing of my health, which is still so poor. I had almost recovered from my cold, but in lecturing in Ottawa at the Skating Rink, a hideous, dismal, damp barn—the only available place in town—I caught a fresh cold and have been coughing badly ever since. And you can imagine that my business annoyances do not add greatly to my sleep or appetite. While Harte maintained a gracious home for his family in Morristown, New Jersey, he spent much time in a small New York City apartment. The reasons for his extended absences from his family can be explained on several grounds: the need to provide for the family, a desire for tranquillity, and an escape from creditors. "His talent for eluding creditors," says O'Connor, "was matched only by his quicksilver quality as a husband." The year 1874 was fairly productive for Harte; half a dozen stories made their way into print. The best of these, "A Passage in the Life of Mr. John Oakhurst," resurrects the gentleman gambler who committed suicide in "The

354 I AMERICAN Outcasts of Poker Flat." Unlike so many of Harte's other stories, this one does not have a sentimental ending. The ending in this instance is marked by a note of cynicism. Oakhurst befriends a man and his rheumatoid wife, Elsie, and arranges a place for them in a resort area, where the man prospers as a carpenter and the woman regains her health and her beauty. Oakhurst falls in love with the woman, not realizing that she is using him to get rid of another suitor, his friend Jack Hamilton. Oakhurst forces Hamilton into a duel and mortally wounds him. As he is dying, Hamilton gives Oakhurst two love letters he has received from Elsie. Oakhurst confronts Elsie with the letters, saying that he has come to kill her. With feminine aplomb she admits her guilt and urges him to shoot her. This gesture unnerves the gambler, and he leaves. The story closes with him back at his faro table in Sacramento. Also in 1874, Harte, perhaps wanting to prove that he could write something more sustained than short stories, began work on a novel, Gabriel Conroy. Such earlier stories as "Cressy," "In a Hollow of the Hills," "A Waif of the Plains," and "The Crusade of the Excelsior" are long enough to be called novelettes rather than short stories. But in Gabriel Conroy Harte let out all stops. It was to be a novel that covered all that California had to offer. In Stewart's words, it "would be a colossal painting, a synthesis of innumerable sketches, the representation of a whole historical episode." Too complex to summarize here, the novel centers on the adventures of its hero, Gabriel Conroy. Among the numerous side plots are those dealing with the trials and tribulations of Grace Conroy, Gabriel's sister, and the doings of Jack Hamlin, the gambler who appears in several other of Harte's stories. Most critics agree that Gabriel Conroy proved that Harte was no novelist. Much too ambitious a venture, the novel—really a long string of brief narratives—sinks under its own

WRITERS

weight. Harte himself admitted that he had difficulty in moving his characters in and out of the complex plot. Usually a fast writer, he also found both the beginning and the end of the book slow going—writing to his friend Elisha Bliss that "the book winds up slowly. It requires as much care—even more—in ending than in beginning." In spite of the weak story line the novel does have some graphic scenes and strong narrative passages that stand out in their own right. Perhaps the best part of the whole book is the prologue, which depicts a group of emigrants trapped by deep snow high in the Sierras. Having tried novel writing, Harte next turned to play writing. With an earlier story, "Mr. Thompson's Prodigal," as a basis, he built the plot of his play around two of his most successful characters, John Oakhurst and Colonel Starbottle, and a new character named Hop Sing, a Chinese laundryman. Two Men of Sandy Bar opened in Chicago, and came to New York on August 28, 1876. The critics ripped the play to shreds, one calling it "the worst failure witnessed on the boards of our theatres for years." Undaunted, Harte planned another play, this time in collaboration with Mark Twain, who had said earlier that Two Men of Sandy Bar "would have succeeded if anyone else had written it. Bret killed off his own chances in New York by having charged loudly and publicly before the opening that the newspaper critics never said a favorable thing about a new play except when the favorable thing was bought and paid for beforehand." The new play was to be called Ah Sinf with each author initially working on his own contribution. When Harte visited Twain so that they could finish the play, the latter reportedly became angry at Harte's sarcastic remarks about the Twain home. Thirty years later, in his Autobiography, Twain quoted his scolding of Harte for his behavior:

BRETHARTE / 355 ... you are barred from these criticisms by your situation and circumstances; you have a talent and a reputation which would enable you to support your family most respectably and independently if you were not a born bummer and a tramp; you are a loafer and an idler and you go clothed in rags, with not a whole shred on you except your inflamed red tie, and it isn't paid for; nine tenths of your income is borrowed money—money which, in fact, is stolen, since you never intended to repay any of it. ... Ah Sin opened in Washington on May 7, 1877, and was well received by the audience. The critics were a different story. Although Twain worked on revisions during the ensuing summer, Harte apparently lost interest in the project and had nothing more to do with it. When the play opened in New York, Twain was there but Harte was not. Harte's career, and Harte himself, were at a precariously low point. Money problems and lack of literary success combined to make good writing almost impossible. He did turn out a number of potboilers for the New York Sun but not much else. What he hoped would be a turning point—the editorship of the Capitol a Washington magazine—came to naught when that publication was seized by its creditors. Through the influence of friends and his own efforts with governmental bureaucracy, Harte obtained an appointment as United States consul in Crefeld, Germany; and in June 1878 he sailed for England, never to return to his homeland. Not surprisingly, his wife and children did not accompany him. The break with Anna was virtually complete as far as any real husbandwife relationship was concerned. Harte did write often, and he apparently sent money whenever he could. Crefeld was not at all to Harte's liking, and he got away from it whenever possible. He knew almost no German and made little effort to learn any. His letters to Anna during this period

reflect his dissatisfaction with the post and his concerns for his financial situation and his health. His hopes, he knew, lay in England; and in January 1879 he went there on a lecture tour—dragging out the "Argonauts of '49" lecture. The lecture tour was generally a failure from Harte's standpoint. "I came here a week ago to begin my lecture tour," he wrote to Anna, "but my agent has blundered so in the beginning that my friends think it better for me to postpone the tour until later in the season." He followed the advice to postpone, finishing the tour in the spring, again to his financial disappointment. But he did establish social contacts in England that greatly pleased him. As for his writing, Harte tried unsuccessfully to use the German background in "A Legend of Sammtstadt." He tried in other stories to picture Californians in Europe—again unsuccessfully. With "The Twins of Table Mountain" and "Jeff Briggs's Love Story" he fell back on the California setting. He obviously was not satisfied with his efforts, writing to Anna that "I grind out the old tunes on the old organ and gather up the coppers." In June 1880, Harte left Germany for a new consular post in Glasgow, Scotland. Not only did the move represent a promotion; it also enabled him to continue his associations in England. The most significant of these was with Marguerite Van de Velde, whose husband, Arthur, was chancellor of the Belgian legation in London. She had read and admired Harte's stories, and it was not long before a room at the Van de Veldes' was set aside for him. She not only translated some of his stories into French, but she also proved an astute critic. With her encouragement Harte began to write with more regularity and fervor. When Grover Cleveland was elected president in 1884, Harte lost his position. He nevertheless decided to remain in England and reside with the Van de Veldes rather than return to

356 I AMERICAN WRITERS America. Artistically speaking—and regardless of Twain's accusations that he had deserted his family—this decision was a good one. Harte was free now to write, and what he wrote was of good quality, resembling his earlier work. "Snow Bound at Eagle's," which opens with what is probably the archetypal stagecoach holdup of western fiction, is an example, as is "An Apostle of the Tules." In the latter story Harte tells the moving tale of Gideon Deane, a neophyte preacher who offers to risk his life to save an outlaw about to be hanged illegally by a group of vigilantes. Because of this action he wins the respect of the gambler Jack Hamlin and others of the town of Martinez. They offer to build him a new church if he will stay there to preach. He declines, in order to go back to Tasajara to take care of a widow and her small children. That, he feels, is the work to which God has called him. In a letter to Anna, Harte said of the story that it was "in my old shorter and more condensed style." During these years Harte worked steadily at his writing, becoming, according to Stewart, "a factory to produce stories, to meet the factory's financial obligations, to buy supplies of food and clothing, so that the factory might produce more stories to buy more food, and so to grind on in the circle until the factory eventually wore out." And on May 5,1902, the factory did wear out; Bret Harte died of a severe hemorrhage— at his writing table. Many modern scholars and critics of literature would probably agree with the view that Bret Harte is an example of how far a writer of limited talent can go—a view that has been held about numerous writers who have captured the imagination of the reading public. In Harte's case the view is applicable at least to some degree, depending on how one defines talent. Not a Herman Melville, a Nathaniel Hawthorne, or a William Faulkner, Harte nevertheless wrote a place for himself in the American literary chronicle by turning his talent for de-

veloping narrative, creating scene and incident, and depicting character to the raw material he found in the mining camps of California. Following a formula that was based on the contrast between appearance and reality, that utilized stock characters, and that spiced sentimental plots with irony and humor, Harte showed, as John Erskine put it, "that the romance of the coast was not in outward things, but in the curious mixture of characters and races, brought together for the moment into the sudden whirlpool of the mining towns." And in so doing, he made the characters of those towns come to life for readers in the East and in Europe. The medium in which he worked—the short story—was the best for capturing that transient, kaleidoscopic life of the mining camps. It enabled Harte to focus clearly on incidents and characters and to catch their foibles, their eccentricities, and their dreams. Whenever he tried another medium, the novel or the play, he failed. Part of the reason for this failure surely lay within Harte's own abilities, but another part of it lay within the very nature of the subject matter that he chose for his stories. Even his longer stories—"Cressy" is an example— are often based on, and developed from, a single incident. It is ironic that some of his own contemporaries castigated Harte for his "vulgarity, obscenity, and harsh realism," while critics and scholars today tend to see his work as excessively romantic and sentimental. The irony is underscored in terms of the latter view when one remembers that Harte was vehemently opposed to extreme romanticism and cheap sentimentality. He did have a tendency to idealize his characters—probably because he saw the Argonauts in a grander light than they perhaps deserved—and he certainly used his share of sentimental endings for his stories. But his tonal perspective, at least in his best work, more often than not saved a given story from becoming an

BRETHARTE / 357 exercise in mere melodramatic sentimentality. His sense of parody and his recognition that humor and deep feeling often are closely related also played a significant role in this regard. Perhaps, as Erskine suggests, if Bret Harte could have turned his gallery of portraits and incidents in the direction of longer compositions, he might have produced not only novels but also an epic of California. Since he could not, the world must be content—and well it should be—with what he did do, as G. K. Chesterton so aptly described it in Varied Types (1903): He discovered the intense sensibility of the primitive man. To him we owe the realization of the fact that while modern barbarians of genius like Mr. [William Ernest] Henley, and in his weaker moments Mr. Rudyard Kipling, delight in describing the coarseness and crude cynicism and fierce humor of the unlettered classes, the unlettered classes are in reality highly sentimental and religious, and not in the least like the creations of Mr. Henley and Mr. Kipling. Bret Harte tells the truth about the wildest, the grossest, the most rapacious of all the districts of the earth—the truth that, while it is very rare indeed in the world to find a thoroughly good man, it is rarer still, rare to the point of monstrosity, to find a man who does not either desire to be one, or imagine that he is one already.

Selected Bibliography WORKS OF BRETHARTE FICTION

Condensed Novels and Other Papers. New York: G. W. Carleton and Co., 1867.

The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Stones. Boston: James R. Osgood and Co., 1870. An Idyl of Red Mountain. New York: Robert M. De Witt, 1873. Mrs. Skagg's Husbands and Other Sketches. Boston: James R. Osgood and Co., 1873. Idyls of the Foothills. Boston: James R. Osgood and Co., 1875. Tales of the Argonauts and Other Sketches. Boston: James R. Osgood and Co., 1875. Gabriel Conroy. Hartford, Conn.: American Publishing Co., 1876. Thankful Blossom, a Romance of the Jerseys, 1779. Boston: James R. Osgood and Co., 1877. Drift from Two Shores. Boston: Houghton, Osgood and Co., 1878. Story of a Mine. Boston: James R. Osgood and Co., 1878. The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories. Boston: Houghton, Osgood and Co., 1879. Jeff Briggs's Love Story and Other Tales. Leipzig: Tauchnitz, 1880. Flip and Found at Blazing Star. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1882. In the Carquinez Woods. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1884. On the Frontier. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1884. Maruja. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1885. By Shore and Sedge. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1885. Snow Bound at Eagle's. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1886. The Crusade of the Excelsior. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1887. Frontier Stories. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1887. A Millionaire of Rough and Ready and Devil's Ford. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1887. Argonauts of North Liberty. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1888. A Phyllis of the Sierras. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1888. Cressy and Other Tales. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1889. The Heritage of Dedlow Marsh and Other Tales. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1889. A Waif of the Plains. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1890. A Ward of the Golden Gate. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1890. A Sappho of Green Springs and Other Stories. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1891.

358 I AMERICAN WRITERS Colonel Starbottle's Client and Some Other People. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1892. Sally Downs and Other Stories. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1893. Susy, a Story of the Plains. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1893. The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1894. A Prottgt of Jack Hamlins and Other Stories. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1894. Clarence. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1895. In a Hollow of the Hills. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1895. Baker's Luck and Other Stories. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1896. Three Partners or The Big Strike on Heavy Tree Hill. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1897. Stories in Light and Shadow. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1898. Tales of Trail and Town. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1898. Mr. Jack Hamlin's Meditation and Other Stories. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1899. From Sand Hill to Pine. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1900. Under the Redwoods. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1901. Openings in the Old Trail. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1902.

COLLECTED EDITIONS

The Writings of Bret Harte. 20 vols. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1896-1914. The Riverside and Overland editions are basically the same as this, the standard edition. Bret Harte's Collected Works. Argonaut edition. 25 vols. New York: P. F. Collier and Sons, 1906.

BIBLIOGRAPHIES Gaer, Joseph, ed. Bret Harte: Bibliography and Biographical Data. New York: Burt Franklin, 1935. Stewart, George R. A Bibliography of the Writings of Bret Harte in the Magazines and Newspapers of California. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1933.

BIOGRAPHIES Merwin, Henry Childs. The Life of Bret Harte. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1911. O'Connor, Richard. Bret Hartef a Biography. Boston: Little, Brown, 1966. Pemberton, T. Edgar. Life of Bret Harte. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1903. Stewart, George R. Bret Harte: Argonaut and Exile. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1935.

POETRY

The Lost Galleon and Other Tales. San Francisco: Towne and Bacon, 1867. East and West. Boston: James R. Osgood and Co., 1871. Poems. Boston: James R. Osgood and Co., 1871. That Heathen Chinee and Other Poems. Melbourne: George Robertson, 1871. Echoes of the Foot-Hills. Boston: James R. Osgood and Co., 1874. Her Letter, His Answer, and Her Last Letter. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1905. Poems and Stories. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1912. NONFICTION

The Lectures of Bret Harte. Brooklyn: C. M. Kozlay, 1909. The Letters of Bret Hartet edited by Geoffrey Harte. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1926. Sketches of the Sixties. San Francisco: J. Howell, 1926.

CRITICAL STUDIES Beasley, Thomas D. A Tramp Through Bret Harte Country. San Francisco: Paul Elder, 1914. Booth, Bradford. "Unpublished Letters of Bret Harte." American Literature, 16:131-42 (May 1944). . "Bret Harte Goes East: Some Unpublished Letters." American Literature, 19:318-35 (January 1948). . "Mark Twain's Comments on Bret Harte's Stories." American Literature, 25:492-95 (January 1954). Duckett, Margaret. "Bret Harte's Portrayal of Half Breeds." American Literature, 25:193-212 (May 1953). . "The Crusade of a Nineteenth Century Liberal." Tennessee Studies in Literature, 4:109-20 (1959).

BRETHARTE / 359 . Mark Twain and Bret Hartg. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1964. -. "Plain Language from Bret Harte." Nineteenth Century Fiction, 11:241-60 (March 1957). Erskine, John. Leading American Novelists. Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1910. Gardner, Joseph H. "Bret Harte and the Dickensian Circle in America." Canadian Review of American Studies, 2:89-101 (1971). Loomis, C Grant. "Bret Harte's Folklore." Western Folklore, 15:19-22 (January 1956). May, Ernest R. "Bret Harte and the Overland Monthly." American Literature, 22:260-71 (November 1950). Morrow, Patrick. "The Predicament of Bret Harte."

American Literary Realism, 5:181-88 (Summer 1972). Nadal, E. S. "Bret Harte." North American Review, 124:81-90 (January 1877). Pattee, Fred Lewis. The Development of the American Short Story. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1923. Quinn, Arthur H. American Fiction: An Historical and Critical Survey. New York: AppletonCentury Crofts, 1936. Walker, Franklin. San Francisco's Literary Frontier. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1969. — WILTON ECKLEY

Robert Hayden 1913-1980 FROROM 1940 until shortly before his death on

upon the glittering death march of De Soto through Indian wilderness. Here mockingbird and cottonmouth, fury of rivers.

February 25, 1980, Robert Hayden published poems of unusual diversity and breadth of experience. A range of modern poetry from the dialect poems of Langston Hughes to the Byzantium poems of William Butler Yeats figured in his development. In broadest terms his verse deals with the tensions between the conditional realities of men's lives and their human aspirations, between a tragic and irredeemable world and the possibilities for transcendence that exist in sensory delight, art, and religion. As a black American, Hayden is also concerned with history. The relationship between harsh empirical facts—especially the realities of American slavery—and the moral and imaginative use of these facts is an important element of his verse. Although at times his poems rise above the evil of the world, most often history and a hostile universe limit the possibilities of the present. In "Locus" (Words in the Mourning Time, 1970), a poem about the undying presences and deadly nature of the southern landscape, Hayden writes:

Here spareness, rankness, harsh brilliances; beauty of what's hardbitten, knotted, stinted, flourishing in despite, on thorny meagerness thriving, twisting into grace. In "Locus" past and present, shade and brilliance, beauty and violent undergrowth twist into qualified "grace." Embodiment of the violent history of the South, the landscape thwarts the ample blossoming of beauty or the poet's transcendent contemplation. By contrast, in the same volume the poet is able, briefly, in "Monet's 'Waterlilies'" to escape history through the contemplation of art: Today as the news from Selma and Saigon poisons the air like fallout, I come again to see the serene great picture that I love.

Here violent metamorphosis, with every blossom turning deadly Here wound-red earth and blinding cottonfields, rock hills where sachems counseled, where scouts gazed stealthily

Here space and time exist in light the eye like the eye of faith believes. The seen, the known dissolve in irridescence, become illusive flesh of light that was not, was, forever is.

361

362 I AMERICAN In these poems we see a manifestation of what Wilburn Williams, Jr., calls Hayden's "bipolar" imagination. Both poems emerge out of the conflict between man's imaginative-spiritual nature and the immitigable aspects of existence. In "Locus" the evil in man and nature condemns the transcendental impulse to unending terrestrial struggle. In "Monet's 'Waterlilies'" the poet is able for a short while to rise beyond "the seen, the known" to a sphere of iridescent serenity. Williams says of Hayden's verse: "The realities of imagination and the actualities of history are bound together in an intimate symbiotic alliance that makes neither thinkable without the other." Michael S. Harper observes similarly that "Hayden has always been a symbolist poet struggling with historical fact, his rigorous portraits of people and places providing the synaptic leap into the interior landscape of the soul " Hayden himself suggested to John O'Brien, only partly in jest, that perhaps he was a "romantic realist." Acknowledging elements of romanticism, symbolism, and realism in his poetry, Hayden often underscored in interviews his mistrust of the commonplace sense of "reality" and his belief in the reality of the subjective. (The word he preferred is "fantasy.") He said to Dennis Joseph Gendron: "... we live so much of our lives in our own minds. What we consider fantasy and unreality—these things are so much a part of us and determine so much of us. I have always been fascinated by this. The line between the real and the fanciful is a very thin line " Unquestionably the reality of "fantasy" or what we shall call "subjectivity" exerted a persistent influence on Hayden's verse. Yet if this attitude placed him squarely in the mainstream of modern poetry, it did not always win him approval or even attention. "There is a chronic American belief," Lionel Trilling observes in "Reality in America" (1940). "that there exists

WRITERS

an opposition between reality and mind and that one must enlist oneself in the party of reality." This tendency to view reality as "material reality," "wholly external" and "always easily to be known," emerges particularly in economically depressed times and amid economically oppressed groups. Sometimes it leads to a complete subordination of art and intellectual life to economic and political "realities." At other times, as was common during the 1960's and 1970's among radical blacks, mind—but only "black" mind—is admitted as part of reality. Stephen Henderson, for example, in Understanding the New Black Poetry (1973), defines contemporary black verse exclusively in terms of black themes, black feeling for life (Henderson's term is "saturation"), and structural effects arising from black speech and music as "poetic references." Other themes, feelings, or references are not important in understanding black poetry. Although it made Hayden the subject of occasional attack, he always opposed such ethnocentric attitudes. Their fault lay for him in their defining the boundaries of reality for the artist and establishing ethnic or political criteria upon which to judge a writer's selection and treatment of material. In the controversy over William Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner (1966), which was attacked by a group of black artists for its misrepresentations, Hayden's sympathies were with Styron and his freedom to write about whomever he chose: "... the attack on Styron, the extremely harsh criticism leveled against him, should give all writers pause," Hayden said to Paul McCluskey. Hayden believed that craft and universality are the criteria upon which a work ought to be judged. Responding to real or anticipated pressure from black quarters, he described himself in his own anthology of black poetry as "opposed to the chauvinistic and the doctrinaire." Significantly, he went on to say that he "sees no

ROBERT HAYDEN / 363 reason why a Negro poet should be limited to facial utterance' or to having his writing judged by standards different from those applied to the work of other poets"; here he also seemed to be addressing himself to white readers, editors, and critics. Coercion from this second group did not assume any overt form; it manifested itself as neglect. Until 1975, Hayden had not been published by a large American publishing house. His works were issued in limited editions by small foreign and domestic presses. Even in terms of poetry anthologies, only "Middle Passage," a historical poem about the slave trade, and his sonnet "Frederick Douglass" have appeared in the major anthologies used regularly in college classrooms. "Yet do I marvel at this curious thing: / To make a poet black, and bid him sing!" Countee Cullen wrote in 1925, commenting on the irony of the black lyric poet's vocation in a world scored with evil. At the present time too few people are acquainted with the marvelous richness of Hayden's verse. That it does not always embody the anticipated attributes of black poetry, such as ethnicity and anger, has something to do with this. Robert Earl Hayden was born in Detroit, Michigan, on August 4, 1913. He grew up in a poor neighborhood, later affectionately, though not without irony, named Paradise Valley by its inhabitants. In the 1920's, blacks, Jews, Germans, Italians, and some southern whites lived there; by the 1930's, with the black migration to the North, the neighborhood was inhabited solely by blacks. Hayden's memories of a huge old synagogue on Montcalm Street becoming the Mount Olive Baptist Church grew out of this transitional period and figure in a poem about the loss of Jewish friends called "The Rabbi" (Selected Poems, 1966). "Free Fantasia: Tiger Flowers" (Angle of Ascent, 1975) describes the "sporting people / along St. Antoine" and how "I was a boy then, running ...

errands for Miss Jackie / and Stack-o'-Diamonds' Eula Mae." In "Elegies for Paradise Valley" (American Journal, 1978), neighborhood characters return to the poet's mind as if from a region of the dead. These resurrections are stirred by the memory of a storefront gypsy whose seances he attended with his mother and aunt in order to contact a dead uncle. The quality of life in Paradise Valley is best evoked in "'Summertime and the Living ...'" (Selected Poems). In contrast with the languid environs of George and Ira Gershwin's Porgy and Bess hit, the living, according to the poem, was anything but easy. The adult speaker recalls how "sunflowers gangled there sometimes / tough-stalked and bold / and like the vivid children there unplanned." He also remembers how, as a child, there were never any roses . . . except when people died— and no vacations for his elders, so harshened after each unrelenting day that they were shouting-angry. But summer was, they said, the poor folks' time of year. And he remembers how they would sit on broken steps amid The fevered tossings of the dusk, the dark, wafting hearsay with funeral-parlor fans or making evening solemn by their quietness.... Hayden's family life was riddled with emotional complication and trauma more than with poverty. His parents' marriage ended when he was still young. His mother placed him in the care of a childless neighborhood couple, then went to Buffalo, New York, in search of work. Robert remained with William and Sue Ellen Hayden permanently. He assumed their name, and they reared him with the love of actual parents. "All through my childhood my mother

364 I AMERICAN was a kind of vision, a kind of imaginary person," Hayden said, trying to describe the impression the visits of his real mother left on him. When he was a teenager, she returned, not merely to Detroit but to live with the Haydens; and then, when jealous conflict with Sue Ellen Hayden made that impossible, to the house next door. Hayden described his foster mother (the source for "The Ballad of Sue Ellen Westerfield," Selected Poems) as extremely neurotic, tortured by a facial "neuralgia" that he suspected was psychosomatic. Her intense love for him was irrationally possessive. She beat him, subjected him to verbal abuse about his real mother, and became violently jealous about the time he spent with her. If this was not enough, William Hayden, Robert's foster father, had "terrible rows" with Sue Ellen's daughter by her first marriage. "I lived in the midst of so much turmoil all the time that I didn't know if I loved or hated," he told Gendron. Still, he felt compelled to add that "while cruel and dreadful things happened and I was exposed to all kinds of really dreadful things, really soul-shattering experiences in the home and all around me, they [his foster family] could be really selfsacrificing on top of all that." Until Hayden was forty, he thought that he had been legally adopted by the Haydens, and that his original name was Robert Sheffey. He learned when applying for a passport that there never had been a legal adoption, although the "old ones" had told him so; his legal name was Asa Bundy Sheffey. "You know, I am in many respects a divided person," Hayden told Gendron. Hayden's tendency to think of both sets of adults as parents and his prolonged living with divided loyalties and ambivalent feelings help one to understand the man. It also offers valuable insight into the sources of the dogged courage he displayed during his long career as a poet.

WRITERS

Learning to live amid violently contending demands as a youth may, ultimately, have helped Hayden to resist the pressures he faced as an adult from black nationalists to be a "black poet" and from white liberals to be a "spokesman for his race." Also, Gendron suggests that, from the circumstances of his youth, certain themes manifested themselves in his work: "the search for and definition of what constitutes identity, the significance of names, and the dilemma of a man caught between two worlds." Furthermore, rather than immobilizing his sense of self (though for periods this evidently occurred), his struggle with identity seems finally to have given him a penetrating and coherent sense of character. One wonders, after reading his poems about Malcolm X and Nat Turner, what sort of novelist he might have made. Hayden was always extremely nearsighted. Limited to indoor play because of this and turned inward by the tensions at home, he spent most of his early years in solitary activity. Recalling the summer in late adolescence when he discovered modern poetry, he told Paul McCluskey: "Instead of playing baseball... or taking part in the other so-called 'normal' activities of the boys in my neighborhood, I would spend hours reading poetry and struggling to get my words down on paper. From that summer on, I continued working at poetry, hoping someday to be known as a poet." By the age of eighteen, he had taken the first step. A poem imitating Cullen's "Heritage" appeared in Abbott's Monthly, a Chicago magazine. Hayden attended Detroit City College (now Wayne State University) from 1932 to 1936 and majored in foreign languages. After college he joined the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and until 1938 did research on the Underground Railroad in Michigan and the antislavery movement. He probably acquired his appetite for his-

ROBERT HAYDEN / 365 torical research from this stint with the WPA. In the 1940's, Hayden continued to read about the slave trade, plantation life, slave revolts, and the Underground Railroad; and this material, both as general background and as documentary detail, made the composition of his historical poems possible. During his college years and afterward, Hayden also acted in Detroit and wrote for the stage. A play of his about Harriet Tubman, Go Down, Moses, was produced several times. He served as an arts critic for a black weekly, the Michigan Chronicle; and he was also tangentially involved in left-wing labor organizing in Detroit. At one mass meeting he was voted "the people's poet." "These Are My People" (HeartShape in the Dust, 1940), a long protest poem describing the poverty and idleness of blacks in America during the Great Depression, was "a great thing... in Chicago and Detroit" and was performed by groups. From 1941 to 1946 Hayden did graduate work in English at the University of Michigan, where he studied with and was befriended by W. H. Auden. He received an M.A. in 1944. He had married Erma Morris, a musician and teacher, in 1940; and they had a child, Maia, two years later. In 1946 Hayden moved his family to Nashville, Tennessee, to teach at Fisk University. He spent twenty-two years at Fisk. Although the faculty was racially mixed, socialized together, and lived in an integrated enclave, he described (in his interview with Richard Layman) feeling limited in "the kind of experience we could have ... the kind of things we could do." His daughter had to attend a segregated school. Also, there was a "provincialism in the South," frustrating to his and Erma's interest in avant-garde painting and dance. Thus, although Fisk was a "pretty sophisticated place" and he felt he "could be of some service to the young people there," Hayden would have liked to return to the North. But it

was impossible to find a position. In the years when he might have been at the height of his productive powers, he found his stamina drained away in "earning a living." The writer and poet Julius Lester, a student of Hayden's, offers this recollection of him at Fisk: When I entered Fisk University in the fall of 1956, he had already been there 10 years On campus, he was regarded as just another instructor in the English department, teaching 15 hours of classes a week No one at Fisk had the vaguest notion of what a poet's function was, not that they gave it any thought. Yet, somehow, Hayden continued to believe—in himself and poetry—though no one except his wife and a few students and friends in New York ever cared. Although Hayden worked in relative obscurity, without significant popular or critical recognition, he did have his share of awards and honors, some of major importance. He won the Avery Hopwood Award for poetry at the University of Michigan in 1938 and 1942, and received a Rosenwald Fellowship in 1947 and a Ford Foundation grant to write and travel in Mexico in 1954. In 1966—the same year that Julius Lester recalls his being attacked as an Uncle Tom by students and writers at a writers' conference at Fisk—Hayden received a major international honor, the Grand Prize for Poetry in English at the First World Festival of Negro Arts; he was personally awarded the prize for A Ballad of Remembrance by Leopold Senghor, the president of Senegal. In 1975 he was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Poets and in 1976 he became the first Afro-American to be appointed poetry consultant to the Library of Congress. From 1968 until his death Hayden was a professor of English at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. Kaleidoscope, the word used by Hayden as the title of his anthology of black poetry, can be

366 I AMERICAN used in its adjectival form to describe Hayden's body of work. In terms of subjects and styles, his poetry is kaleidoscopic. While there are, of course, representative traits in his various styles and representative patterns of thought, the impression his work gives is of relative freedom from thematic or stylistic obsession. His poetic treatments convey a sensibility able to interact with new material in a fresh and inquisitive manner. In his poems Hayden moved through subjectivity and private anguish to a plane where the possibilities for objectivity, clarity, imaginative freedom, and artistic realization lay. Art for him involved language and design cleansed of the egocentric. Hayden's philosophy of poetry was that it must not be limited by the personal or ethnic identity of the poet. Though inescapably rooted in these elements, poetry must rise to an order of creation that is broadly human and universally communicative. Yeats is the figure Hayden admired and pointed to in his effort to articulate his own goals. This is because Yeats was able to reconcile his private self with both his common humanity and the folk culture and myths of his ethnic group. "I think I always wanted to be a Negro poet ... the same way Yeats is an Irish poet," Hayden said to Gendron. He then went on to speak of his intense response to Yeats's "Easter 1916" (in which Yeats speaks of "All changed, changed utterly: ...") in the aftermath of the Detroit riots: "... that is the kind of poetry I want to write. Yes, it may reflect a certain kind of experience, a certain kind qf awareness, but it's human rather than racial. It speaks to other human beings and it's not limited by time and place and not limited by the ethnic." The manner in which these goals manifest themselves most prominently in Hayden's verse is the movement of his imagination away from the autobiographical and toward the imper-

WRITERS

sonal. In "'Summertime and the Living ...,'" for instance, Hayden referred to himself in the third person in order to obtain perspective and objectivity about his childhood. In "The Burly Fading One'" (Selected Poems) he took the early work history of William Hayden and the experience of seeing an early photograph of his foster father, and then enlarged the characterization to mythic outlines about a hard-living, hard-dying "bullyboy" American, Uncle Jed. Hayden's poems are not necessarily factual. There is no reason, for example, to assume from the lines quoted previously from "Free Fantasia: Tiger Flowers" that Hayden ran errands for St. Antoine Street prostitutes. Given the spirit of the poem, it is more reasonable to assume that it expresses an unchecked wish, an old man's fantasy drawn from the materials of childhood. Similarly, in "'Mystery Boy' Looks for Kin in Nashville'" (Words in the Mourning Time) it would be unfortunate for a reader to stop at the identification of Hayden's own conundrum about parentage. Far better if the projected emotions that visit and torment the boy from within trees and behind walls are perceived as universal to a parentless condition. And better still to view the boy as the man-child in any individual, so that the real subject of the poem can be seen as the psychic grotesquerie beneath the cliche "search for identity." Hayden's commitment, then, was to a truth deeper than realism can provide; it was to a dimension of mind and cultural truth beyond naturalistic fact. And because, for him, that realistic surface was the means to a deeper end, he was a symbolist; and heavy reliance on autobiographical material will not carry a reader to the essence of his poems. Swinging from a hazy romantic and proletarian vantage point in Heart-Shape in the Dust (1940) to an aesthetic allied with dense linguistic and formal effects in The Lion and the

ROBERT HAYDEN / 367 Archer (1948), Hayden's mature work did not appear in significant quantity until A Ballad of Remembrance in 1962. A Ballad, retaining and revising some of the poems from The Lion and the Archer and Figures of Time (1955), and abandoning all the apprentice work of HeartShape, presents the first consolidated view of Hayden's protean subjects and styles, as well as his rare devotion to craft. Selected Poems (1966) extends this impression with some new poems as well as a thoughtful grouping of his previous work. After Selected Poems, Hayden continued to evolve, responding both to the times and to his internal rhythms, the former tendency somewhat more prominent in his volume of writings from the 1960's, Words in the Mourning Time (1970), which contains a poem about Malcolm X and the long title poem responding to the war, riot, assassination, and racial militance of that decade. Hayden's volumes since then— The Night-Blooming Cereus (1972), the eight new poems in Angle of Ascent (1975), and American Journal (1978)—reflect a poet entering his seventh decade and coming to terms with his deeply aesthetic nature and his love of art and beauty for their own sake. They are roughly comparable with Yeats's devotion to "monuments of unaging intellect" in his Byzantium poems in The Tower (1928). Chronological development is not the soundest basis on which to discuss Hayden's work. There is neither the set of philosophical preoccupations nor the persistent subject matter to warrant serial study. Because he was ever responsive to new subjects and to the truths intrinsic to these subjects, it is in terms of style and technique—and then only in terms of limited clusters of subjects and themes—that the kaleidoscopic Hayden yields to broad generalization. In "Kodachromes of the Island" (Words in the Mourning Time), Hayden con-

cludes a descriptive poem about a Mexican island with the following lines: Alien, at home—as always everywhere—I roamed the cobbled island, and thought of Yeats, his passionate search for a theme. Sought mine. The roving quality, "alien, at home... / everywhere," reveals a basic quality of Hayden's nature: he was a peripatetic modern with a lingering sense of the past, but ever open to the new, to the flow of the contemporary. Hayden wrote in a spectrum of styles that range from the severely economical to the highly decorative. Toward one end of the spectrum his work is typified by the qualities of cpncreteness, conciseness, and clarity of effect. Hayden wrote in the concrete and was not usually in agreement with Wallace Stevens that "Life consists of propositions about life." Hayden's lines may rise to the reflective and the abstract, but abstractive lyricism is not the plane on which he usually created. At times, in fact, Hayden gravitated toward the poetics of imagism: "dry," "hard" lines without sentiment or generalization; total dependence on image for emotional and intellectual content; haiku-like concentration. "The Moose Wallow," "Smelt Fishing," "Kodachromes of the Island," and "Gulls" fall into this category. More commonly, though, Hayden's brief lines and clear effects have a sensuous and rhythmic litheness, such as in the opening stanzas of "The Night-Blooming Cereus": And so for nights we waited, hoping to see the heavy bud break into flower.

368 I AMERICAN On its neck-like tube hooking down from the edge of the leaf-branch nearly to the floor, the bud packed tight with its miracle swayed stiffly on breaths of air, moved as though impelled by stirrings within itself. Another of his styles relied on a heavier application of language in order to achieve the effect of dense, sensuous imagery. This is Hayden's tropical side, reflecting acute sensory equipment and a love of rare, colorful language. "I must confess that I like the exotic, and I go in for exoticism," he told Gendron. Always he had to "tone it down" because he loved to "deal in exotic textures" and "atmospheric words." Yet in "The Diver" (Selected Poems) and "Market" (A Ballad of Remembrance) he does not tone it down; he lavishes it on like a painter going from paintbrush to palette knife; and the result, especially in the latter, Mexican poem, is a virtuoso performance. The poet becomes utterer, namer, creator of reality: Ragged boys lift sweets, haggle for venomgreen and scarlet gelatins. A broken smile dandles its weedy cigarette over papayas too ripe and pyramids of rotting oranges. Turkeys like featherduster flowers lie trussed in bunchy smother. The barefoot cripple

WRITERS foraging crawls among rinds, orts, chewed butts, trampled peony droppings— his hunger litany and suppliant before altars of mamey, pineapple, mango.

Occasionally Hayden wrote in a style that was still more elaborately ornamented, which he liked to describe as "baroque." This decorative, denser style was used when he treated disturbing material; it served both to reflect and to explore the tension between an ornamental surface and a dark problem, between an embellished defense and a private or social pathology. It appears in "Witch Doctor" (A Ballad of Remembrance). It is present also in "A Ballad of Remembrance," in which Hayden described the Zulu parade of blacks that was a feature of the Mardi Gras and tried to convey the tension of their lives, balanced between gaudy spectacle and underlying racial nightmare. In the 1960's and 1970's Hayden's poems showed less attraction to ornate diction and elaborate effects. The spirit of imagism prevailed over the rococo temptation. His verse became sinuous, colloquial. Colorful subjects— objects of art or beautiful flowers—satisfied the need for "exoticism" that was formerly satisfied by densely wrought presentations. Hayden often wrote poems about people— ballads or character poems such as "Unidentified Flying Object," "Aunt Jemima of the Ocean Waves," and "The Dream" (all in Words in the Mourning Time). The need in these poems to render the speech or thoughts of his characters led him to refine a technique that is of special interest. Widespread throughout Hayden's verse, this technique is the careful blending of a narrator's voice with a folk character. The narrator's voice in these instances

ROBERTHAYDEN carefully avoids learned diction, so as to blend imperceptibly with the speech or consciousness of the character. The poet is able to enlarge his control over mood, setting, or narrative point of view without overshadowing the protagonist. In "Night, Death, Mississippi" (Selected Poems), an old redneck, retired from the Ku Klux Klan, thinks about his son, who has replaced him in the ranks. (I have italicized the narrator's voice.) A quavering cry. Screech-owl? Or one of them? The old man in his reek and gauntness laughs— One of them, I bet— and turns out the kitchen lamp, limping to the porch to listen in the windowless night. Be there with Boy and the rest if I was well again. Time was. Time was. White robes like moonlight In the sweetgum dark. Unbucked that one then And him squealing bloody Jesus as we cut it off. Sterling Brown, also writing from an urbane and educated standpoint, has used dialect successfully in many poems, such as in the "Slim Greer" series. But Brown, in a poem like "Slim in Hell," uses dialect in the narrated portions as well. Hayden pursued a different course, best expressed by James Weldon Johnson in the preface to The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922), where he says that a Negro poet needs "a form that is freer and larger than dialect, but which will still hold the racial flavor " If we add "regional" to "racial," we can see how Hayden, by means of this technique, enlarged the field of his materials and was able to write

/ 369

about folk culture and local color anywhere. In "Market" he follows the descriptive portion quoted earlier with three different voices: Turistas pass. For caridad, por caridad. Lord, how they stride on the hard good legs money has made them. The first voice ("Turistas pass.") suggests the speaker's detachment from tourists and his identification with the Mexican point of view; the second voice ("Por caridad ...") is the beggar's supplication for charity; and the third ("Lord...") is the speaker's anglicized and empathic rendering of the point of view of the crawling beggar. By including the beggar's perspective, Hayden is able to reveal the underside of the bright tropical reality of fruit and fowl. Wilburn Williams, Jr., has written nicely about Hayden's "multivocal talents" in "The Rabbi." Derogatory terms for blacks and Jews ("schwartze" and "Jew Baby") are used to suggest succinctly the cultural and economic antipathies of Hayden's old neighborhood. The black speaker remembers his youthful closeness with Jewish friends. His feeling of harmony with them is contrasted with the antagonisms of the adults: Mazuzah, Pesach, Chanukah— these were timbred words I learned, were things I knew by glimpses. And I learned schwartze too And schnapps, which Schwartzes bought on credit from "Jew Baby." Tippling ironists laughed and said he'd soon be rich as Rothschild From their swinish Saturdays. Hirschel and Molly and I meanwhile divvied halveh, polly seeds, were spies and owls and Fu Manchu.

370 I AMERICAN Occasionally Hayden was not able to bring his sophisticated consciousness and his folk materials together in a happy alliance. We see instances of this incomplete coalescence in "Electrical Storm" (Selected Poems), where the poem originates not from folk materials but from philosophical ruminations of the educated poet about chance and cosmic design. A similarly unsatisfying result appears in "Full Moon" (Selected Poems), as Hayden contrasted the folk and scientific-technological views of the moon but failed to find a diction that can encompass both points of view. An unusual philosophical influence on Hayden should be examined before discussing his themes and subjects. This is Hayden's Bahai faith and his allusions to the prophet Bahaullah in some of his poems. Hayden and his wife became Bahaists in the early 1940's, when Hayden was attending the University of Michigan. He was the poetry editor for the Bahai magazine, World Order. Some of his poems—for example, "Full Moon" and "Trom the Corpse Woodpiles, From the Ashes'"—contain references to Bahaullah as "Him" or "The Glorious One" or the "exiled One." "Words in the Mourning Time," part III, in Angle of Ascent, contains the most explicit treatment of Bahaullah as a reconciling and redeeming figure for our age: I bear Him witness now— mystery Whose major clues are the heart of man, the mystery of God: Baha'u'llah: Logos, poet, cosmic hero, surgeon, architect of our hope of peace, wronged, exiled One, chosen to endure what agonies of knowledge, what auroral dark

WRITERS bestowals of truth vision power anguish for our future's sake.

"BaM'u'llah in the Garden of Ridwan" (Selected Poems) treats the prophet's declaration of his mission on his way to prison and exile in 1863, and "Dawnbreaker" (Selected Poems) treats the experience of a martyr; its title refers to early Persian martyrs and is taken from Nabil's narrative, The Dawn-Breakers. Both of these poems play down the identities of the figures with which they deal and are excellent poems about universal religious experiences. As a Bahaist, Hayden obtained important— perhaps crucial—spiritual resources: for one, a belief in "the essential oneness of all people" and the "basic unity of all religions," and, for another, a belief that "the work of the artist is ... a form of service to mankind" and "a kind of worship." He discussed his religious needs with Richard Layman: I think that today when so often one gets the feeling that everything is going downhill, that we're really on the brink of the abyss and what good is anything, I find myself sustained in my attempts to be a poet and my endeavor to write because I have the assurance of my faith that this is of spiritual value and it is a way of performing some kind of service.... I have the feeling that by holding on to these beliefs and giving them expression in my work, not always directly—most of the time not directly—at least I'm doing something to prepare, maybe, for a new time, for a new world. In trying to make a critical judgment about Hayden's incorporation of elements from his Bahai faith into his poetry, this last comment hints at the criterion appropriate to the question. So long as Hayden's beliefs inform his work indirectly and his allusions to Bahaullah are in archetypal terms that Western readers can relate to, Hayden's private faith and his in-

ROBERT HAYDEN / 371 terest in its historical material do not stand in the way of effective poetry. On the other hand, when, as in "Words in the Mourning Time," he bears witness to Bahaullah as a figure to redeem our age, a lapse of judgment occurs. Since the general audience does not share Hayden's sentiments about this prophet, his faith seems undemonstrated in the poem, an imposition on the reader. Hayden's immersion in the universalist content of Bahaullah's message may have obscured from him the fact that to Western readers it seems not so much humane and unifying as strange and sectarian. This involved Hayden in at least the appearance of a contradictory stance, since he conceived and described his poetry as "opposed to the chauvinistic and the doctrinaire." Although his Bahai faith provided Hayden stable ideals to live by, his poetry itself deals with fluctuations of viewpoint, ambivalences explored, uncertainties succumbed to, despair lived to the bottom. In his poetry the self lives in conflict. Finite identity and material reality strain against imagination and transcendental longing. Resolution is never more than partial, respite never more than temporary, equilibrium attainable only by maintaining the terms of the struggle. When pursued directly, the dream of unity brings dissolution of the self. At the same time, resignation to the prison of the self and the material realm is a denial of one's spiritualimaginative nature. One's ultimate responsibility is to keep one's powers alive through the struggle with self and God. In "Veracruz" (A Ballad of Remembrance) the terms of the struggle are "reality" and "dream." Under the term "reality" are allusions to the finiteness of the self and to poverty, history, power; under the term "dream" are the pleasures of the senses and the flesh, the impulse to merge with the boundless natural world, and the problem of romantic illusion. The setting is the Veracruz harbor. The speaker

is on a breakwater, hit by "bickering spray." As he stands at the seaward end, the shore, with its "inward-falling slum" and old Spanish fort, appears hidden in the color and light thrown up by the intervening waves: " . . . only the sea is real—" and the sea is envisioned as a "barbarous multifoliate" sea of life, with its rustling of leaves, fire, garments, wind; its clashing of phantasmal jewels, its lunar thunder, animal and human sighing. This visionary sea is alluring. "Leap now / and cease from error. / Escape," runs through the speaker's mind. Instead, he accepts the shoreward alternative, the common fate, the losses and farewells, the long warfare with self, with God. The shoreward, repetitive motion of the waves breaking on the rocks at the close of part I defines the concerns of partII. Part II explores the consequences of a romantic poet's trying to channel the "dream," symbolized by the sea, back to "reality," symbolized by the town life. Can the dream transform a recalcitrant reality? Can the poet, refusing suicide, merge imaginatively with the universal forces beyond the self and provide renewal of the actual world? For the most part the answer is negative. At first, " . . . bedizened in the . . . colors / of a dream," the arcade of the town becomes "ornate with music and / the sea." The poet achieves a temporary fulfillment of his sensuous needs. But then the dream further "beckons / out of reach in flyblown streets / of lapsing rose and purple, dying / blue." As the colors of the dream fade, a quest in "marimba'd night" for a sensual key has no more success. In the end the speaker finds himself in "phantasmal / space." The light of a star is a symbol of his

372 / AMERICAN WRITERS unanswered needs: "one farewell image / burns and fades and burns." Unable to achieve wholeness by identifying with the universal forces beyond the self, the speaker falls back into incompleteness. Remote light replaces boundless sea. Dream thins to illusion. In "The Diver" (Selected Poems) the impulse to yield to death, to slough off the will, is at first irresistible. Through the diver's descent, egoless drift and languid merging with nature are simulated. Echoing John Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale," the diver-poet finds release for his imagination as he sinks "through easeful / azure." At once chill and floridly delicious, his descent—his death wish—opens a private psychological realm that is disorienting but has its own subaqueous logic. Reminiscent of "'Mystery Boy' Looks for Kin in Nashville," the diver imagines a "hide and / seek of laughing / faces." He then declares: I yearned to find those hidden ones, to fling aside the mask and call to them, yield to rapturous whisperings. ... The "hidden ones" (dead family members?) draw him into their deathly circle. He yearns to "have / done with self and / every dinning / vain complexity." Yet regression is not in the service of the ego if the "hidden ones" prevail and he succumbs. He flees "the numbing / kisses" that he craves. "Reflex of life-wish" reasserts itself. A "measured rise" begins. The subject of "A Ballad of Remembrance" is not the desire for unity either with nature or with the past. Rather, it is a descent into the nightmare of southern racism and the perversion of imagination that such a milieu exacts. Social institutions, reaching back into the "shadow" and "blood" of the past, shape the

highly charged, subjective setting, a Walpurgis Night of hysteria, menace, confusion, and hallucination. The poet is overwhelmed by a Mardi Gras spectacle. The parade floats, costumes, and tawdry shops possess him as though the boundaries of his ego were shattered, and events move through rather than past him. Unable to separate subject from object, he is victimized by monstrous choices, threatened with monstrous metamorphoses. The New Orleans imagery ("Tight streets unfolding to the eye / like fans of corrosion and elegiac lace ...") convey the city's antiquated elegance. In the third stanza the saleswoman's inquiry, "What will you have?" conveys the commercialization, the "prepared tarnishes," of the old South for tourists. The "sallow vendeuse" pushing jewelry with veneers of "nacre" and "ormolu" represents the faded remains of the antebellum culture, with its "oldrose graces" and "manners like scented gloves." Surface is stressed, not substance; nostalgia, not living truth. It is a world of "contrived ghosts," of deadly fantasy. Meanwhile, "masked Negroes wearing chameleon / satins" pass down the street. If the imagination of an old, artistic culture has been reduced to gift-shop materialism (and for the poet, in its sway, to a decorative view of language), the imaginative life of blacks without freedom has also been perverted. The city's atmosphere is a "switchblade" on which they balance, making spectacles of themselves as Zulus, mermaids, angels, priestesses—a "fortuneteller's / dream of disaster." Out of the phantasmagoria three stances within the racist environment are articulated. The Zulu king says, "Accommodate." The mermaids, angels, and saints say, "Love." The "gunmetal priestess" says, "Hate." In "spiked bellcollar curved like a fleur-de-lys" the villainous priestess is the most compelling:

ROBERT HAYDEN / 373 As well have a talon as a finger, a muzzle as a mouth, as well have a hollow as a heart. And she pinwheeled away in coruscations of laughter, scattering those others before her like foil stars.

ditional limitation. Here, though, there is weariness with the insoluble evils of the world, and a willingness to accept the subjective and the transcendental as a temporary relief, an island holiday:

The inexorable sway of the festival over the poet's perceptions continues in the seventh stanza. He walks through various shops. "Metaphorical doors," "coffeecups," "decors of illusion," and "mazurka dolls" dance past him with the same surrealistic fragmentary rhythm as the parade. Finally, in the eighth stanza, the poet is "released from the hoodoo"—the black magic—"of that dance" by the arrival of a friend who is "meditative, ironic, / richly human." (The friend is identified as Mark Van Doren.) The terrifying metamorphoses cease; integrated selfhood returns. The poem rises from the vortex of contrivances as the one authentic thing, a "remembrance, a gift, a souvenir" that has sorted through fantasy and reality, exorcised evil, and found the tones of love with which to say "thank you." Two minor poems published subsequently take the position that the subjective descents explored in "Veracruz," "The Diver," and "A Ballad of Remembrance" are man's only reality. The speaker in "The Mirages" (Words in the Mourning Time) knows that the mirages he sees in a symbolic desert landscape are illusions; but he follows them anyway, for it is "less lonely to do so." In "Sphinx," another poem in the same volume, a sphinx tells the protagonist that it is his fate " . . . to endure / my riddling. / ... which, in truth, / is only a kind / of psychic joke." In "The Islands" (American Journal), the same categories of experience and the same chafing relations seen in "Veracruz" recur: dream and reality, sensuous freedom and con-

of history, its patina'd cliches of endless evil. Flame trees. The intricate sheen of waters flowing into sun.

... I am tired today

I wake and see the morning like a god in peacock-flower mantle dancing on opalescent waves— and can believe my furies have abandoned for a time their long pursuit. His "furies" are associated with sociahand economic institutions, with history, race, the "vain complexity" of self; his freedom to pursue "the morning like a god," with release from the conditional. The transience of subjective "dreams"—indeed, the transient and dreamlike nature of life—begins to emerge with more prominence in the poems Hayden published in the 1970's. Many of these poems respond to the passage of time and may be usefully thought of as the art of old age. The title poem in The NightBlooming Cereus, by describing the ephemeral beauty of the nocturnal cactus flower, evokes the terrible poignancy and "plangency" of life itself. "The Point" {American Journal) speaks of "land's end," where "sound and river come / together, flowing to the sea." In golden elegiac light the poet contemplates "all for a moment ... inscribed / on brightness" "like memories in the mind of God." Hayden's principal means of dealing with the flow of time and the ebbing away of life is art, even if, as with Yeats, it is art "of what is past, or passing, or to come."

374 I AMERICAN Richard Hunt's sculpture of Arachne (a Lydian woman of classical mythology who is turned into an arachnid—or spider—for her presumption in challenging Athena to a weaving contest) becomes the subject of a Hayden poem, with inevitable parallels to Keats's lovers in "Ode on a Grecian Urn." Arachne's mouth "shaping a cry it cannot utter" and her "goggling terror / fleeing powerless to flee" suggest our own metamorphosis into something less than human in this century of Guernica and Auschwitz ("Richard Hunt's 'Arachne,'" The Night-Blooming Cereus). The high point of Hayden's verse about art as a means of redemption from time is "The Peacock Room," in the same volume. An old man visits a historical room exhibited in a museum. Personal and historical associations flood his mind. He is filled with a sense of loss and a heightened awareness of time; but there is also stirred within him an uncanny appreciation of the survival of the room. The room becomes a symbol of art. It generates meditations about time, history, art, imagination, and the nature of reality. Yeats's "Among School Children" is an influence, especially in the stanzas in which a woman's anecdote about her youth is recalled. Yet this in no way diminishes the level of achievement of the poem, nor the sense that Hayden is able, with some frequency, to compose poems of major or near-major rank. The Peacock Room was a room commissioned by Frederick R, Leyland, a rich English shipowner, to set off a James Whistler painting. The work of Henry Jeckyll, the young decorator who designed the room, was redone by Whistler, who was displeased with the setting for his painting. He painted an extravagant peacock motif throughout the room, destroying priceless leather panels and infuriating the wealthy owner with a demand for 2,000 guineas. The decorator whose work he defaced was shattered. In 1904 the Peacock Room was purchased by

WRITERS

Charles L. Freer and brought to Detroit. In 1919 it was placed in the Freer Gallery at the Smithsonian Institution. Hayden was told about the room by Betsy Graves Reyneau, a painter he met and became friendly with a number of years before her death in 1964. When Reyneau was a child in Detroit, her family was friendly with the Freers, and the party for her twelfth birthday was held in the famous room. The poem begins with a statement that art is long and life is short, and follows with the question "Which is crueller / life or art?" The cruelty of life is obvious, but the cruelty of art is that it mocks man's impermanence. This is one of the major themes of the poem. In the second stanza the Peacock Room is described as a "triste metaphor" for the "beautiful" but "unreal" nature of art. Contrasted with it are some of the imponderable nightmares of modern history—Hiroshima, Watts, My Lai. Although the room ("Exotic, fin de siecle") affirms the opulence of the imagination, it also reveals the potential dichotomy between art and life, a dichotomy that broadens the more art views the world as a playground for the imagination or, as the poem puts it, views "environment as ornament." Yet the stanza ends with a counterassertion, a qualified defense of the imagination. History may "rebuke" the "vision chambered in gold / and Spanish leather" for its excess and moral laxity; but the ability of artifacts to recapture the past and redeem men from time is something history "cannot give the lie / to...." Impersonal history, personal history, and poetic vision are awakened in the poet by the room. Whistler's peacocks become both symbol and agent for the ruthless pride and power of the artist. In the third stanza Whistler's birds express the artist's antagonism to his employer and to the acquisitive capitalist culture on which art depends; in the fourth the peacocks

ROBERT HAYDEN I 375 become part of the young rival's nightmare; and in the fifth there is the horrible vision that follows the speaker's memory of Betsy Reyneau. The birds embody the fusion of imagination with death: With shadow cries the peacocks flutter down, their spread tails concealing her, then folding, drooping to reveal her eyeless, old—Med School cadaver, flesh-object pickled in formaldehyde.... The hostility toward the wealthy connoisseur, the frightening manner in which the master's egoism is experienced by the young rival, the union of imagination with the impersonal forces of life—all these suggest the aggressive world that underlies artistic activity. All are antithetical to the effete unreality attributed to the room. "Reality" and "art," even when they move in opposite directions, are never entirely disparate. Even an ornamental art has some of the savagery of the real. The vision withdraws in the final stanza. The room regains its former repose, but all is not the same. Whistler is dead. Betsy Reyneau is dead. Only the room remains—the room, and the questions posed about the nature of art and life. The perspective of stanza 2 that the room is "unreal" is now reversed. Art is the only reality. Life is but phantom. As for the Peacock Room, it is life, history, reality, all that remains of a time that is past, It is living artifact, the perpetuation of man. Even the aestheticism manifested by the room is excusable, for each period of history is precious only for its uniqueness. Balancing the warring urgencies of life and art, the poet closes with a cluster of Eastern metaphors that speak of the transcendence of temporal viewpoints. "Rose-leaves" and "ashes," symbolizing beauty and sadness, life

and death, gather together the sum of man's temporal existence, then spin gently toward a wisdom figure with detached and "ancient smile." This figure, a "bronze Bodhisattva," like Yeats's Byzantine bronze bird, is a symbol for the poet and for the poem. It symbolizes the poet's enlightened detachment from tlie illusions of time, and it also symbolizes the commemoration in the poem of Betsy Reyneau, as the Peacock Room memorializes Whistler. Feeding on flesh, beauty, and man's temporal struggles, art alone survives. Hayden is best known for his historical poems. In 1941, while reading Stephen Vincent Benet's John Browns Body (1928), he was strongly affected by a passage in which Benet confesses his limitations: Oh, black-skinned epic, epic with the black spear, I cannot sing you, having too white a heart, And yet, some day, a poet will rise to sing you And sing you with such truth and mellowness. ... At this time Hayden, nearly thirty, conceived the ambition to be the poet to sing the history of black Americans—to end the neglect of their past, correct the stereotypes, and bring the inextinguishable urge of black men and women for freedom into current consciousness. He planned to writ? poems about slavery and the Civil War and a sonnet series about outstanding antislavery figures. Regrettably, only part of this plan was carried out. By 1942 enough poems were finished for him to submit them under the title The Black Spear and to win the Hopwood competition at the University of Michigan for the second time. The finest of these poems is "Middle Passage," published in various periodicals in the mid-1940's and appearing in final form in A

376 I AMERICAN WRITERS Ballad of Remembrance in 1962. The primary historical sources for the poem are Brantz Mayer's Adventures of an African Slaver (1928) and the second chapter of Muriel Rukeyser's biography Willard Gibbs (1942), in which the story of the Amistad mutiny and the legal battle that followed it are narrated. The literary influence is Benet's John Brown's Body. The marvel of "Middle Passage" is its ability to evoke the entire period of the Atlantic slave trade, yet achieve a highly unified effect. From research into actual documents, Hayden creates log entries, court depositions, and trial testimony, ail of which give the work its air of historical truth. Careful coordination of this "documentary" material to sustain the themes of inhumanity, greed, moral disease, and blindness is one of the sources of the unity of the poem; the other is the consistent manner in which thfs material is handled. The moral bankruptcy of the white "Christians" is allowed to reveal itself. Although the poet selects what they say, he does not comment actively. Documentary objectivity, with a reliance on dramatic irony, is his major strategy. The first part comprises a mosaic of the physical and spiritual torments endemic to the slave trade. The conditions described support the opening assertion that the middle passage is a "voyage through death" or, in spiritual and literary terms, a descent into hell. Illness, confinement, squalor, and suicidal despair afflict the Africans; fear of disease and rebellion, guilt, desperate prayer, and sexual degeneracy beset the whites. The names of ships that the poet intersperses between sections of the poem suggest the pervasiveness of these conditions. Multiple voices are employed to yield both scope and immediacy. First there is the narrator's omniscient voice, which frames the narrative and offers a moral vision of the action; then the alarmed journal notations—concrete, concise, yet rich in psychological atmosphere—of an officer or crew member; the narrator's ad-

aptation of a disembodied voice of conscience follows next (other italicized passages differ from this one); then the hymns, double-spaced, so that they seem to drift mournfully over the scene as they drift across the page; and last the deluded prayers of crew members asking "safe passage to our vessels bringing / heathen souls unto Thy chastening." The first part concludes with a court deposition revealing the disintegration of authority and the brutal lusts aboard the Bella J. The fire that envelops the ship symbolizes the fires of sinfulness much as the ophthalmia on another ship has overtones of the traders' moral blindness. The second part, using the reminiscences of a retired slaver, enlarges the canvas to include the complicity of African kings. Showing no compunction, enjoying the vivid memories of his adventures, a Conradian profiteer speaks of "wealth aplenty to be harvested / from those black fields." He describes how "for tin crowns that shone with paste, / red calico and Germansilver trinkets" a king sent his warriors to "kill the sick and old and lead the young / in coffles to our factories." The simplicity of the second part provides respite from the complex structure of part I. Partll also conveys the moral imperturbability of the whites, even when privileged with hindsight about their "adventures in the slave trade." Having begun by describing the middle passage as a "voyage through death / to life upon these shores," the poem in part III reaches for some sustaining actuality, some affirmative human basis, upon which life on these shores will be possible—not only for the survivors of the crossing but also for succeeding generations. Here the moral imagination of the poet exerts a more pronounced influence. Although the use of testimony from the trial of the Amistad mutineers returns to the documentary method, the narrator's shaping moral vision obtrudes more strongly both in the opening section, which speaks of the "dark ships" as "shuttles in the

ROBERT HAYDEN / 377 rocking loom of history," and in the portrayal of the leader of the Amistad mutiny as a symbol or icon for the "immortal human wish, / the timeless will" of men to be free. Charles T. Davis writes about the "mystical emergence of freedom from circumstances that appall and degrade" in Hayden's history poems; and it is this very mystical sense of the inevitable assertion of manhood that Hayden tries to compress into his few words about the leader of the rebellion. In the poem Cinquez is not developed as an individual. He is a "life that transfigures many lives"; and with his efforts to gain freedom, life on the "actual shore" can begin. In "Runagate Runagate" {Selected Poems) Harriet Tubman rises like Cinquez from the "anguish" and "power" of her people. "Runagate" is conceived also as a historical panorama, in this case of the Underground Railroad. As a collage of slave voices and verse, snippets of song, ads for runaways, and wanted posters for Tubman, it is somewhat reminiscent of John Dos Passos' sketches of prominent Americans in US.A. (1937). The title "Runagate" derives from an archaic form of the word "runaway." Unfortunately, "Runagate" fails to come together in the way that "Middle Passage" does. The first part is self-consciously literary, unable to escape the rhythms of an "inspired" tone. Richest and most memorable are the instances of folk idiom and imagination in part II, in which the "freedom train" of the spirituals becomes fused with the idea of crossing over to the North: Midnight Special on a sabre track movering movering, first stop Mercy and the last Hallelujah. We see this also in the final lines: Come ride-a my train Mean mean mean to be free. One passage captures beautifully the whispered tensions of nocturnal flight:

And this was the way of it, brethren brethren, way we journeyed from Can't to Can. Moon so bright and no place to hide, the cry up and the patterollers riding, hound dogs belling in bladed air. And fear starts a-murbling. Never make it, we'll never make it. Hush that now, and she's turned upon us, levelled pistol glinting in the moonlight: Dead folks can't jaybird talk, she says; you keep on going now or die Less ambitious but more successful than "Runagate" is "The Dream (1863)" (Words in the Mourning Time). "The Dream" complements the central importance given to heroic leadership and spiritual vision in the two previously discussed poems by illustrating the negative consequences when a dream of freedom has existed unrealized for too long. Sinda, an old slave, is unable to reconcile fantasy and reality when her emancipation* finally comes. She had dreamed of "great big soldiers marching out of gunburst, / their faces" those of her menfolk. When instead "Marse Lincum's soldier boys" reach her plantation, she refuses to go: ... those Buckras with their ornery funning, cussed commands, oh they were not were not the hosts the dream had promised her. Sinda cannot accept the imperfect arrival of freedom from strange whites, or the everyday burden it will bring. She is too old. By contrast, her son (or grandson) reveals through his letters from the front that it will take youth to face the mud-and-guts struggle and still dream of "ficety gals down here in Dixieland" and how he "mite jus go ahead an jump oyer the broomstick with one / and bring her home." "O Daedalus, Fly Away Home" {A Ballad of Remembrance) also deals with the wafting dream of freedom. Here it is a dream of escape

378 I AMERICAN from the New World; atavistic memories are still vivid among the African-American slaves. In his interview with McCluskey, Haydeii described the poem as "developed contrapuntally," with "sadness and nostalgia" counterpointing "gaiety and dancing." The poem links the classical myth of Daedalus and Icarus, who escape the Cretan labyrinth, with a legend among Georgia Sea Island blacks about Africans with the magical power to "fly away home." Lighthearted lyrics of Paul Laurence Dunbar and motifs from Jean Toomer's Cane poems (especially "Georgia Dusk") are recognizable influences: Drifting night in the Georgia pines, coonskin drum and jubilee banjo. Pretty Malinda, dance with me. Night is juba, night is conjo Pretty Malinda, dance with me. Night is an African juju man weaving a wish and a weariness together to make two wings. Ofly away home fly away. Words such as "juju" (African for magic) and "conjo" (probably short for conjurer) appear frequently in Hayden's folk material. Davis believes that the metrics of "O Daedalus" "suggest the rhythm of a folk dance called 'juba,' widely performed by slaves in the antebellum South." In fact, the poem has been performed with dance accompaniment. Because it is about the leader of the 1831 slave revolt in Virginia, "The Ballad of Nat Turner" (A Ballad of Remembrance) was grouped by Hayden with his other historical poems; yet it might just as appropriately be grouped with poems about religious experience, such as "BahaVllah in the Garden of Ridwan." Narrated in the first person, it is a character poem in which Turner describes his quest in the

WRITERS

Dismal Swamp of Virginia for a vision of divine approval. At first, visions of death visit the tormented wanderer: And came at length to livid trees where Ibo warriors hung shadowless, turning in wind that moaned like Africa, their belltongue bodies dead, their eyes alive with the anger deep in my own heart. As he wanders further, ... wild things gasped and scuffled in the seething night; shapes of evil writhed upon the air. Finally Turner experiences an Old Testament vision of a war of angels, patterned on Ezekiel. With Miltonic detail he sees "angels at war / with one another, angels in dazzling / battle." He describes "the shock of wing on wing and sword / on sword," and how he saw ... many of those mighty beings waver, waver and fall, go streaking down into swamp water, and the water hissed and steamed and bubbled.... In the end "the conqueror faces ... were like mine." Free of his burden of doubt, reassured of his divine mission, he returns to the "blazing fields, to the humbleness," and bides his time. Williams observes that "although ... Hayden's mind ventures backward over time" in his history poems, they "invariably close with a statement or action that points forward." Cinquez makes life upon these shores possible. Harriet Tubman's poem reverberates with the unceasing, sounds of the freedom train: "Mean mean mean to be free." Nat Turner has his revolt still before him. And in the one as-yetunmentioned poem of this group, the sonnet commemorating Frederick Douglass, the great

ROBERT HAYDEN / 379 fighter is envisioned as a living influence that flows into the present. Williams puts it well: "The poet emphasizes that the dead hero is still a vital force, and the reality his poem ostensibly commemorates has its full realization in the future. ... In the final analysis the poem celebrates not a man who has been but a man still coming into being." Besides poems about nineteenth-century antislavery figures, Hayden wrote other character poems. About known figures of the modern world (Bessie Smith, Malcolm X) and unknown figures from strange corners of black life (a religious charlatan, a circus Aunt Jemima), these poems exemplify the fertile conceptions and high degree of realization of Hayden's work. Tone is the quintessential ingredient, the crowning grace, of some; in others a bold use of syntax or unusual verbal texture is the facilitating technique. Dramatic or narrative elements also figure in some poems. A dialogue in "Aunt Jemima of the Ocean Waves" (Words in the Mourning Time), between the low-key speaker and "Aunt Jemima," brings out the pathos in the downhill life of the "Sepia High Stepper" of the 1920's. In "El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz" (Words in the Mourning Time), the phases or "masks" of Malcolm's development from "Home Boy" and "Dee-troit Red" to his "final metamorphosis" in Mecca are narrated with a brevity that captures his abbreviated lifespan. "Homage to the Empress of the Blues" (The Lion and the Archer) employs a particular syntactic structure to describe the origin of Bessie Smith's blues and the ironic splendor of her stage presentation. Each sentence begins with a "because" clause that is long and highly descriptive of the background of black life or the blues tradition that has risen from it; and each sentence ends with an independent clause that gives the result, the triumphant eclat with which Bessie comes out on stage:

Because somewhere there was a man in a candystripe silk shirt gracile and dangerous as a jaguar and because some woman moaned for him in sixty-watt gloom and mourned him Faithless Love TwoTiming Love Oh Love Oh Careless Aggravating Love; She came out on the stage in yards of pearls, emerging like a favorite scenic view, flashed her golden teeth, and sang. In the first sentence old blues, such as W. C. Handy's "Careless Love Blues," and in the second sentence poverty, persecution, and fantasy are defined as the formative elements of her art. This art, the poem goes on to say, involves a shared sense of experience with her audience and a communal celebration of the triumph of the self over circumstance. The promiscuous woman who is, at the same time, an inspired singer in the church choir is the subject of "Mourning Poem for the Queen of Sunday" (A Ballad of Remembrance). Spoken in the idiom of the black church, as if by a chorus of mourners, the poem approaches the circumstances of the singer's death (she was murdered, presumably for two-timing) with a high ironic tone, half mock-lament, half genuine dismay. Infinitely wry, the poem pivots teasingly on the refrain, "Who would have thought / she'd end that way?" Yet the void in spiritual terms is real, even if the adulation of church members has always contained lurking suspicions about her. The righteous and the sinner alike are losers: Oh who and oh who will sing Jesus down to help with struggling and doing without and being colored all through blue Monday? Till way next Sunday?

380 I AMERICAN WRITERS With "four holes in the heart," "the gold works wrecked," her life has conformed to the pattern of the gangster era or a tragic love ballad; yet to her admirers, who cannot do without her, ... she looks so natural in her big bronze coffin among the Broken Hearts and GatesAjar, it's as if any moment she'd lift her head from its pillow of chill gardenias and turn this quiet into shouting Sunday and make folks forget what she did on Monday. Bewitching artifice is the theme of "Witch Doctor" (A Ballad of Remembrance), a poem that describes a day in the life of a religious charlatan. Included is all the drapery of his mystique—the chic surfaces of his style of life, the tailored movements and calculated effects on his congregation. Not only does his mystique answer the hunger of his followers for some fantasied Being who is opulent, erotic, and unreal, but it also feeds the preacher's own "outrageous" narcissism. Mutual fantasy, Hayden seems to say, is the basis for the rapport; manipulation, the unspoken formula that yields "euphoria" for the members and "mystery and lucre" for their leader. A poetry that moves toward the conjurer's art captures this obscure pact. Present-tense verbs and participles usher the "prophet" through the decadent textures of his day. Exotic belongings fill his artificial world—mirrors everywhere, a cinquecento stair, a lilac limousine with black leopard-skin interior, the smoke of Egyptian cigarettes. Though it is repellent and luridly funny, the spell on the reader (like the spell on the congregation) is seductive. It taps some

deep vein of delusional need and is as suggestive about the poet's temptation by the magical powers of language as it is about the magnetism of the prophet of Israel Temple. "Witch Doctor," like "Mourning Poem for the Queen of Sunday," is among Hayden's perfect poems. As Hayden's interest was aroused by a variety of people, so, too, did diverse places engage him as poetic subjects. Earlier a set of lines from "Kodachromes of the Island" ("Alien, at home—as always / everywhere—") was introduced to suggest the breadth of his subject matter. In discussing a final group of poems about places, a perspective intrinsic to these lines can now be brought into greater definition. Sometimes alienation defines the quality of an experience for Hayden; more often estrangement and "at homeness" coexist. On the one hand Hayden confronted a changing and frightening world as a lonely modern; on the other hand he was able to perceive emotional and intellectual connections with a new environment. This ability to discern meaningful relations in ostensibly alien places derived from his sense of continuity between past and present. In "Zeus over Redeye" (Words in the Mourning Time), a poem about a visit to the Redstone Arsenal in Alabama, a sense of alienation and dread predominates; yet even here the past offers a reference point for his fears. Myths of the Greek gods (for whom the rockets are named) are the only analogue for the "new mythologies," the new powers and gods breeding in the desert. The rockets are "totems of our firebreathing age" and the grounds of the arsenal are "terra guarded like / a sacred phallic grove." In another poem in the same volume, "On Lookout Mountain," the poet visits a Civil War battleground in Tennessee. He thinks of "Union soldiers struggling up / the crackling mountain-

ROBERT HAYDEN / 381 side," where now "Sunday alpinists / pick views and souvenirs." "A world away," he remarks, "scions" of that earlier climb are falling—in Vietnam. And because of Vietnam and the racial warfare at home, he refers to the Civil War battle as "dubious victory." In the best of these poems in which the past contributes to the imaginative rendering of the present, it is the poet's psychic refraction of the past that colors the present, not formal history or intellectual tradition. The speaker, in "On the Coast of Maine" (A Ballad of Remembrance), stalks at twilight Past stone walls that keep the restless from old granite-weary farmers' sleep. He passes between "Puritan shadow" and "Indian dark," "moving in a hush of time"; "... ghostly thunders," like the grumblings of ancestral dead, "are remotely near." In "Locus" and "Tour 5" (A Ballad of Remembrance) this Hawthornean aspect of Hayden's imagination achieves its highest expression. The southern landscape, with its psychic subsoil of Indians, slaves, bloody war, and aristocratic dreams, becomes a "soulscape . . . of warring shades" that lacerates the bright present. Having quoted at the outset from "Locus," let me conclude with "Tour 5," a poem emblematic of the nature of the poetic intelligence I have been trying to suggest: roving yet not deracinated; alive to the luminous present yet inescapably haunted by, caught up with, the harsh chromatics and shadowy phantoms of the past. The title derives from a guidebook description of a contemporary route to Jackson, Mississippi. The poem itself includes references to the "old Natchez Trace," which Hayden described (in the McCluskey interview) as "originally an Indian trail going from Nashville . . .

down through Mississippi and beyond," "a dangerous and sinister road, used by escaped criminals, highwaymen, murderers." More than simply informational, this background emerges in the poem as a group of associations that is symbolic of a dangerously angry state. The speaker and his party are on an auto trip through the autumn "blazonry of farewell scarlet / and recessional gold." Past the car window scenes move—"cedar groves," "static villages" with Indian names. But with an inevitability linked with the tragic history of the South, the holiday mood is dampened. As they "buy gas and ask directions of a rawboned man," his eyes "revile" them "as the enemy." Suddenly there is internal difference. Physical journey becomes mental journey; the festive enjoyment ends: ... Shrill gorgon silence breathes behind his taut civility and in the ever-tautening air that's dark for us despite the Indian summer glow. We drive on, following the route of phantoms, highwaymen, of slaves and armies. Children, wordless and remote, wave at us from kindling porches. Ancestral wounds have begun to bleed. An everyday event has punctured the most human of pleasures. The cruel southern past seeps into a final vision of the present: ... And now the land is flat for miles, the landscape lush, metallic, flayed; its brightness harsh as bloodstained swords.

Descriptive, symbolic, human—this is vintage Hayden. A surface is beautifully rendered; an internal anguish is subtly conveyed; a vision of the inner nature of things emerges with detached and passionate intensity. Hayden has

382 I AMERICAN WRITERS brought us more fully and humanly into the world. That was his purpose, his calling.

Selected Bibliography WORKS OF ROBERT HAYDEN POETRY

Heart-Shape in the Dust. Detroit: Falcon Press, 1940. With Myron O'Higgins. The Lion and the Archer. Counterpoise series, no. 1. Nashville, Tenn.: Hemphill Press, 1948. Figures of Time. Counterpoise series, no. 3. Nashville, Tenn.: Hemphill Press, 1955. A Ballad of Remembrance. London: Paul Breman, 1962. Selected Poems. New York: October House, 1966. Words in the Mourning Time. New York: October House, 1970. The Night-Blooming Cereus. Heritage series, vol. 20. London: Paul Breman, 1972. Angle of Ascent: New and Selected Poems. New York: Liveright, 1975. (Contains poems Hayden wished to collect from previous volumes.) American Journal. Taunton, Mass.: Effendi Press, 1978. EDITED VOLUMES

Kaleidoscope: Poems by American Negro Poets. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1967. With David J. Burrows and Frederick R. Lapides, Afro-American Literature: An Introduction. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1971.

CRITICAL STUDIES AND REVIEWS Davis, Charles T. "Robert Hayden's Use of History." In Modern Black Poets: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Donald B. Gibson. En-

glewood Cliffs, N J.: Prentice-Hall, 1973. Pp. 96111. Faulkner, Howard. "'Transformed by Steeps of Flight': The Poetry of Robert Hayden." CLA Journal, 21:282-91 (September 1977). Fetrow, Fred M. "Robert Hayden's 'Frederick Douglass': Form and Meaning in a Modern Sonnet." CLA Journal, 17:79-84 (September 1973). Galler, David. "Three Recent Volumes." Poetry, 110:267-69 (July 1967). Gendron, Dennis Joseph. "Robert Hayden: A View of His Life and Development as a Poet." Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1975. (A pioneering dissertation on Hayden's life and development; includes the transcript of a fourday interview Gendron conducted with the poet in March 1974.) Harper, Michael S. "Angle of Ascent." New York Times Book Review, February 22, 1976, pp. 3435. Jones, LeRoi. "A Dark Bag." Poetry, 103:394-401 (March 1964). Lester, Julius. "Words in the Mourning Time." New York Times Book Review, January 24, 1971, pp. 4-5, 22. Lewis, Richard O. "A Literary-Psychoanalytic Interpretation of Robert Hayden's 'Market.'" Negro American Literature Forum, 9:21-24 (Spring 1975). Novak, Michael P. "Meditative, Ironic, Richly Human: The Poetry of Robert Hayden." Midwest Quarterly, 15:276-85 (Spring 1974). O'Sullivan, Maurice J. "The Mask of Allusion in Robert Hayden's 'The Diver.'" CLA Journal, 17:85-92 (September 1973). Pool, Rosey. "Robert Hayden: Poet Laureate." Negro Digest, 15:39-43 (June 1966). Post, Constance J. "Image and Idea in the Poetry of Robert Hayden." CLA Journal, 20:164-75 (December 1976). Rodman, Selden. "Negro Poets." New York Times Book Review, October 10, 1948, p. 27. Turco, Lewis. "Angle of Ascent. The Poetry of Robert Hayden." Michigan Quarterly Review, 16:199-219 (Spring 1977). Williams, Wilburn, Jr. "Covenant of Timelessness and Time: Symbolism & History in Robert Hayden's Angle of Ascent." Massachusetts Review, 18:731-49 (Winter 1979).

ROBERT HAYDEN / 383 INTERVIEWS Gendron, Dennis Joseph. "Robert Hayden: A View of His Life and Development as a Poet." Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1975. Pp. 150-234. Layman, Richard. "Robert Hayden." In Conversations with Writers, edited by Matthew Bruccoli, E. Frazier Clark, Jr., et al. Vol. 1. Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1977. Pp. 156-79.

McCluskey, Paul. "Robert Hayden, The Poet and His Art: A Conversation." In Judson Philips and Lawson Carter, How I Write / L New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1972. Pp. 133-213. O'Brien, John. "Robert Hayden." In Interviews with Black Writers, edited by John O'Brien. New York: Liveright, 1973. Pp. 106-23.

—ROBERT M. GREENBERG

0. Henry 1862—1910 0

O. Henry's literary reputation, however it is measured, now seems as conclusively dead as Rover. It might be revived, though. That is one important difference between a dead dog and a literary corpus. The questions to be asked are whether it should be revived, and if so, how. Literary reputations die, more often than not, because we have lost (or consciously rejected) a way of reading or seeing or hearing: The letter is dead, the eye is blank, the ear is stopped with wax. When our ancestors seem remote, when their tastes seem quaint or primitive, it is hard not to consider ourselves their superiors, and harder yet not to consider their works superfluous. To be sure, we can cultivate a taste for the quaint or primitive, but to think and feel so is akin to necrophilia. Dead artists can live again only if we somehow see that their ways of feeling and thinking are akin to our own, perhaps closer than the perceptions of our parents and even many of our contemporaries—whose views may seem stodgily, even dangerously, old-fashioned. Then we can recognize these artists as ancestors in spirit as well as in name. They may even come to seem more important than the recently dead or the dying, the artistic parents whose reputations have begun to seem overblown even if they have not yet burst. The phenomenon has long been

'. HENRY and Mark Twain are the most famous pen names in American literary history. O. Henry and Edgar Allan Poe continue to be the chief totem figures of popular fiction: Every year the "best" mystery stories are initiated into the tribe of "Edgars" by the Mystery Writers Association of America; every year the "best" short stories are gathered into The O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories. Sober, knowledgeable men have compared O. Henry favorably with William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Francois Villon, Laurence Sterne, and the great Russian storytellers. Collections of his stories are found all over the world, translated into nearly all the great modern literary tongues and into many of the less widely spoken as well. In view of all this fame, it might seem impertinent to ask, "Why should we read O. Henry?" Yet the question is very pertinent, for unlike Twain and Poe, O. Henry attracts few American readers these days and still fewer are interested in writing or talking about him. When asked about the possibility of spiritual afterlife, O. Henry recited the American jump-rope rhyme: I had a little dog And his name was Rover, And when he died He died all over.

385

386 I AMERICAN noticed by psychologists. At issue here is whether O. Henry is such an ancestor, whether by reading him thoughtfully we can recognize his kinship to us and evoke a living and useful presence from his words. Such a revived O. Henry may well seem different from the one familiar to his contemporaries. Indeed, that result is probably inevitable, for the shock of recognition that Herman Melville felt unites contemporaries, and the electric current that runs through both the modern reader and an ancestor presumed dead but now galvanized into new life, come from perceiving what had been hidden by inherited ways of seeing. These inherited ways belong to our ancestors, the men and women who found O. Henry so familiar and liked what they saw—as they saw it. To restore O. Henry to life may be to disclose what those ancestors did not see in him, or, if they saw it, valued differently. Reviving an artist means less restoring him than discovering him to be our contemporary, a person who sees and feels as we do, or, more likely, as we are coming to feel It is in the becoming that we seek allies, that we create new historical explanations for how we are coming to see, to hear, to feel, to think. In 1850, Nathaniel Hawthorne did just that. Meditating on why he had written The Scarlet Letter and suggesting, very subtly, to his contemporaries how they might best read it and learn new ways of feeling and thinking, Hawthorne receives a small shock of recognition, a "sensation not altogether physical, yet almost so, as of burning heat" from the scarlet letter he claims to have discovered in the attic of the Salem customhouse during his tenure there as surveyor of customs. (How accidentally apt the title for many writers, for O. Henry as well as for Hawthorne.) Hawthorne then administers a small shock to his readers, most of whom believed in the "official" history or myth of American origins. Ac-

WRITERS

cording to that history Americans are the spiritual heirs of the Pilgrim and Puritan "fathers." Looking back to those ancestors, Hawthorne finds that in matters of art, at least, and in important moral questions as well, he has less in common with his biological ancestors (old Puritans all) than with his "official ancestor" in the customhouse, Mr. Surveyor Pue. Pue had been a Royalist, stalwart in his loyalties and foppishly elegant in his tastes, as unsympathetic to Puritan manners and morals as it was possible to be. Yet it was he, at least as Hawthorne tells the story, who sympathized with the already legendary Hester Prynne, he who cared enough to gather her story, he who rises from the grave to visit Hawthorne in the empty attic chamber and galvanize him into retelling that story for Hawthorne's generation. The implication is clear: If Hawthorne's readers are to read well, see well, and be truly sympathetic, they must reject their supposed heritage and find its alternative, one as new as the day, yet also one with some historical claim to being theirs. So it usually is in times of great change: so it was in Hawthorne's time, so it was in O. Henry's day, so it is today. That "day" began with O. Henry's birth during the Civil War. It extended through his death in 1910 and into a glorious evening that darkened during the 1920's. Night falls unevenly over so wide and various a country as the United States, but for Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren it had fallen on O. Henry well before 1943, the year in which they brought out the first edition of Understanding Fiction. This text, a companion to their successful Understanding Poetry (1938), codified the principles of reading that they and many teachers of literature found to be self-evident. O. Henry figures in Understanding Fiction, but to the then new generations of readers he was exhibited as a writer who did not understand fiction. One of his most famous stories, "The Furnished

O. HENRY I 387 Room," is given as an example of a badly plotted story. Since O. Henry's fame, especially among those who know him by only a few stories, rests in large part on the supposed excellence of his plots, the strategy of Brooks and Warren is clearly a frontal attack on what seemed to them to be the enemy, the deadening taste in literature and the arts acquired by many of their students from parents and schoolteachers alike. Brooks and Warren were more crusaders than vandals, partisans of the "modern" art that they had grown to love and that was still being created as they wrote. They sought to create a taste for what they valued, to open the eyes of one generation, to lay in the grave the dead weight of another that had found O. Henry such lively reading. They were the able spokesmen for a minority soon to become a majority, at least among educated readers. "Their" prose writers, those anthologized in their textbook, include Sherwood Anderson, Anton Chekhov, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Katherine Mansfield, Luigi Pirandello, Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty. Warren's name might be added, as could those of other distinguished writers of modernist fiction in the years to come. O. Henry indeed does not belong with these writers. But that is not to say that he does not belong with others of great interest today. The man known as O. Henry came into the world as William Sidney Porter. When he was born in Greensboro, North Carolina, on September 11, 1862, the omnipresent war was providing much work but little income for his physician father, who seems on all counts to have been a bad manager. Porter's mother died when he was three, leaving her husband the additional burden of three sons (soon lightened to two). Doctor Porter retreated with his children to his mother's home, then further retreated into

drink. The boys were left to their grandmother's care and the tutelage of Aunt Lina, whose primary school made enough money to keep the family in food and clothing. Will learned from her to love reading and writing and sketching cartoons; he learned from his father to be ashamed. He probably also learned how to evade responsibility, how to plead for tolerance of his shortcomings, how to ingratiate, how to make light of the truth. Ashamed, he learned shameful behavior. Most ominous of all, he seems to have learned to play the role called for by his company, so that throughout his life he was an amusing companion but loyal to nobody. By his own account Porter read widely between the ages of thirteen and nineteen. Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy and Edward William Lane's translation of The Arabian Nights' Entertainment: or, The Thousand and One Nights were his favorites, he said; and if he remembered accurately, the combination did much to form his literary tastes, nicely divided as they are between playfully moody manner of execution and clever narration that gives the illusion of the world's plenty of invention always at hand. If he elevated these books to the status of favorites only in maturity, as is quite likely, his choice of texts shows how well he understood the nature of his genius. He learned such self-consciousness early. His grammar-school studies under his aunt gave Porter enough Latin to play with and to sharpen his sense of how Latin roots and stems are transformable into English. Linguistic and narrative transformation thereafter fascinated him, especially, it seems, the backward pull of tradition on the thing transformed. He learned his science practically, as assistant to his pharmacist uncle between the ages of fifteen and nineteen. The drugstore was of the familiar sort: part pharmacy, part soda fountain, part newsstand and tobacco shop, and, for the "boys in the back room," secret and genteel saloon. It

388 I AMERICAN encouraged small talk and tale-telling, the convivial arts of male society that both comfort and constrict with their conventions of discourse. The drugstore provided another school of dissimulation, if another was needed; and Porter was at the top of the class, a popular entertainer with his quips and cartoons. It also opened a larger window upon the world, although the reality thus framed was filled mostly with men who might well have drifted away, were it not for the moorings provided by the drugstore. When Porter's chance came, he cut himself free. At the age of nineteen he was invited by Dr. and Mrs. James Hall to go with them to Texas, to visit their sons. In the American fashion the boys had "westered" and, as hoped, prospered. Porter, facing a dead end in the drugstore, was happy to follow, and except for brief trips when his grandmother and father died, he never returned to Greensboro. For a long time Porter lived the life of a guest, first with Richard Hall and later, starting in 1884, with the Joseph Harrell family in Austin. He learned the ways of cattle and sheep ranching, but largely as an observer. Otherwise he read as much as possible, learned Spanish, and, for his supper, talked charmingly, wrote comic sketches, or drew amusing pictures. When the ranch was between cooks, he cooked—as a member of the family would. Porter's social pleasures were simple and few, but he made the best of them. At other times he sought the company of words—in the dictionary that he perused for hours on end. In Austin he went out when he could, worked briefly in a pharmacy, then retired again to the life of leisured guest. By the age of twenty-four Porter was so involved in the social life of Austin that earning money once again seemed important. He returned to the daily grind, first as a bookkeeper in a real estate firm, then as a draftsman at the Texas Land Office, which had recently come to be directed by his former host, Richard Hall.

WRITERS

He prepared himself diligently for each of these jobs, studying with the purposeful concentration that he later gave to his stories. The salary of $100 a month at the land office, together with kindnesses from friends, enabled Porter to marry in July 1887. The groom was twenty-four; the bride, Athol Estes, was nineteen. An elopement overcame her mother's and stepfather's objection, which in part was that both had a history of tuberculosis. Porter did a little newspaper work to augment his salary, and thus began his career as a writer. He was a "stringer," his material for the most part skits and jokes. In 1891, Porter was once again behind a counter, this time as clerk at a bank, his salary still $100 a month. His wife had borne two children, the first of whom died within hours of birth; she herself survived each time only with difficulty. Tuberculosis was beginning to waste her; medical bills were as common as newspapers in the house; the Porters often took money from her parents to meet these and other expenses. Porter's patron lost his post as land commissioner after being defeated in the Democratic gubernatorial primary (the other candidate, James Hogg, proving to be a sore winner); Porter lost his job in turn. Charles Anderson, who got him work at the bank, was another Greensboro man who had helped him before and whose help proved once again that charm and connections are invaluable aids, but are not in themselves enough to ensure success. Porter therefore rushed to the door when what seemed to be opportunity knocked in the form of a defunct monthly paper, an idle printing press, and a willing partner, James P. Crane. In 1894 he started his own newspaper of sorts, a humorous weekly that he called The Rolling Stone. He wrote and drew most of the material himself, at the beginning still holding down his job at the bank. The Rolling Stone rolled for one year. It was

O. HENRY I 389 remarkably good, filled with material that his publisher later mined and sold as O. Henry's. There was considerable political satire (Austin was the state capital), ethnic humor generally of a good-natured sort (although some German families took offense on occasion), a regular parody of small-town newspapers in the form of "Plunkville Patriot" (appealing to the common backgrounds of most Texans, indeed most Americans in those days), and the like. In the "Patriot," Porter comically played with printing conventions, creating "errors" by running together "news" items and "advertisements." News articles and stories generally parodied reportorial and narrative conventions—strategies he later practiced as a storyteller. Although popular, the paper lost money, which Porter made up by borrowing from his father-in-law and friends. Eventually he seems to have tried his inventive powers on the books at the bank—so, at least, the examiners charged. His friends agreed to repay most of the more than $5,000; but although the bank officers were satisfied, the examiners were not, and a grand jury agreed that there was probable cause for a trial. Despite Porter's best efforts The Rolling Stone rolled to a dead stop in April 1895, and for six months the Porters were dependent on Athol's family. Under these circumstances it was easy for Porter to absent himself, his wife, and his daughter from Austin for a while, to write and draw for the Houston Post as occasional feature writer and regular author of "Some Postscripts," otherwise known as "the Post Man." Facing the trial proved to be harder; and when the time came, in the summer of 1896, Porter turned tail, going first to New Orleans for a few weeks and then to Honduras, where he holed up in the shallow-water port of Trujillo. He later compared himself to Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim, victim of a "fateful mistake" at the "supreme crisis" of his life; but as Gerald

Langford points out, "An action can hardly be called a mistake if it is the most characteristic action of one's life—the logical outcome of all that has gone before." If this brief sketch has failed to convince that, given his character, Porter's flight was inevitable, Langford's definitive biography will be more persuasive. Porter's wit and charm could not win the indulgence of the law, nor were his patrons powerful enough to turn the law aside. Under these circumstances he apparently planned to remain in exile until he would be free from prosecution under the statute of limitations. Less than a year later, on January 23, 1897, Porter returned to Austin and his dying wife. After her death he was tried and convicted of embezzlement and of flight to escape prosecution. His sentence of five years was the lightest that could be imposed. Although he maintained that he was innocent, and many believed him, it seems likely that he did embezzle at least some of the money to keep the Stone rolling. And he was undeniably guilty of flight. Just before the trial Porter had sold his first story to a large publisher, the S. S. McClure Company, which brought it out on September 18,1898, in newspapers associated with its syndicate. By this time he was in prison. "The Miracle of Lava Canyon," as the story was called, was the only one of his ever to be published nationally over the name W. S. Porter. Nearly all the rest were to be over pen names, the most famous of which is O. Henry. That was the name Porter used most often to market his stories while in the Ohio Penitentiary. He sold poems under the name John Arbuthnott, and later some poems and stories as S. H. Peters. Ainslees magazine, simplemindedly unwilling to let a cipher stand in place of a first name, got him to call himself Olivier Henry, and he went so far as to sign six of his stories (at least one of them written in prison)

390 I AMERICAN WRITERS as Sydney Porter, the name he used "legally" after his release. But it was O. Henry who caught on and became a mysterious figure of mythical proportions, identified with his characters (cowboys, conmen, consuls, boulevardiers, actors, writers, merchants, rubes both rustic and slick, lovers of elegant ladies and shopgirls, confidants of the wealthy and the hobo) because no other personality existed in association with the name. Unlike Samuel Clemens, who paraded himself as his alter ego, Porter used his other identity to shield himself. But the two men are alike in at least one way besides the initial popularity of their literary personas: Both were able to precipitate, by this indirection, a purer self. Both, too, characteristically keep even this self hidden from the casual reader; but to the careful reader go the surprise and pleasure of discovering a clear, tough mind, a self usually free of self-deception, who is the true originator of the words they are reading. This O. Henry seems to have been born between the flight to Honduras and Porter's release from the federal penitentiary in 1901, after serving three years with "good behavior." The Porter who refused to testify at his own trial may already have been this O. Henry. Porter's three years in prison were as easy as they could have been. He was assigned immediately to the prison hospital because of his experience as a pharmacist. He ate and slept there until he had gained a trusty's job as bookkeeper in the steward's office, "entirely outside and separate from the rest of the institution," as he wrote to his mother-in-law. Porter was thus, by and large, segregated from the other prisoners, freer than most from molestation by them or by the guards, and often in the company of educated men. When he needed company, he sought it out, preferring westerners and conmen. He also had many hours free for reading and writing.

Yet Porter threatened suicide shortly after he arrived; and Dr. John M. Thomas, chief physician at the prison, who knew and liked him well—well enough to recommend that Porter be made the steward's bookkeeper even though it meant that he would lose his best pharmacist—remarked that in eight years as prison doctor, he had "never known a man who was so deeply humiliated by his prison experience." In his earliest encounter with shame, young Porter learned the behavior that led to his imprisonment. This time he varied his response somewhat by creating a "new life," as prison stories have long taught us to think of it, as a writer. In this way he once again played a role, but he separated himself analytically from that role. As Porter he kept up a correspondence with his dead wife's parents and, through them, with his daughter, who knew only that he had to "be away" for a while. As a writer he turned his attention to analyzing what worked with audiences and why it worked. Already a master of the persiflage of journalistic humor, he sought the secrets of popular fiction. Porter rewrote "The Miracle of Lava Canyon," making it more marketable and more nearly profound— then sold it as "An Afternoon Miracle" to Everybody's. He entered the Christmas market by placing "Whistling Dick's Christmas Stocking" with McClure's, adjusting the sentiment of the season to the muckraking interests of that magazine by "exposing" the migratory habits of hoboes as well. (It was the first story to be printed as O. Henry's.) Such calculated manipulation of popular literary conventions, such direct satisfaction of popular and editorial taste, went beyond what had been possible for the editor, chief reporter, and typesetter of The Rolling Stone. Prison life provided, ironically, the leisure for such analysis, but the humiliation of living that life provided the energy.

O. HENRY I 391 One aspect of prison life opened another perspective on the nature of things, particularly on social relations. Again, as in the Greensboro drugstore, the view was limited in scope, but this time it was much more profound. As prison pharmacist Porter saw and knew many men, could choose whom to talk with, for the most part; but in his dealings with the sick and injured this was not so. They forced him to look closely at what he otherwise could avoid. Here, in an extract from a letter to his father-in-law, written early in his imprisonment, is what he saw and how he saw it:

hour or two. This generally makes him go to work again, and when he gives out and can't stand up they bring him on a stretcher to the hospital to get well or die as the case may be.... Twice a day they have a sick call at the hospital, and from two hundred to three hundred men are marched in each day suffering from various disorders. They march in single file past the doctor and he prescribes for each one "on the fly." The procession passes the drug counter and the medicines are handed out to each one as they march without stopping the line.

There are four doctors and about twenty-five other men in the hospital force. The hospital is a separate building and is one of the finest equipped institutions in the country. It is large and finely furnished and has every appliance of medicine and surgery.... The doctor goes to bed about ten o'clock and from then on during the night I prescribe for the patients myself and go out and attend calls that come in. If I find anyone seriously ill I have them brought to the hospital and attended to by the doctor. I never imagined human life was held as cheap as it is here. The men are regarded as animals without soul or feeling. They carry on all kinds of work here; there are foundries and all kinds of manufacturing is done, and everybody works and works twice as hard as men in the same employment outside do. They work thirteen hours a day and each man must do a certain amount of work or be punished. Some few strong ones stand the work, but it is simply slow death to the majority. If a man gets sick and can't work they take him into a cellar and turn a powerful stream of water on him from a hose that knocks the breath out of him. Then a doctor revives him and they hang him up by his hands with his feet off the floor for an

A society builds one of the "finest equipped" hospitals in the country, then staffs it with only four doctors; every day at sick call one doctor prescribes "on the fly" for 200 to 300 men; often a doctor revives a prisoner tortured into insensibility so that he can be tortured some more. It is no wonder that, after having this long look at the conditions around him, Porter threatened suicide. His ostensible reason was that he "never imagined that human life was held as cheap" as in the prison, but the weight of the details suggests another perception, associated but even more disturbing. It is that the systematic brutality takes place under the pretense of care. Although the hospital seems a monument to social concern, provides "every appliance" to repair the health of the prisoners, in reality it is a sham. The doctors bring no substance to the role of healer. They exist so that the state cannot be charged with inhumanity, and fulfill that role most fully when they are present to see that corporal punishment hurts as much as possible but does not cause a death. Suicide might follow, but the hands of the institution are clean on that account. It does not slit the throat, fashion the noose, or seal the cell and turn on the

392 I AMERICAN gas—the common methods noted by Porter. At least for the record, all humane measures have been taken. Porter was part of those measures. Once safely "outside" and living a "new life" as O. Henry to his readers and as Syd Porter to his new acquaintances, Porter never said a word directly about these horrors and the realization they had forced upon him. He is supposed to have told a fellow prisoner, "I will forget that I ever breathed behind these walls." But Porter's imagination touched again and again upon the routine playing of roles, much as the tongue touches a sore tooth. He seems never to have gotten the systematic pretense of the prison out of his system. To a large extent the humiliation felt at being assigned the roles of thief and prisoner is responsible for his obsession; but his realization that society, at least in its institutional forms, cares more for the role than for the substance completes the reasons for the recurring examination of role and routine in O. Henry's works. The stories usually have a comic tone, to be sure, but distinctly uncomic possibilities often exist just at the fringes of his ostensible narrative. Sometimes, as though to call attention to his own role as entertainer, O. Henry almost visibly whisks his protagonists away from the brutality awaiting them by obviously superimposing a happy ending. Two variations on a theme demonstrate how important this direct disclosure of his role was to become. O. Henry's first work to be published, as noted earlier, had been a Christmas story, "Whistling Dick's Christmas Stocking." As a subgenre of sorts (with Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" its best-known example), the Christmas story had to be both appropriately seasonal and happy in its outcome. "Whistlen" Dick, a hobo escaping the cold of winter and the New Orleans police, saves a plantation household from robbery and worse by warning them

WRITERS

of his fellow hoboes' plans. He is rewarded with a Christmas Eve feast and bed, as well as a promise "that the way would be heartily smoothed for him to rise to as high places of emolument and trust as the plantation afforded." The predictable ending is not long in coming. In the morning Dick hears "certain dread and ominous sounds" as "the mighty din of the ogre Labor shook the earth," sounds so threatening that "the poor tattered and forever disguised Prince in search of his fortune held tight to the window-sill even in the enchanted castle, and trembled." In an instant he is gone, whistling in company with the birds, if one reads for that sentiment, or unable to cease being the poor tattered thing he has become, if one reads for another. Either interpretation can be derived directly from the story that O. Henry has told and from the conventions governing the portrayal of such "knights of the road" as Dick. One might smile at O. Henry's insinuation of the second reading under the first, but there is no surprise to either. O. Henry delivers the expected goods. His role remains secondary to the story he has to tell. In 1906, seven years later, the Christmas story that O. Henry sold to Ainslee's also concerns a hobo, but the more "mature" O. Henry is manifest in the role, even roles, that he assumes in his story. At the outset of "Compliments of the Season," he appears as an essayist (a favorite gambit): There are no more Christmas stories to write. Fiction is exhausted; and newspaper items, the next best, are manufactured by clever young journalists who have married early and have an engagingly pessimistic view of life. Therefore, for seasonable diversion, we are reduced to two very questionable sources—facts and phil-

O. HENRY I 393 osophy. We will begin with—whichever you choose to call it.

The "beginning" that follows this beginning does seem to mix fact and philosophy: "Children are pestilential little animals with which we have to cope under a bewildering variety of conditions." Another story mixes them even more sardonically. Fuzzy, a "soldier of misfortune," finds the pestilentially insistent poor little rich girl's lost rag doll, which he returns for the $100 reward. Unknown to him, Black Riley, "Pigeon" McCarthy, and "One-ear" Mike are waiting, "fingering under their coats the inevitably fatal weapons that were to make the reward of the rag-doll theirs." But Fuzzy, remembering a long-forgotten role, drunkenly will not leave without "'exchangin comp'ments sheason with lady th'house. 'Gainst princ'ples gen'leman do sho.'" In return he is chauffeured out of harm's way in the family's Mercedes. The efficacy of seasonal ritual and almost forgotten social status and role is thus asserted against the menacingly and criminally brutal streets, but it is clearly all a sham. O. Henry's role in it is to provide the narcotic of the season for those who need it, but unlike the doctor or pharmacist on sick call back at the Ohio Penitentiary, he openly mocks his role. It is easy, too, to see him eye the reader in need of a fix. In place of the "engagingly pessimistic" view provided by the young journalists who compete with him by dispensing "the next best" form of the narcotic of print, he pessimistically points to a world of violence from which Fuzzy has been saved only by the storyteller's power. The Fuzzies of society rarely fare so well. "One-ear" Mike's "brass knucks" are well broken in—they are "an heirloom in the family"—he is well socialized in his role, and he re-

mains at large. O. Henry is also well socialized in the role he plays within the social ritual at hand. Throughout he has been engaging, often wittily cynical, sometimes as brilliantly inventive as a modernist poet ("Though the dusk of twilight was hardly yet apparent, lights were beginning to spangle the city like pop-corn bursting in a deep skillet"). Unlike the young journalists, O. Henry avoids the single role of being engagingly pessimistic. Both engagement of the reader and pessimism are too important to him to be carelessly mixed. Like the journalist—like Stephen Crane, say, reporting on the Spanish-American war—he is present in the familiar role of storyteller, entertaining with his wit and artful dressing of the "facts," even asserting his personality, as in the opening paragraph—the story, after all, is told from his point of view. Contemporary journalism had "stars," reporters whose personalities infused extra appeal into their dispatches. Among them was O. Henry's contemporary rival for popular fame as a shortstory writer, Richard Harding Davis. But O. Henry cannot be summed up as the personality present in his works. Unlike Davis, though quite like Crane when he turned his great talents to fiction, O. Henry transcends the role he fills so obtrusively in his fiction. His pessimism resonates from depths undefined by social role and not to be measured by it. Porter lived only nine years after leaving prison, nearly all of the period in New York. He stayed briefly in Pittsburgh, rejoining his wife's family and getting to know his daughter again, but New York clearly was where the money was to be made. By 1902 he was there. For a while he sent money for his daughter's care. Then, in 1907, Porter married a childhood sweetheart, Sara Lindsay Coleman, and brought both his wife and his daughter to live with him in New York. When the marriage did

394 I AMERICAN not work out, the three went their separate ways—his daughter off to school, for he was determined that she should have the college education he felt had been denied him. However significant these matters were in O. Henry's personal life, the signal event of his professional career occurred in 1903, when he signed a contract with the New York Sunday World to write a weekly feature story, to be syndicated throughout the country. He wrote 113 of these, as well as the generally longer pieces for magazines such as Ainslee's, Collier's, Cosmopolitan, Everybody's, McClure's, Munsey's, Red Book, Saturday Evening Post, and Smart Set. In 1904, O. Henry brought out his first book, Cabbages and Kings, in which he wove stories about Honduras into a book-length fiction—not a novel but not simply a collection of stories. The Four Million, published in 1906, established his reputation. Reprinting, for the most part, stories from the Sunday World, pieces already known to the millions who had read them there or in the papers buying the syndicated material, this volume did not range outside New York for its subjects, yet caught the attention of readers everywhere. Its title refers to the entire population of that metropolis, not to the "Four Hundred" for which Ward McAllister had claimed exclusive importance (this being the number that could be fitted into Mrs. William Astor's ballroom). Some of O. Henry's stories in The Four Million touch on that golden circle: in "Mammon and the Archer" the mansion of the wealthy soap baron, Anthony Rockwall, borders on that of "the aristocratic clubman, G. Van Schuylight Suffolk-Jones," and Rockwall's son marries into the set that excludes his father and wants to exclude him. But the even more famous stories "The Gift of the Magi" and "The Furnished Room," like the majority of O.

WRITERS

Henry's tales from the Sunday World, keep soclose to the experience of the working and shopkeeping classes as to make these pseudonymously penned, essentially anonymous stories a democratic answer to McAllister's self- and class-aggrandizing Society as I Have Found It, written in the preceding decade (1890). Society as the otherwise identityless O. Henry found it was quite a different thing. From 1906 until his death in New York on June 5, 1910, O. Henry was able to bring out two volumes of short stories a year. After his death his publishers put together five more volumes. Nearly all his tales were twice-told, once in newsprint, once again between book covers. Such publication did wonders for his income, but even so he usually spent more money than he made. New York delighted O. Henry, and he moved about Bagdad-on-the-Subway, as he called it, as though he were a caliph in disguise—that, at least, is one of the literary masks he came to use. (In his rooms, sweating in his underwear over his weekly story for the Sunday World, he must have felt himself more genuinely to be a modern Scheherazade, spinning yarns because his life depended upon it.) As soon as possible O. Henry moved from furnished rooms to more spacious lodgings on Irving Place, where the associations with Washington Irving delighted him. When he married, he took a house on Long Island and an apartment in Manhattan. He did his writing in an apartment at the Caledonia Hotel, where he could be reached only by those knowing the password. Nevertheless, acquaintances always could touch him for a loan, and beggars who approached him sometimes found themselves holding coins or bills of large denomination, so fully did he play the caliph in modern business suit. O. Henry stood countless men on the skids to a meal and a bed; he dressed expensively and ate well; and he drank ever more whiskey. By

O. HENRY I 395 the time he died of diabetes and cirrhosis of the liver, he was drinking two bottles a day. He owed thousands of dollars to his first wife's parents and to people who had befriended him in Texas and elsewhere, and thousands more that had been advanced to him by publishers. When he died, it was known that Sydney Porter had been O. Henry, but it was not generally known what else he had been. Some acquaintances had known his secret but had not felt free to discuss it with him. When it became known that he had spent three years in prison, his stories became even more popular, as any publicist could have told him would happen. But the role of ex-convict was one he remained unwilling to act. Just as O. Henry was settling in New York, Frank Norris was proclaiming the death of the short story because the public had fed to satiety on the supply provided by the cheap magazines and Sunday supplements. O. Henry's success proved Norris' diagnosis to be wrong, but before long it was claimed that O. Henry himself had helped to kill the story as a form of art. Praise found him incomparable and beyond criticism. Shakespeare was most often summoned up as a confrere, the common links being "a flashing wit, abundant humor and quick observation"—thus Henry James Forman, writing in that organ of American gentility, the North American Review (May 1908). Carl Van Doren characterized the profusion of discovery and invention in O. Henry's work, the unique flavor and aftertaste of O. Henry's fiction, thus: "He is gay, irresponsible, impudent, hoaxing; no writer in the language seems clever immediately after one has been reading O. Henry." To this praise he added a shrewd observation: O. Henry was the raconteur of his literary generation, nearer to the actor than to the historian in his modus operandi, which, Van Doren remarked, "must be swift and easy, not

too subtle." He also placed O. Henry's matter firmly within the tradition of romance. ("The true adventurer," O. Henry writes in "The Green Door," "goes forth aimless and uncalculating to meet and greet unknown fate.") O. Henry's tales, like those in that great "fountain head of romance," The Arabian Nights, attract popular attention because of "a certain popular quality in the plots, as if not a man but a generation had invented them." Implicitly, Van Doren made O. Henry the artful manipulator of already popular material, which is indeed true. He invented new ways of using old material, not new material itself. Like many others, Van Doren objected to O. Henry's slang, though less understandably, since that practice would seem of a piece with the commonness of his plots and his role as raconteur. Curiously, O. Henry's slang today can seem a fresh discovery; it is the plots that now often seem tawdry. There is good reason to believe that they seemed so to O. Henry as well. Van Doren's essay appeared as part of the flurry precipitated by the publication, in 1916, of C. Alphonso Smith's O. Henry Biography. Smith, who had grown up with O. Henry, renewed interest among readers with his carefully researched biography. It revealed what had taken place during the "shadowed years" in the Ohio Penitentiary, in this way inadvertently adding to O. Henry's legendary status growing out of earlier publicity and his own decision to remain faceless before his public. Smith's position as Poe professor of English at the University of Virginia, a title displayed prominently on the title page, doubtless lent his work added weight with that public. Not all professors were impressed. The most tenacious and cogent of O. Henry's professorial critics was Fred Lewis Pattee. His fullest assessment came in The Development of the American Short Story (1923). Pattee granted

396 I AMERICAN that O. Henry was "the greatest short-story writer of his generation," but that conceded greatness—what he called O. Henry's "undoubted powers"—was "debauched" because O. Henry served the god Momus rather than the truth, because he had put his art at the service of "the swift ephemeral press" and produced a "narcotic effect" on demand for the "jaded and blase and sensation-surfeited readers of Sunday papers." Such criticism is a cultural event. O. Henry obviously had come to stand for the enemy, the mindless hordes of what H. L. Mencken called the "booboisie." (Mencken too found O. Henry to be anathema.) Worse, the boobs had forced the citadels of the universities, so that writing the short story (as "journalized" most successfully by O. Henry) had become the corrupt subject taught by corrupted professors. C. Alphonso Smith, "while exchange professor," had even "lectured on the short-story form in a German university." Clearly Pattee was distressed by what the Germans must think of us now. He made it amply clear what he thought. The final chapter bears the title "O. Henry and the Handbooks"—so he styled those publications of the professors who "advertised their courses by statistics of the number of stories sold by the class the preceding year." Pattee's final criticism of O. Henry can easily apply to his colleagues and their courses: "He worked without truth, without moral consciousness, and without a philosophy of life." Although Pattee was partisan, he was an honest man. One could place the blame on O. Henry for the emphasis everywhere, by the 1920's, "upon the mechanistic, upon manner, upon a technique that one might learn from books"; but Pattee conceded that, however amoral and unphilosophic O. Henry may have been, he had risen on the wings of pure originality. In contracting with the Sunday World

WRITERS

for a story a week, in placing his art at the level of a sweatshop pieceworker's shirt or shirtwaist dress (the examples are not Pattee's), he yet "had shaken off all trace of models and conformity to standards." His stories "were pure O. Henry." Their results were what Pattee regretted. The record of the "handbooks" makes manifest the justice of Pattee's cause—the times did indeed seem derivative and bad, unless one looked in the direction of the modernist writers already at work. Even then it would have been apparent that no taste (including Pattee's) had developed for them, so that for one regretting the sins of the fathers, which gave every sign of having been visited upon their children in one's own generation, no consolation was in sight. One writer saw O. Henry's works, their virtues and shortcomings, with even greater acuity than Van Doren had. Oliver W. Firkins placed himself between the middle class, which viewed O. Henry "as the impersonation of vigor and brilliancy," and that "part of the higher criticism" (into which we can justly fit Pattee) that "sees in him little but sensation and persiflage." Firkins paid for his right to hold judiciously to a middle position by removing himself from the field of combat: "Between these views there is a natural relation; the gods of the heathen are ipso facto the demons of Christianity." Firkins found O. Henry to be, like himself, a partisan of neither persuasion. Curiously, like Pattee he faulted O. Henry because he did not love the truth, because too often his stories ask the reader to "imagine the unimaginable." But in one literary trait O. Henry must be ranked supreme: "the designing of stories." Firkins did not mean "the primary intuition" of them, the discovery of a new story. Nor did he mean "skill in development," the intricate designing of plot and accretive building of character. Rather, he meant "the disposition of masses," the "blocking-out of plots." In creat-

O. HENRY I 397 ing this almost visual effect, which cannot be subtle (at least on first impression) but can have great power, O. Henry has no superiors. Here is how Firkins blocked out "The Furnished Room" for his readers: Through the wilderness of apartments on the lower West Side a man trails a woman. Chance leads him to the very room in which the woman ended her life the week before. Between him and the truth the avarice of a sordid landlady interposes the curtain of a lie. In the bed in which the girl slept and died, the man sleeps and dies, and the entrance of the deadly fumes into his nostrils shuts the sinister and mournful coincidence forever from the knowledge of mankind. The melodramatic nature of such a story, its lack of characterization, its reliance upon chance and coincidence instead of upon psychological motivation, is not the issue. The effect comes from treating these commonplaces almost abstractly, as though they were blocks of color. Firkins does not put the matter this way, to be sure. In his formulation, "O. Henry's speciality is the enlistment of original method in the service of traditional appeals." Traditional appeal and original method highlight each other. They are the antitheses necessary to his successful synthesizing of them into a story uniquely his and giving a sensation beyond that expected of a story. "O. Henry transports us by aeroplane to the old homestead." So it seems to the reader who can find his or her way to the coign of vantage that Firkins builds above the warfare of the literary heathens and Christians. We may well find that ascent less difficult than our warring ancestors did. "The Furnished Room," as we have seen, is the story that Brooks and Warren singled out when they prepared to do battle. They display their colors at the outset. Formally, we are told,

the story has two parts. The first tells of the man's final search and suicide; the second is the conversation between the landladies, from which we discover that the girl had indeed lived in the room and died there—by her own hand, as the young man is dying by his own hand at that moment. "What holds the two parts of the story together?" ask Brooks and Warren, and the answer they expect is clearly "Nothing very much." At least nothing very honest. For the ending, the conversation between the landladies, is there only to shock the reader. It has nothing to do with the story, which is about the young man. That story could have been improved had O. Henry taken more pains to motivate the man's suicide by characterizing him more carefully. But even in an improved story the appended second part would remain "a trick played on the reader" rather than "a trick which fate has played on the young man." After all, even had he known that the girl had killed herself, even had he been motivated by being made aware of her fate, the young man might still have committed suicide. Brooks and Warren concede that a conclusion motivated in this way "would seem very tame and flat." They use its probable tameness as evidence that O. Henry is practicing his wiles on the reader by writing the story as he does. To use their terminology, the conclusion to the revised version would be "meaningful" but not effective. O. Henry has chosen to create an effect (chills generated by "the sinister and mournful coincidence," as Firkins puts it) instead of generating meaning. To make the ending meaningful in Brooks and Warren's terms would be to destroy O. Henry's effect. It is possible to defend the story pretty much on the grounds chosen by Brooks and Warren. For example, they single out for criticism the "sweet odor of mignonette" that reminds the young man of the girl and with which O. Henry

398 I AMERICAN apparently motivates the young man's suicide. To Brooks and Warren this motivation is insufficient: The "handling of this detail is confused," they write, although "the whole effect of the story depends on the incident of the odor." So it does, which is why O. Henry dwells on it. But if we assume that suicide is an action often imprecisely motivated, that the suicide's mind is often tired and confused; if we assume that no plot is likely to catch in its makeshift intricacy the lightning shifts in circumstance and feeling that convince the suicide there is no other way (even though tomorrow may bring several)—if we make these rather reasonable assumptions, then O. Henry's "motivation" becomes more satisfyingly realistic and the ending more nearly meaningful. Such a reading may not make the story rival one of Shakespeare's plays; but even if we are modest in our comparisons, it might be well to remember that confusion about the motivation of his characters has sometimes plagued that greater writer's critics. Brooks and Warren do not make these saving assumptions, for they are out to murder, not to create; and in O. Henry's story they see the enemy. Why else begin with a question about form ("What holds the two parts of the story together?") and then move immediately to a discussion of motivation? There are, after all, other possible grounds besides characterization and motivation for perceiving a formal unity in the work at hand. Brooks and Warren, it would seem, choose a ground from which one cannot easily perceive a unity in O. Henry's story. Formalist criticism should be subtler and more generous. So, at least, Samuel Taylor Coleridge advised. But Brooks and Warren can be forgiven. The enemy was real—the "booboisie," that is—and they were doing the good work of teaching how to read the modernist fiction derived from realism. If their work at times took on the pre-

WRITERS

scriptive strategy of the handbook for criticism, it had the virtue of encouraging the reading of a new and inventive literature rather than, as with the earlier handbooks of short-story writing, the derivative multiplication of stories according to fixed formulas. If we now find the strictures of Brooks and Warren too confining, we can still thank them for having been among the literary fathers who taught the value of freedom. The most useful critic for a reader of O. Henry today is less an ancestor who can head a countertradition than a foreign ally who can suggest untraditional ways of reading. (So it seems at first glance, at least.) Boris Eikhenbaum, writing in 1925, gave the answer to all those critics who had complained that O. Henry stressed manner at the expense of matter, that he loved effect too much and the truth too little. (In essence that is also Brooks and Warren's charge, though they draw it in New Critical fashion.) Inside the Soviet Union, far from the literary wars of the United States, though deeply involved in those of Russian literature and the Bolshevik Revolution, Eikhenbaum saw that "the laws of the short story dictated" that O. Henry "distort reality over and over again." In other words, it is true that O. Henry elevates manner over matter, but it is also true that to do so is essential to writing good stories. A formalist of a different persuasion, Eikhenbaum found O. Henry to be an instructive example in the evolution of literary forms, an artist whose work had much to teach Russian writers of his generation. O. Henry's reputation among readers throughout the Soviet Union was considerable, another fact that Eikhenbaum took to be instructive. His reasons would seem to be of little interest to Americans, whose concern is with O. Henry and American readers of today, but such a conclusion would be mistaken: Eikhenbaum's argument proceeds on the premise that O.

O. HENRY I 399 Henry's is a peculiarly transitional form of literature, and transitional forms are much in evidence and demand today. At least in the history of Russian literature, we are told, short fiction had generally prepared the way for the novel, which Russians generally think (and apparently Eikhenbaum agreed) is a higher form. In Eikhenbaum's present, and under the conditions then prevailing, both short and long fiction stood in need of revival. Historical precedent showed that short fiction had first to be restored if long fiction were to be revived. O. Henry had shown the way, and Eikhenbaum set out to show the way O. Henry had marked. He seized upon O. Henry's popularity to show Russian writers how they might succeed. O. Henry had revealed his own awareness of what the historical moment demanded. (Consider again the opening paragraph of "Compliments of the Season," in which O. Henry declares, long before John Earth was to come to a similar conclusion, "Fiction is exhausted.") His advantage over Russian writers was considerable, for instead of writing within a tradition dominated by long fictional forms, he wrote at the end of a tradition of short fiction, headed by Irving and Poe, and in which he benefited from a century of experiment and achievement. Even long fiction in America is "manifestly oriented toward the story," we are told. (Eikhenbaum instances The Scarlet Letter, which indeed has a unity of "time, place, and action" similar to that of most short stories. But he says nothing of Moby Dick or Sister Carrie.) O. Henry is the last in a line of self-conscious practitioners of an art, all master craftsmen well initiated into its mysteries. He can thus deconstruct, in the fashionable phrase of our day, the dead and dying forms surrounding him. Out of that deconstruction, that corrosive dissolution of the dead flesh, he supplies his own boneyard of material for the creation of new formal possibilities in literary art.

The strategy of such an artist is parody. It is through parody that "the regeneration of a genre comes about—a transition from one set of possibilities and forms to another." The nature of short fiction, its source in folklore and anecdote rather than in syncretic forms such as history and travel writing (usually pointed to as sources for the novel), "amasses its whole weight toward the ending." (American writers of O. Henry's time called such endings "the snapper." For a while actors called the "snapper" speech in a play constructed along similar lines "the O. Henry.") Furthermore, as Poe had argued long before, the manner of telling a short story is structurally essential to its success. It prepares for the ending. O. Henry parodies both ending and manner. Others before him (Bret Harte, Frank Norris) had begun the parody of serious, longer forms, always reducing them in the process to story length. O. Henry concentrates on parodying the story itself. He frequently takes problems in literary practice as the subjects of his stories, such as the problems of finding authentic dialogue ("The Dog and the Playlet," "A Little Local Color") or material for a good story ("'Next to Reading Matter'"). He constructs beginnings that call attention to the teller rather than to the story (one of Mark Twain's tricks). He makes light of the intrigue that is the ostensible subject of his tale ("Tommy's Burglar"). He often gives away the apparent ending of the story well before he ends it—concluding instead with another and more "effective" ending than mere plot would provide (as in "The Furnished Room," one could note). He raises dialogue to a high tension, not to advance the story but to impede it by calling attention to the manner of narration. He interjects commentary for the same reason, and invents the most improbable metaphors, ironies, and the like. This summary is not Eikhenbaum's, but in using such strategies as these O. Henry's stories

400 I AMERICAN are, we are told, "so far from any psychology, any ambition to foster in the reader an illusion of reality and bring him into contact with his heroes as people, that the very categories of comic and tragic can be said to be inapplicable to his works." Their true subject is literature. Their truest readers are the few who see the game for what it is, who enjoy meeting "the parodist almost overcome by his own wittiness and by the irony of his position vis a vis the reader and even vis a vis the craft of fiction itself." But "parody is a road that leads to something else." According to Eikhenbaum, O. Henry had died before it led him there, but his roadbuilding efforts led in America to Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Waldo Frank, Ben Hecht—to a regenerated literature in which once again choice of material could take precedence over construction. (Had Eikhenbaum written a few years later, he might have pointed out that Ernest Hemingway began his career as a novelist by writing a parody of Anderson.) In Russian literature, though, a new self-consciousness about construction was a precondition to any regeneration. It needed its own O. Henry—or to take a close look at the example of O. Henry. One cannot say that American literature needs the example of O. Henry. As though, in response to a request for a sample, a malfunctioning computer had thrown up a profusion of names in alphabetical proximity, our literary journals and magazines, our publishers of contemporary serious fiction, our times have given us John Barth, Donald Barthelme, Jorge Luis Borges, Michel Butor, and Richard Brautigan, then thrown in Robert Coover and Thomas Pynchon and a few others to keep the list of accomplished users of parody from beta dominance. It is commonplace to remark on the exhaustion of fiction, and engaging the reader in

WRITERS

literary games and gamesmanship is the order of the day. Yet O. Henry can add variety to these games, and to discover a literary ancestor may give almost as much pleasure as to find another interesting contemporary. His thematic material is different, not only in the literal sense of his parodying forms other than the more common subjects today but also because he approaches from a different angle the shared subjects of sham, convention, role, and identity. The experience of prison life lent an urgency to O. Henry's themes that contradicts both Eikhenbaum's assessment of him as playful litterateur and Pattee's scornful dismissal of him as "a harlequin Poe with modern laughter in place of gloom." Less philosophical than Borges or .Butor, less savvy about the weight of history than Pynchon, he nevertheless shares their gloom. As for self-asserting treatment of old themes in new ways, Barth looks elephantine in comparison, Barthelme almost commonplace. O. Henry has Brautigan's impudence and fascination with the power of narrative convention, yet had to please a wider audience and so worked more closely to the conventions at hand and under his eye. In short, he is worth reading as a literary ancestor who, with some accommodation on our part, can seem a contemporary. Like Laurence Sterne, who is a greater but also less accommodating English cousin, he can be made to live and even to cut capers. O. Henry's art grows out of anecdote and is rooted in the folk tradition of short oral narrative, but it connects that tradition with the popular press and its "traditional" products for the readers of modern times. In the opening to "The Girl and the Graft"—"graft" being a term frequently used in O. Henry's time and tales to mean "confidence game"—the popular writer sets up a tale to be told by a narrator. The writer's hyperbolic playfulness, though, is

O. HENRY / 401 hard to tell from the tale spinner's traditional hyperbole: The other day I ran across my old friend Ferguson Pogue. Pogue is a conscientious grafter of the highest type. His headquarters is the Western Hemisphere, and his line of business is anything from speculating in town lots on the Great Staked Plains to selling wooden toys in Connecticut, made by hydraulic pressure from nutmegs ground to a pulp. The parody here is respectful, "parodic" only for lack of a better word. The audacity of a graft based on the recycled product of an earlier graft (the legendary Yankee peddler's bogus nutmegs) that is in turn passed off onto the grafter's descendants is delicious. With this opening paragraph the story writer indicates his awareness both of the sources of his story (the rogue peddler) and the telling of such stories (the oral tradition). He also defines the teller's diction, very respectfully, by measuring it against the parody of elevated diction so important to the story writer's art: I sat on his trunk while Ferguson Pogue talked. No one could be franker or more candid in his conversation. Beside his expression the cry of Henry James for lacteal nourishment at the age of one month would have seemed like a Chaldean cryptogram. Pogue may be a grafter, Pogue's artful storytelling may be the art of a grafter, and O. Henry's composite written story may be the grafter's graft on a grafter's graft; but once these facts are acknowledged by sly glances of the eye or linotype, all is on the up and up. (What's that, breathless reader?—or, as O. Henry once addressed his overeager audience, "bumptious reader"? The girl's graft is marriage, so that the professional grafter's graft is defeated by the more socially acceptable con of

the golden band and the tie that binds. Thus O. Henry sends us up on two of the game's oldest formulas, the guller gulled and the comic power of marriage.) O. Henry's readers were more accustomed to journalistic fiction of a sentimental, bathetic sort, perhaps disguised with a well-cut coat of sophisticated banter but with the real bogus goods underneath. His parody of this fiction has a quite different flavor. Some is so close to its original as to be distinguishable only by a bitter aftertaste. "Blind Man's Holiday" winds together love, suspicion, and a wise and knowing priest, present both for legal and religious reasons and to oversee the sentimental denouement. In this story the new husband is much relieved to discover that his bride has been a night-shift seamstress in a sweatshop rather than the prostitute he suddenly (and belatedly) suspected her of being. O. Henry only suggests sotto voce that her "virtuous" employment may have been nearly as exploitative as her presumedly vicious one—to have done more would have moved his story uncomfortably near the cliche of the virtuous woman of the streets. So he contents himself with planting ambiguities in the plot (the girl's eagerness to leave her employment and her shame at revealing its nature—signs her new husband reads with a conventionally "dirty" mind) and rich layers of literary textures in the ending. The priest's language moves about from the stage bombastic to the wittily jocular ("spying upon the mysteries of midnight millinery") to gruff brogue. Only on reflection does the parody come through, aided by these small signs. Often, though, O. Henry's parody is open, especially when the target is sentimental or pretentious or both. In "Tommy's Burglar" the burglar "got into the house without much difficulty; because we must have action and not too

402 I AMERICAN much description in a 2,000-word story." But before he can bore the lock of the silver closet, he is engaged in conversation by young Tommy about how a burglar ought to behave in such a story and what cliches of plot and characterization it must contain. "A Dinner at " involves the story writer in disputes with his protagonist, Hudson Van Sweller, about what he as a "metropolitan type" should say and do— most of all, about whether he should "dine at ." (To fill the blank, O. Henry's footnotes tell us, we should "See advertising column, 'Where to Dine Well,' in the daily newspapers.") Such mocking self-consciousness about what writer and reader are up to can erupt at any time. "And now must come swift action, for we have here some four thousand words and not a tear shed and never a pistol, joke, safe, nor bottle cracked," cracks O. Henry in "A Night in New Arabia." The requisite action is taken care of in one sentence, followed by several more of delightfully pertinent impertinence: Get the point? Of course I know as well as you do that Thomas is going to be the heir. I might have concealed the name; but why always hold back your mystery till the end? I say, let it come near the middle so people can stop reading there if they want to. That the revelation is essential to O. Henry's plot is overlooked by a reader delighted with this playful attention to the medium. The art of parody in this way conceals the narrative art it is supposed to reveal. As sensitive as O. Henry was to narrative convention and cliche, he was even more so to these matters in language. As one of his loquacious narrators remarks about a bug collector, "He was an etymologist, or words to that effect." He was attentive both to sources and to contemporary taxonomies of diction, so that he could fix Bulwer-Lyttonese in a cruelly accurate

WRITERS

parody of one sentence's length (see "The World and the Door"). One sketch, "Sound and Fury," is built entirely upon a stenographer's mistaken understanding and proposed corrections of a novelist's dictation. The easy joke is on Miss Lore (she corrects "rows" to "had risen," for example), but the bigger is on the utter banality of what Mr. Penne dictates— hence the title. Yet the taxonomist does not crowd out the psychologist and metaphysician. O. Henry wrote over and over again about the need for such stock vocabularies of stock emotions. They give definition to the self in trying circumstances, lend shape—although borrowed—to emotions. "The World and the Door" again: Dear me! in such scenes how the talk runs into artificial prose. But it can't be helped. It's the subconscious smell of the footlights' smoke that's in all of us. Stir the depths of your cook's soul sufficiently and she will discourse in Bulwer-Lyttonese. Only taxonomists can pun so. Only metaphysicians, however rudimentary their philosophy, can speculate with any precision on epistemology. O. Henry's speculations along these lines led him to conclude that the imagination, however banally, constantly shapes perception, more often narcotizing it, but always asserting its presence in what we experience. Imagination most often makes itself felt in the words chosen. An old man wanting to give away money proposes charity to a young man browsing in a secondhand bookstall and holding Sartor Resartus in one hand and A Mad Marriage in another ("'What You Want'"). Neither person understands the other, nor would the authors of the two books, but the old man's mistaking comes as much from stereotyping as the young man's does. In an empty boast that captures, in its ironic echoes of Mike Fink and Davy Crockett,

O. HENRY I 403 the essence of American popular scorn for the literary imagination, old Tom Crowley the soap baron declares: "'I come from the West, where we imagine nothing but facts.'" The young object of his proposed charity may be addicted to Clark Russell's sea yarns, but he is on the side of truth and beauty when he refuses to buy that soap. The language of the press concerned O. Henry the most. He understood the function of the press and of the journalese that was written, and his understanding flatters neither except in granting both extraordinary power. In "The Unprofitable Servant," which he left unfinished, he considers the art of journalism in tandem with the art of dancing. The dancer who "shall inherit Broadway" is one in "125,000 living creatures training for the stage." Besides talent, that one successful dancer needs training, drilling in the right moves by a master of them. It is an art the craft of which is highly conventional and difficult. Success comes more from submission to its rules than from original genius. Journalism too is a craft bound by rules. One rule is to be only slightly different from other reporters and newspapers; another rule is to be predictably different. Given some "print-worthy incident," O. Henry claims, four reporters will read differently the shadows on the wall of the cave or process different phenomenal interpretations of the input from the Great Out There. (The examples and diction are not O. Henry's; his are entertainingly journalistic.) In such circumstances a wise man needs only one newspaper. Surely that "is enough for any man to prop against his morning water-bottle to fend off the smiling hatred of his wife's glances." Newsprint exists, then, to erect thought- and ego-conserving and entertaining fictions between reader and reality. The narrator of "The Head-Hunter" had been a "bush-whacker correspondent" covering what a later generation of

military and journalistic dope pushers would call "counter-insurgency action" directed at those natives of the Philippine Islands who were ungrateful for the protecting presence of their new and good friends and brothers from the United States. He resigned because his managing editor had notified him "that an eighthundred-word cablegram describing the grief of a pet carabao over the death of an infant Moro was not considered by the office to be war news." Expecting one genre of fiction, the public would not know what to do with a truth cast in a genre other than the one anticipated. On the other hand it might, or at least a part of that public might; but even O. Henry's disgruntled narrator does what he can to suppress the full power of the truth, leaving as he does the cause of the baby's death politely unspecified. He is not yet, it seems, a headhunter who can deposit "the severed, gory head" of his victim "with pardonable pride in the basket at the side of the door." Nor is his editor, no matter how cosmetically retouched that face in the basket. They are civilized. To differing degrees they cannot countenance expecting their readers to prop a severed head against the morning water bottle. (The masses of the story are so disposed as to show that civilized men will drop civilized pretense when a woman is at stake.) Very rarely the conventions of newspaper stories and journals can be used to cook that rare bird, truth. "The New York Enterprise sent H. B. Galloway as special correspondent to the Russo-Japanese-Portsmouth war." But since the Japanese "were not ready for the readers of the Enterprise to season their breakfast bacon and eggs with the battles of the descendants of the gods," this companion of Richard Harding Davis had to cool his heels. He could have sent home fictions—other correspondents did—but he had not been sent to write "literature instead of news." His was an honest paper, as papers

404 I AMERICAN go. When his story went out, it cleared the censors as innocuous cable talk and scored a scoop. "Galloway's Code," as the story is called, consisted of the following message: "Foregone preconcerted rash witching goes muffled rumor mine dark silent unfortunate richmond existing great hotly brute select mooted parlous beggars ye angel incontrovertible." The youngest reporter—the one most recently initiated into the mysteries, that is, so the one most aware of the silent rules by which they function—cracks the impromptu code. "'It's simply newspaper English,'" he explains. Much of it is still current: foregone conclusion, dark horse, silent majority, existing conditions, hotly contested, brute force, select few. "'Old Calloway gives us the cue word, and we use the word that naturally follows it just as we use 'em in the paper.'" Naturally indeed! Yet sometimes second nature can be made to tell the truth. At other times what it tells is as close to the truth as we can get. And of course, so far as the "truth" about being killed or wounded or surviving a battle is concerned, Galloway's dispatch is as far from it as a map is from the terrain it signifies. But to reason so perhaps puts too fine a point on O. Henry's slight story. Sometimes his tone encourages further probing of this sort; at other times it seems not to. The curious reader might look at the ending of "Galloway's Code" to see how much reflection it encourages, how extensively present the code it uses. So it often is with parodies, whether fullblown or partial. Some are obvious, some are subtle. Some bite, some kiss, some bite in kissing. O. Henry was not alone among Americans in writing parodically at the turn of the century, but his tone, his attitude, are among the most complex. To measure them adequately and to define their special characteristics, it is probably best to range abroad, comparing him with other masters at satisfying the public's taste, yet

WRITERS

mocking it to gratify part of that public or even part of a reader—even, perhaps, moving some to think and feel unconventionally. The examples of Robert Louis Stevenson and the operettas of W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan establish standards for O. Henry's popular art and provide as well a rough calculus for measuring how nearly unique his use of parody is. As the master of adventure clearly and stirringly told and as a literary stylist of grace endowed with a wondrously popular imagination, Stevenson has a great deal in common with O. Henry. Adventure is an encounter with the unknown and, like Stevenson, O. Henry often sends his protagonist up against unknown and unknowable "fate," for want of a better word. Stevenson's tales and romances for children also provide a curiously complicated experience for their adult readers, one akin to parody done with a kiss. They are transparently directed at two audiences, the child consumer of the adventure and the occasional parent or adult performer of the text—who is often the bootleg consumer of the same adventure, yet enjoyer of the child's enjoyment. Like parodies, these texts address different audiences in the same words but with different signals. In company with much of the other popular literature for children, they remind us that literary pieces must often gratify quite diverse tastes within society, even within the reader. But they are not parodies. If the author winks, it is not to question the materials at hand or even to celebrate them. On the other hand, the stories in Stevenson's New Arabian Nights are parodies, and O. Henry seems to refer to them in proposing his own revival of "the late Mr. H. A. Rashid." (Scribners had just brought out an American edition of New Arabian Nights in 1905, the year O. Henry began to locate some of his tales of adventure in "Bagdad-on-the-Subway.") Stevenson's tales are literary curiosities that corrode the literary and

O. HENRY I 405 social conventions they lay bare. The adventurer must place himself at hazard willingly, for example, as O. Henry's does in "The Green Door," which in its protosurrealism resembles Stevenson's parodies. But Prince Florizel of Bohemia, Stevenson's modern Haroun alRashid, binds himself by his honor to accepting the criminal conduct of the Suicide Club, so that when the cards (or their sinister dealer) mark him as the next victim, he feels that as a gentleman he can do nothing to save himself. Because his companion is not so honor-bound, the tale can be concluded "happily" by his intervention. The resolution effected in this way is as hollow as the hazard of suicide by lot is disgusting, and throughout the tales of the New Arabian Nights equally disturbing situations and stratagems denigrate hero and circumstances alike. The princely adventurer, who is first introduced wearing false eyebrows and whiskers (so "to represent a person connected with the Press in reduced circumstances"), is finally reduced by a Bohemian revolution to being "the handsomest tobacconist in London." So much for the hero. In another tale an adventuresome young officer observes servants carrying off what amounts to the stage scenery for his enlistment on the prince's behalf. The whole ethos of adventure is simultaneously being dismantled by Stevenson. It is hard to say whether youthful high spirits or barely controlled hysteria is responsible for Stevenson's wholesale parody, but there is no mistaking his intention to bite. Perhaps he had first to kill contemporary absurdities of plotting and characterization in order to create his own more nearly realistic adventures. Parody thus would have been a necessary condition for achieving the apparently serene awareness of a multiple readership that plays over such works as Kidnapped (1886). O. Henry, on the other hand, never moves beyond parody, incorporating it instead as an

essential element of his art and vision. Adventure erupts into the life of John Hopkins when, after doing inglorious battle with the keeper of the corner cigar store and "the inevitable cop," he is whisked away to do battle for a fair lady in what turns out to be a silly, recurring domestic disagreement. The husband "irresistibly" overpowers the recent champion of the street battle and returns him to his element. The glory of it all lies in the sketch of Hopkins' routine life that encapsulates the brief adventures. "John Hopkins sat, after a compressed dinner, in his glove-fitting straight-front flat." In sentences like this O. Henry represents "The Complete Life of John Hopkins." It, like his conversation, is empty, even of adventure—although his willingness along that line indicates a spark of "romance," as O. Henry calls it, that the modern world has not totally extinguished. The parody of adventure curiously confirms its value. O. Henry bites and kisses. The example of Gilbert and Sullivan likewise demonstrates that parody can confirm value. In The Pirates of Penzance (1879) they kiss the sources that they plunder for their musical material. They further dispose these piracies so brazenly as to call attention to their origins on the operatic stage and in the popular music hall. Ruth's simpleminded "When Frederic was a Little Lad" helps to set up Mabel's later coloratura warblings, just as the Pirate King's utterly empty opening aria with chorus ("'I am a Pirate King'—'He is, he is a pirate king!'") sets off Major General Stanley's patter song, "I am the Very Model of a Modern Major General." Their sources so openly admitted, Gilbert and Sullivan can call attention to how they dispose the masses of these contrasting materials throughout, for few stage pieces are so effectively blocked out as theirs. Like O. Henry they are masters of design, and the secondary, parodically derivative nature of their music and verses serves them in exercising that mastery.

406 I AMERICAN They too are masters of manner, both of phrase and of total composition. O. Henry's stories, because short, are generally simpler in pattern, but his uncharacteristically long "A Municipal Report" declares its unity in this fashion, with especially interesting results in how the stereotype of the former slave is confirmed and then exploded. The Pirates of Penzance is concluded by the most obvious sleight-of-hand, the most conventional of signals that the entertainment is over. The pirates are discovered to be "noblemen who have gone- wrong"; and since "peers will be peers," they can be reformed, like any other boys, simply by uttering mother's name—in this instance, Queen Victoria's. O. Henry's endings also consist of the most conventional of signals, but at their best they set convention against convention in the service of truth. They bite as they kiss. Endings are the most obvious structural element of short stories, the place where the writer's hand makes itself the most strongly felt. Consequently, they are the most useful part of the story for declaring and perceiving the artist's interest in parody. New Arabian Nights and The Pirates of Penzance are disparate but confirming cases in point. If O. Henry's interests lie in that direction, his famous endings should suggest the lay of the literary land. They also should illustrate the uses of parody, for it can indeed lead beyond itself. It can, for instance, fasten us tightly to reality, or it can awaken us to how fully mediated by conventional form all awareness of reality must be. Parody in such instances ceases to be simply the indulgent or satirical mocking of literary or other art forms. It becomes a passkey to the world of forms, and perhaps as well an instrument for registering the pressures exerted upon those forms by the realities of the contiguous but directly unknown realms of natural, social, psychological, and perhaps even spiritual force. O. Henry is famous for the "snappers" that

WRITERS

conclude his brief narratives, but he is by no means unique in using these. Eugene CurrentGarcia provides a convenient summary of the surprise endings available to O. Henry: "the hoax and the practical joke, the anti-conventional or distorted revelation of events, the paradoxical or antithetical disclosure, the manipulation of psychological concepts, the double reversal, the problem close—all of which had been worked with varying success by O. Henry's predecessors and contemporaries." That O. Henry uses all should not be surprising. The question is how he uses them. Sometimes he simply closes definitively. The silly "October and June" is a practical joke of sorts and never can be anything more; the famous "The Gift of the Magi" exploits the double reversal for maximum effect but gives no prospect from which to reconsider the story. To be sure, in the course of telling the latter story O. Henry indicates how aware he is of his role by asking the reader to "Forget the hashed metaphor." The metaphor in question, though, defines the recently shorn Stella's delighted ransacking of the stores for her husband's present. O. Henry merely uses his self-consciousness to validate the pleasure she takes in self-abandonment. At such times convention rules the heart; the self-conscious artist intrudes upon its precincts. O. Henry, consequently, will risk bathos but not irony when he comes to putting an end to his Christmas story. Often, O. Henry's endings set convention against convention. As a result truth will be heard, even if it proves to be banal. That is why the elements of O. Henry's surprises so often cancel or undercut each other. Nor are they simply unresolved paradoxes or antitheses. They point toward a common ground in experience or a synthesis of meaning, but such a "truth" cannot be offered as O. Henry's ending. The reader must derive it from the story by means of the ending. "The Furnished Room" ends by directing attention away from the sui-

O. HENRY I 407 tide's motivation to the larger question of motives, their sources and etiologies. "A Municipal Report" concludes by making murder a socially useful tool, thus so shocking conventional expectations as to bring back into question the social roles and special dictions parodied throughout the story. Perhaps "The Country of Elusion" most clearly shows the artist enlisting his reader in backward revision. For the most part the narrative is a sketch of New York's Bohemia, ostensibly even an essay rather than a tale: "The cunning writer will choose an indefinable subject; for he can then set down his theory of what it is; and next, at length, his conception of what it is not—and lo! his paper is covered." But the narrative that emerges, although rudimentary, seems to develop differently. Bohemian Mary Adrian enjoys her Saturday night of spaghetti, wine, and repartee; but, as the narrator remarks of the Bohemians, "Freedom is the tyrant that holds them in slavery." Consequently, Mary escapes for her Sunday to the home and religion of her parents, where, "out of the clutch of the tyrant, Freedom," she feels her soul fill "with a delicious, almost a fanatic joy." When she returns to the city, she can declare " A I have been away in Bohemia'" because, as O. Henry tells us, that is "nothing more than the little country in which you do not live." Mary's declaration has "spoiled" O. Henry's climax. But not his ending, which coincides with the end put to Sunday night's Bohemian revel by the efficacious slap that Mary administers to Kappelman when he tries to kiss her. Upon this ending is superadded yet another, an "anticlimax" that turns out to be the ending, the judgment by Minnie, another native of Mary's hometown that "'if she had stayed there a week,'" instead of the day she did, Kappelman "'would have got his kiss.'" Initially these shifts are bewildering. The indefinable subject, "Bohemia," is twice defined explicitly. It is both that society in which free-

dom rather than convention enslaves (where the conventions of laissez-faire hold sway, that is) and that unknown place where convention seems not to rule. Between these definitions is a third, Mary's implication that it is the place where one can freely yield to convention because one is otherwise free from it—one is only a temporary resident. Mary's definition and the one O. Henry extrapolates from it differ in one important principle. Mary can visit her Bohemia and enjoy it because she knows its conventions, whereas the person who conceives of Bohemia as free of convention is merely ignorant—no such place exists, it is only the "hillside that you turn your head to peer at from the windows of the Through Express." In slapping Kappelman, Mary violates the conventions of New York's "sham-Bohemia" by applying those of Crocusville, which by her definition ought not to apply. The glow of Kappelman's cheek shows that they do. So too does the general exodus: The Bohemians hear in the slap "the sound of the ax of the fly cop, Conscience," so they vacate the premises before the raid can get under way. The cop may have been born in Crocusville or whatever the name of the town, but he lives on in New York. Habit, another of O. Henry's terms for convention, thus would seem to tyrannize whether it is called freedom or the straight and narrow way. But this is to reason without Minnie's conclusion, O. Henry's anticlimax. Her worldly wisdom, gleaned from a life in Crocusville and a short vacation in New York's Bohemia, concludes that a few days of real suffering at the ancestral homestead would have stilled Mary's conscience. Instead of the easy conclusion that all living is conventional and all conventions essentially the same, Minnie sees that some conventions are to be preferred over others. New York is not simply an urban Crocusville. O. Henry offers this conclusion as one of those from the great vault in which are stored

408 I AMERICAN "the anticlimaxes that should have been tagged to all the stories that have been told in the world." All, that is, lie in their endings; all need their conclusions qualified. Endings are too definite. So too, consequently, would be the suppressed anticlimaxes. To be truthful, stories need both. Yet conventionally they come with only one—even when it is a "surprise." The wise reader, for whom Minnie stands in as O. Henry reads her his manuscript story, must supply the other ending, then reject its imperial claim to being the real truth. The wise reader must both be Minnie and take over from her. "Mammon and the Archer" does not invite so openly the reader's revision, yet it conceals in its ending a fact that brings that ending into doubt. It seems to end in an unambiguous double reversal. At first Aunt Ellen announces her nephew's engagement and attributes his .success to true love rather than to her brother's money: "'Money is dross compared with true love, Anthony.'" Then Anthony pays off the man who organized the traffic jam that gave his son the time he needed to press the engagement. Incorrigible Anthony takes delight in asking if his henchman had seen "6a kind of a fat boy without any clothes on shooting arrows around with a bow.'" Kelly's mystified but negative answer confirms the old man's belief in the power of money, while the exchange between the two ends the story with what seems a conclusive exhibition of that power. Yet part of Kelly's report opens ample room for doubt. "The boys was on time to the fraction of a second.'" The cab, though, would have been nearly a minute early—would have been, that is, except that it had stopped that little time for young Richard to retrieve the dropped ring, the "little emblem of true love" that his aunt had referred to in singing the power of love. Had it not been for that delay, organized by love or chance or fate, the traffic jam organized by Anthony's money would have been several seconds late, and the sentimental cyni-

WRITERS

cism with which the story seems to end would have been openly punctured. As it is, it would seem that both Aunt Ellen and brother Anthony are right, but it is left to the reader to see that the story is about Mammon and the Archer, not—as the apparent reversal in the ending suggests—Mammon over the Archer. O. Henry located this story precisely in the middle of his second volume of stories, The Four Million (1906). Around it and its evenly balanced conclusion he distributed a number of other, somewhat larger, symmetries such as paired stories of similar theme or treatment. The whole is then enclosed within a frame of four stories, a kind of prologue followed by "The Gift of the Magi" to open the collection, and "The Furnished Room" followed by a kind of epilogue to close it. The three famous pieces are thus related to each other almost geometrically in a pattern identical to that of The Scarlet Letter, in which the second, middle, and penultimate chapters provide the "scaffolding" for the whole. O. Henry's prologue, "Tobin's Palm," reunites separated lovers through the fortunate and kindly intercession of a writer; the epilogue, "The Brief Debut of Tildy," is about a plain waitress briefly elevated to the ranks of the interesting because a customer kisses her. After the suicides in "The Furnished Room," though, a happy ending is not in order, and the fellow apologizes for having done "tanked up" what he never would have done sober. The consolation offered to Tildy by her beautiful colleague is, under the circumstances, of little worth to Tildy, though it provides a wry conclusion to the collection as well as to the story: "'He ain't anything of a gentleman or he wouldn't ever of apologized.'" Sometimes writers can be matchmakers, as O. Henry begins the collection by showing us, but too much of such intervention denies reality. On the other hand, to deny that the writer

O. HENRY I 409 may intervene is to close one's eyes to the obvious fact that the writer makes the story, that whatever "reality" it has is derivative or formative, not primary. O. Henry's volume is organized, like his best stories, to keep these realities before us. It is also organized so as to encourage reading between the lines, between the stories, for matter and insight that lie beneath or transcend the stories themselves. O. Henry's first volume of stories is organized in quite different fashion. Cabbages and Kings (1904) begins with "The Proem: By the Carpenter," tuning what follows to the nonsense of Lewis Carroll's "The Walrus and the Carpenter." The setting is not nonsense but the Trujillo, Honduras, that O. Henry had known during his brief exile. On the other hand, the stories are all either operetta stage shows concerning love and revolutionary misfiring or vaudeville dialect acts or elaborated tall tales and other forms still close to oral tradition. In order to sell shoes, for example, a character imports cockleburs into the near paradise of Anchuria, O. Henry's fictional Honduras. Then, to make the tale of "Shoes" taller, in "Ships" the enterprising exporter of the original barrel of cockleburs shows up with two ships full of the no longer necessary seeds, expecting to sell them to the "factory" he imagines must somehow use them. This foolishness has its points: Such petty graft mimics the devastating, larger machinations of the Vesuvius Fruit Company, and the varietyshow aimlessness of the different stories makes taking the whole seriously both difficult and important. In one way O. Henry tries to make a whole out of them: he provides a complicated plot that, in a few stories revised or written for this purpose, lends a sort of coherence to the whole. But despite all the care expended on providing this plot, O. Henry leaves enough rough inconsistencies to torment the careful reader. At the outset we are told that scarcely anybody has ever seen the president, for he is never there, yet

within a few stories it turns out that Coralio, the Trujillo of the took, becomes the "Newport of Anchuria" for five months of every year, with the entire government in residence. What should a reader do with such apparent nonsense? The ending smooths only a few of the prickly spots. It solves several mysteries but not the mystery of the book's form. Of course O. Henry wrote short stories, not novels; and he wove some together into this book that might seem for a while a novel to those who prefer that form of entertainment, but that is likely to disappoint devotees of either form. The book is perhaps a failed experiment, and it is true that it did not bring the fame and royalties O. Henry had hoped for. But the apparent shortcomings of the stories still invite the reader's inventive intervention, while O. Henry's resolution of the mysteries in the plot may hint at other kinds of resolution not so bound to the conventions of storytelling. Eikhenbaum was drawn to the volume because of its "cyclical" structure, its movement toward the narrative form of so many novels. He might better and more consistently have liked it because of its manifest failure to take the forms of its parts and whole seriously—so that, perhaps, the reader must correct that failure and remanipulate them. The plot, for instance, reveals who lies beneath the headstone marking a grave as that of President Miraflores. Needless to say, it is not Miraflores' grave. Throughout Cabbages and Kings choice as well as chance or fate has cast other identities into different roles, so that name and role (the disguises of conmen and revolutionary agitators alike) dissolve as signs of reality. O. Henry's great themes—the arbitrariness of all convention, the nameless forces that he calls fate (imaged in part by the Vesuvius Fruit Company), the consequently artificial character of personal identity—are all roughly suggested by the meandering plot and shifting identities of Cabbages and Kings. These can be analyzed

410 / AMERICAN more subtly and fully by a reader who takes the near nonsense of them as a sign of seriousness. The other volumes are rarely as carefully ordered as these. In 1907, O. Henry brought out The Trimmed Lamp, a collection of city stories mostly from the Sunday World, and Heart of the West, stories written, by and large, before he had signed the contract with the World. The next year he kept the same pattern. The Voice of the City collects more stories from the World, while The Gentle Grafter concerns confidence men working mostly in the South and West, though visiting New York on occasion. All but two of the stories are narrated by Jeff Peters, who "in the line of unillegal graft" is "a reducer of surplusage" rather than a man "to be dreaded by widows and orphans." All but three (the two narrated by others and the final story) were written for this volume, which consequently is the most nearly unified in tone and subject of all O. Henry's books. Perhaps creating a narrator freed his inventive powers; perhaps it was the sophisticated use of folk-narrative situations and material. Although Eikhenbaum liked these stories for their picaresqueness, they leave curiously little opportunity for the reader's creativity to gain a purchase. In 1909, O. Henry published Roads of Destiny and Options, both miscellanies but the latter comprised recent work with one exception. Strictly Business (1910) was the last collection supervised by O. Henry. The businesses are many (yet most often love and marriage), the strictness occasionally lax; but it contains some of the most interesting late stories, the central one of which, "A Ramble in Aphasia" (amnesia, as we now say), is a comic treatment of identity, role, and repression that obliquely reduces conflict in social roles to a proposed reform in the shelving habits of druggists. A few stories in the posthumously published collections make reading the wholes worth-

WRITERS

while. Rolling Stones, for example, contains what O. Henry justly thought the best of his Jeff Peters stories, "The Atavism of John Tom Little Bear." Behind its stereotyping of sex and race roles one can find just the opposite in the self-knowledge of the deracinated American Indian of the title. It is easy to see why O. Henry left it out of The Gentle Grafter, for it is unusually open to the less gentle reader's imagination. Such readers will find much of O. Henry fascinating. But they must meet him more than halfway sometimes, and even so they will not always find him there. Poe, who like O. Henry sought a popular audience, counseled against trying to make the "suggested meaning" of a story anything more obvious than a 'very profound undercurrent, so as never to interfere with its upper one without our own volition, so as never to show itself unless called to the surface." Poe was writing about allegory; O. Henry's "suggested meaning" is something quite other. Yet the two judged the demands of popular taste identically. Most readers do not want to hear the author talking over their heads to other readers—it spoils the effect that they find entertaining. Knowing this O. Henry keeps his suggested meanings well hidden by making their subject the conventions he manages so entertainingly. There are several ways of thinking about works of art that only partly reveal themselves. Hemingway described these creations as icebergs, three-fifths hidden. One can think, less metaphorically, of the larger set of facts and circumstances that must exist in order for the fragmentary form that we call a story to have claims to existence outside itself. Sometimes these circumstances can be told narratively, are even hinted at in the narration of the story. Sometimes they cannot be told, only touched through the mediation of the story. Such are the icebergs that Hemingway tried t(5 create, that

O.HENRY I 411 Sherwood Anderson created, that so much of Romantic and modern literature evokes as its melting and shifting ground. Ernst Theodor Amadeus (E.T.A.) Hoffmann, Poe, Hawthorne, Ivan Turgenev, Chekhov, Anderson, Hemingway—all in different ways call into relation with their stories a reality that cannot be expressed directly. It is frequently called fate, and it often impresses itself as horror or wonder or a mixture of the two. Stories otherwise as different as Turgenev's "Bezhin Lea" and Anderson's "Death in the Woods" have its evocation in common. O. Henry's stories rarely seem to evoke it. The narrative conventions that adorn their surfaces glitter so charmingly as to satisfy more commonplace responses. Their creator is even more careful than Poe not to compromise his role as popular entertainer. His icebergs are shrouded in a mist on which the sunshine plays. Yet mist must come from somewhere, and the skilled navigator will intuit the shape of the melting mass that, underneath, gives rise to the mist. To change the metaphor, O. Henry's is an art of surfaces delightfully played with, surfaces rearranged by their manipulator in performances immediately recognizable as his. Most readers stay seated in the audience, taking it all in as they would a vaudeville show; the best will be pricked by his performance to try their hand at the game. They will apprentice themselves to a man narrowly obsessed by the terror and beauty of man's role as manipulator of surfaces, a wizard of elusion and aphasia rather than of Oz, a man who has looked too closely for comfort at the social lies of convenience that we call civilization. When O. Henry was about to be checked into the hospital to die, he was asked what name should be entered on the records. "Call me Dennis," he is supposed to have said. "My name will be Dennis in the morning." The derivation of "Dennis" from "Dionysius" may be ascertained

from most dictionaries, and O. Henry may indeed have been playing with an especially deeprooted surface. There is another possibility. "My name will be Dennis" seems to have been a slang idiom. When William Sidney Porter was about to be indicted for embezzlement, he is supposed to have remarked to an old friend that if the bank examiner should find his error, "'my name will be Dennis.'" So, apparently, it was. Yet the man lived on, privately as Syd Porter, publicly as O. Henry. He came to know the underworld from the inside and to see the upper world from the underside. It seems likely, then, that he had long before also seen the connection between the casual slang and its mythic rightness. It was ever his method, at his best, to take what is mindlessly uttered or enjoyed and make it significant to the diligent initiate. In one mystery O. Henry was the only initiate—his name. Scholarship may one day sift out the competing explanations, but it is unlikely. It is also unnecessary. For a man so obsessed with the power of social role, convention, and other sources of social conditioning, what better name than a mysterious one, what better sign than one pointing at once to the commonplace and the unknown?

Selected Bibliography WORKS OF O. HENRY Cabbages and Kings. New York: McClure, Phillips, 1904. The Four Million. New York: McClure, Phillips, 1906. The Trimmed Lamp. New York: McClure, Phillips, 1907.

412 I AMERICAN WRITERS Heart of the West. New York: McClure, 1907. The Gentle Grafter. New York: McClure, 1908. The Voice of the City. New York: McClure, 1908. Options. New York: Harper, 1909. Roads of Destiny. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page, 1909. Strictly Business. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page, 1910. Whirligigs. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page, 1910. Sixes and Sevens. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page, 1911. Rolling Stones. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page, 1912. Waifs and Strays. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page, 1917. (In addition to twelve stories, this volume collects critical and appreciative essays, none of which is listed below.) O. Henryana. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page, 1920. Postscripts, edited and with an introduction by Florence Stratton. New York: Harper, 1923. O. Henry Encore, edited and with an introduction by Mary S. Harrell. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1939. The Complete Works of O. Henry. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1953. (Earlier editions, nearly all issued by Doubleday, are numerous. Only those published after 1917 can be considered complete.) Collected Stories ofO. Henry, edited by Paul J. Horowitz. New York: Avenel, 1979.

BIBLIOGRAPHIES Clarkson, Paul S. A Bibliography of William Sydhey Porter (O. Henry). Caldwell, Ida.: Caxion, 1938. Long, E. Hudson. "O. Henry (William Sidney Porter) (1862-1910)." American Literary Realism, 1:93-99 (Fall 1967).

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL STUDIES Abrams, Fred. "The Pseudonym 'O. Heriry': A New Perspective." Studies in Short Fiction, 15:327-29 (Summer 1978).

Arnett, Ethel Stephens. O. Henry from Polecat Creek. Greensboro, N.C.: Piedmont Press, 1962. Brooks, Cleanth, and Robert Penn Warren. Understanding Fiction. New York: Holt, 1943. Clarkson, Paul S. "A Decomposition of Cabbages and Kings." American Literature, 7:195-202 (May 1935). Current-Garcia, Eugene. O. Henry (William Sydney Porter). New York: Twayne, 1965. (Contains selected, annotated bibliography.) Davis, Robert H., and Arthur B. Maurice. The Caliph of Bagdad. New York: D. Appleton, 1931. Firkins, O[liver]. W. "O. Henry." In Modern Essays, edited by Christopher Morley. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1921. Pp. 100-12. Gallegly, Joseph. From Alamo Plaza to Jack Harris's Saloon: O. Henry and the Southwest He Knew. The Hague: Mouton, 1970. Jennings, Al. Through the Shadows with O. Henry. London: Duckworth, 1923. Langford, Gerald. Alias O. Henry: A Biography of William Sidney Porter. New York: Macmillan, 1957. Long, E. Hudson. O. Henry: American Regionalist. Austin, Tex.: Steck Vaughn, 1969. . O. Henry, the Man and His Work. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1949. McLean, Malcolm D. "O. Henry in Honduras." American Literary Realism, 1, no. 3:39-46 (Summer 1968). O'Connor, Richard. O. Henry: The Legendary Life of William S. Porter. New York: Doubleday, 1970. Pattee, Fred Lewis. "O. Henry and the Handbooks." In his The Development of the American Short Story. New York: Harper, 1923. Pp. 357-64. Peck, H. T. "The American Story Teller." Bookman, 31:131-37 (April 1910). Smith, C. Alphonso. Introduction to The Trimmed Lamp. In The Biographical Edition of the Complete Works of O. Henry. Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, Page, 1925. . The O. Henry Biography. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page, 1916. Van Doren, Carl. "O. Henry." Texas Review (later Southwest Review), 2:248-59 (January 1917). Williams, William Wash. The Quiet Lodger of Irving Place. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1936. —KENT BALES

Robinson Jeffers 188^-1962

A

_ND west of the west / I have lived," wrote Robinson Jeffers in the epilogue to his first volume of poems. In an otherwise unremarkable book they are the most significant words, simply because at an early age and at the beginning of his literary career they point directly to where he was to make his lifelong home, body and soul. For "west of the west" was where a few years later, stone by laborious stone, he would start to build his Tor House, with its Hawk's Tower, at Carmel in California on the continent's western coast. And "west of the west" was his spirit's familiar country, as though in the wake of an immense procession winding over several thousand years he was the last frontiersman, the ultimate westerner.

a precise spot, balked by the ocean, on the edge of a concluded plane, at "the very turn of the world," just before the plane reveals itself to be a revolving globe that goes down again to Asia. "Bred west of Caucasus," he seemed to stand west of a west that never quite touched east, as the Western world's final man. Perhaps appropriately, since going west is part of the classical western experience, his childhood was spent not in California but in and around Pittsburgh, where his father, a minister, was professor of Old Testament literature at the Western Theological Seminary, and where he was born on.January 10, 1887. His paternal grandfather had emigrated in 1810 from County Monaghan in Ireland, but on his mother's side he was descended from much earlier American settlers, including the McCords from Scotland; the Robinsons, who had arrived in 1730 from Ulster; and the Tuttles, who had come over as long ago as 1635 and in New Haven acquired land on which Yale University was eventually built. Seventeenth-century New England, Scottish, Northern Irish, his ancestry was deeply, vigorously Protestant; and though Jeffers was to discard Christianity and to find in its elevation of man above the rest of creation a root cause of latter-day disjunction, his mind and sensibility remained in important respects irrevocably Protestant. These ancestors were

I am building a thick stone pillar upon this shore, the very turn of the world, the long migration's End; the sun goes on but we have come up to an end, We have climbed at length to a height, to an end, this end: shall we go down again to Mother Asia? Some of us will go down, some will abide, but we sought More than to return to a mother. At the end of that long migration across space and through time, he seemed to stand at

413

414 I AMERICAN WRITERS outwardly of little interest to him, but some sort of affinity for them he clearly did feel, because on his rare journeys to the British Isles, it was to Scotland and especially to Ulster, lands of his forefathers, that he was drawn, rather than to England's "soft alien twilight / Worn and weak with too much humanity." There was considerable disparity between the ages of Jeffers' parents. His father was nearly fifty at the time of his son's birth, and his mother only twenty-seven. The couple were evidently dissimilar in temperament also, for he was something of a recluse, whereas she was remembered by her daughter-in-law as being "fond of society and very gay." However, the marriage seems to have been by and large a happy one, although clearly the difference in age and personality provided models for those several occasions in Jeffers' narrative poems when lively young women are wedded, shackled, to men either much older than themselves or much more dour. "What right has a wild old man in the useless beauty of a young wife?" asks the poet on behalf of a character in "The Coast-Range Christ," able to recall from his own childhood a woman still in her thirties married to a man past sixty. Nevertheless, of the two it was the impress of the father that was, if not the more profound, at any rate the more visible, upon the mature Jeffers. It was his father's memory that was cherished in poems, his death that was mourned, his ghost that returned in them, and his presence that Jeffers so often silently or audibly invoked. "Father, / Forgive me. I dishonored and wasted all your hopes of me, one by one; yet I loved you well." His father's most enduring gift was the laying of the foundations of a wide, traditional learning, based on an intimate knowledge of the Bible and of literature in Greek, which he began to learn at the age of five. In this cultivated and comfortable, if rather austere, home Jeffers was an only child until the age of seven, when a brother was born.

Having few companions, he passed his time in books, in daydreams, and in watchful observation of the natural world. The habit of solitariness was implanted in him early. Between 1899 and 1902 Jeffers traveled extensively with his family in Europe, attending schools in Leipzig, Lausanne, and Geneva, and adding to his biblical and classical grounding a proficiency in French and German. In 1903 the family made their western exodus to Pasadena, and Jeffers, now sixteen, entered nearby Occidental College. He studied literature, graduated with the B.A. in 1905, and took up further study at the University of Southern California, switching to medicine in 1907, and to forestry at the University of Washington in 1910. The influence of his medical training persists in the physiological imagery and descriptions that permeate his poetry; while his studies of forestry served him daily throughout his life, as he tended the hundreds of trees that he planted around his house. If Jeffers as a student was changeable, there was at least one constant in his life. This was his love for Una Call Kuster, two years his senior and the wife of a Los Angeles lawyer, whom he first met in 1905. Eight years of confusion, emotional storm and struggle, and parental disapproval followed for them until 1913, when Una was divorced, quite unacrimoniously. The couple were married on August 2 of that year. What had been of paramount importance to Jeffers was that their union should receive the blessing of both his parents, which it finally did a few months before their wedding. Jeffers had been publishing poems in magazines since 1903, and in 1912 his first volume, Flagons and Apples, appeared, financed by himself. Writing poetry was evidently his vocation, and literature was Una's passion, so the couple's first intention, like that of such contemporaries as Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, Hilda Doolittle, and T. S. Eliot, was to go and live in England. Jeffers even confided to a friend that

ROBINSON JEFFERS / 415 "probably a good deal of our future life will be spent in England or on the continent." But it was not to be. Una became pregnant; they remained in America; she gave birth in May 1914 to a daughter, who lived only one day. As Europe tumbled toward war, the Jefferses made their way up the coast to Carmel, where amid hills and trees and by the ocean they knew that they had come to their "inevitable place" that the poet was to make "Jeffers country." They were to live here for the rest of their lives, with simple tastes and modest expectations, on the basis of a modicum of inherited money, supplemented later by his literary earnings. In December 1914, Jeffers had to endure the grief of a second death, less poignant, but more deeply disquieting to him, that of his father at the age of seventy-six. Over the next year or so his life was commemorated and his death mourned in a sonnet, "To His Father," in a lengthy elegy, "The Year of Mourning," and by an autobiographical persona in the large dramatic poem, "The Alpine Christ." Jeffers was writing poetry regularly now, descriptive and occasional pieces, odes, and especially narrative poems, which were still conventional in form and meter but which in their often startling content increasingly foreshadowed his later work. His second volume, Californians, was published in 1916, and in November of that year twin sons were born. The next few months were the most critical and emotionally tumultuous of Jeffers' life. In his father, however much he had disagreed with him over mores and metaphysics, he had lost an anchor; and his consequent mental waywardness became the more pronounced as the civilization, in the name of whose highest established values, originally classical and Christian, his father had spoken, barbarized and destroyed itself on the battlefields of Europe. Now in April 1917 the United States entered the war, and Jeffers underwent an intense period of anguish over whether, when, and in what capac-

ity he should commit himself to this Armageddon. The marriage was severely strained, doubtless also by whatever circumstances inspired such luscious and passionate writing as there is in "Fauna" and "Mai Paso Bridge." But this time of trial passed, the marriage survived, and the war ended; and when in 1919 they bought land on Carmel Point, Jeffers began to heal his spirit and regulate his heart by building a permanent home, on "foundations of sea-worn granite," with "my fingers" that "had the art to make stone love stone," a steady activity that occupied him many years. During this time of crisis and resolution Jeffers' poetry, especially its diction and measure, changed character beyond recognition. Around 1917 and 1918 this change took shapes that were obviously experimental, under the pressure of heightened emotion and events; later, with a greater sense of assurance and the effect of an achieved form, it was under the calming, stabilizing influence of stonemasonry. By about 1921, the year of his mother's death, Jeffers had finally discovered the mature voice with which he was to speak, sometimes varying the pitch, but scarcely ever the accent or phrasing, for the remainder of his life. Coincident with this discovery, the Jefferses' lives began to take on an apparently contented, habitual, and virtually unchanging pattern. "I am as attached to this rock," he announced, "as if I were a feudal serf with an iron collar." As the boys grew older, the family did a certain amount of traveling, particularly to Una's beloved Ireland and to New Mexico, home of Mabel Dodge Luhan and Frieda Lawrence. But "to stay at home," Jeffers considered, "is more interesting"; and for the most part he did stay at home. Between 1918 and 1929, for instance, he never once visited San Francisco, little more than a hundred miles away. He spent his days nurturing his plantation; collecting and transporting boulders for the continuous building of his house; walking the hills and shores with Una

416 I AMERICAN and watching the birds and animals; broadly educating his sons; entertaining a few, treasured friends; and, of course, writing poetry. Behind this outwardly tranquil life, the furies were penned in his poetry. "Imagine victims," he wrote, "Lest your own flesh be chosen the agonist ... Burn sacrifices once a year to magic/Horror away from the house." So, about once a year, starting in 1924 with Tamar and Other Poems, he "imagined victims," "burned sacrifices," and published a new volume, generally consisting of one or two agonizing, burning, horror-filled narrative or dramatic poems, supplemented by twenty or so shorter meditative, descriptive, or prophetic poems composed during the same period. These volumes brought Jeffers a wide readership for a poet and a wider reputation, with enthusiasts as ardent as those who celebrated Walt Whitman. The apogee of this fame was probably reached somewhere around the early 1930's. But just as Whitman, though almost sanctified by some, was reviled by others, so also was Jeffers. For traditional moralists and rationalists, eventually for the New Criticism, Yvor Winters led the way most effectively, with a systematic demolition in 1930; while among populists and Marxists, Jeffers gradually damned himself by his historical "defeatism" and lofty impartiality. By the end of the 1930's the careless, utterly inaccurate imputation to him of incipient fascist sympathies was heard more than once. Having been famous, Jeffers became first notorious and then neglected, "a poet without critics." Jeffers, however, was apparently unaffected either by zealous admirers or by scornful adversaries. What did affect him, though, violently disrupting his detached, even tenor of mind, as it had done over twenty years previously, was the United States' entry into another world war, the coming of which he had long predicted. Intensely isolationist, outragedly pacifist, intimat-

WRITERS

ing in one suppressed poem that he was every bit as capable of patriotically motivated treason as Ezra Pound, he railed against American and Allied leadership in a volume of poems, The Double Axe, published after the war, from whose prevailing sentiments his publishers felt bound to dissociate themselves in a prefatory note. Nevertheless, through waxing and waning renown, the character of the Jefferses' daily life scarcely changed. The sons took careers in forestry and accountancy, and presented their parents with a succession of grandchildren. Jeffers and his wife were usually to be found at Carmel, traveling only to the eastern United States on a reading tour in 1941 and to Ireland again in 1948. Then in January 1949 Una fell ill, to linger, declining, until on September 1, 1950, she died. They had been together in their Carmel quietness for thirty-six years. He had loved her devotedly, more dependently than is disclosed in the poetry. Uneasy in company, he had become habituated to sheltering behind her. A forceful, possessive, protective woman, she had been an immeasurable source of strength to him. He worked deep into his sorrow for her in the narrative poem "Hungerfield": September again. The gray grass, the gray sea, The ink-black trees with white-bellied nightherons in them, Brawling on the boughs at dusk, barking like dogs— And the awful loss. It is a year. She has died: and I Have lived for a long year on soft rotten emotions, Vain longing and drunken pity, grief and gray ashes—... His epitaph for her concludes the poem, the words of one who, believing in no personal im-

ROBINSON JEFFERS / 417 mortality, conjures a pantheistic reunion out of barely tolerable agony. Here is the poem, dearest; you will never read it nor hear it. You were more beautiful Than a hawk flying; you were faithful and a lion heart like this rough hero Hungerfield. But the ashes have fallen And the flame has gone up; nothing human remains. You are earth and air; you are in the beauty of the ocean And the great streaming triumphs of sundown; you are alive and well in the tender young grass rejoicing When soft rain falls all night, and little rosy-fleeced clouds float on the dawn. —I shall be with you presently. But it was not to be "presently." He outlived her by more than eleven years, lonely but not alone, since one of his sons and his young family had come to live at Tor House. While taking delight in his grandchildren, he returned to those "quiet and solitary ways" that had long been essential to him. In his last few years, as his bodily strength faded slowly, he wrote only short poems, some of his finest, celebrating the universe, the physical and natural worlds, from atom to galaxy; inveighing against the social world; and musing on suicide, but emphatically rejecting it, as he had always done. He died at home on January 20, 1962, ten days past his seventy-fifth birthday. What a reader must find most noticeable about the young Jeffers is his exceptional precocity at the age of sixteen but his lack of development over the next decade. Like his similarly forward contemporary, Ezra Pound, he began, unsurprisingly, by echoing a variety of late Victorian poets, among them Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who accorded him a "passionate springtime" of appreciative "intoxication"; William Butler Yeats in his Celtic-twilight

period; and the hearty Henry John Newbolt. In "Man's Pride" he rings a note of airy didacticism that probably owed something to Percy Bysshe Shelley: What is man that he should be proud? And what is the race of men That they should think high things? Behold, the deep cries aloud, The high mountains answer again, The swift wind stops and sings.... Sounded there already is his conviction of human insignificance alongside natural grandeur; and elsewhere a later characteristic, imaginative vantage point is prefigured in the youthful romantic's preference for a sublime pulpit, "A Hill-Top View," from which to measure man. In contrast with that of Pound, however, who over the next half dozen years was more than anybody else to alter the shape and scope of poetry in English, Jeffers' writing evolved by scarcely an irregular foot. In 1912, when Pound was articulating the principles of imagism and of modernist poetics in general, Jeffers produced in Flagons and Apples a volume, consisting chiefly of love poems, that abounded in conventional fin-de-siecle sentiments and postures, that was dyed in the bittersweet, lacklove world-weariness of a speaker either "mad and drunken" or "blind and deaf and broken," and awash with alliterative liquids and an imagery of old wine and crimson partings, wailing winds and soulless stars. The poetry is no worse than that in many contemporaneous volumes; it is usually competent, and there are effective moments. But it is wholly, uninterruptedly derivative; and there are no intimations of what is to come. Jeffers' love for Una at this time was substantial enough, but not these literary loves of Flagons and Apples, the Helens, Canidia, Nyssa, Aileen-of-the-Woods, and a "pretty waitress."

418 I AMERICAN When his second book appeared four years later, Jeffers had been living for some time in his "inevitable place" at Carmel. As the title, Californians, suggests, he at least now knew that he was not a compatriot of Rossetti's: all the eleven story-poems have Californian settings, and the "Invocation" is addressed to the lodestar of the westward historical process. The verse forms are still traditional, in particular blank verse and ottava rima, but the lines, being basically pentameter, are longer and weightier than those in Flagons and Apples. He is stretching toward the spaciousness of line and the gravity of pace that are to be the hallmarks of his mature poetry. The influences and affinities are more proper to him, too: chiefly John Milton, William Wordsworth, Shelley, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Edwin Arlington Robinson, an essentially Protestant (or nonconforming) succession. Wordsworth's importance for the young Jeffers stands out precisely by the intensity with which the poet is castigated for his apostasy in becoming "apologist for kings and priest and lies." If Jeffers has not yet found his style here, he has found several of his subjects. True to his romantic and transcendentalist heritage, toward which the names of Wordsworth and Emerson must have directed us, all good in Californians resides in the natural world or in the simpler forms of rural life, and in the isolated, integrated self rather than in the group or mass. Alone amid nature, a descendant of Wordsworth's leech gatherer, Stephen Brown, in the poem of that name, has become "self-stationed, self-upheld as the all-beholding sky," an exemplary figure. Conversely, the city only withers, crushes, corrupts, "rotting" its prisoners away. Lindsay, alone again "At Lindsay's Cabin," has saved himself from that "life / Alien to men though all composed of men, / Unfriendly, menacing, fearfully alive"; whereas "The Old Farmer," retiring in poor health to live with his

WRITERS

son in the city, breaks his homesick heart there and commits suicide. Peter Graham, narrator of "Maldrove," bewailing a "cankered world" in this "dreadfully degenerate age," and dreaming of "lovely and glorious sons, / Successors of these little and verminous ones," is a more extreme creation, drawn from that late nineteenth-century world in which the language of degeneration and regeneration became current. Graham may not speak for Jeffers, but this is the kind of large distaste that was to point him toward his "Inhumanism," the terms of which are already at hand, in the question asked rhetorically in "A Westward Beach": Can man wash off humanity And wed the unmarriageable sea? There are also in these poems specific narrative prefigurations, notably in "The Three Avilas," with its tale of incest and double sibling murder, the tangled stuff of so many stories to come, and in this case also, seemingly, in part a device for exhuming his own earlier guilt about the original character of his relationship with Una. Jeffers writes in this volume not only as a resident of California, but also as, imaginatively, the latest of history's westward travelers. The final coast may have been reached, but the questions remain and tantalize. "What farther west? What wanderings more sublime?" "When Alaska is peopled, will Venus lack ploughland? / I have dreamed that our children may even ascend to the stars." Although he wandered and ascended no further himself, Jeffers was deeply imbued with a frontier mentality, and in some respects his lifework may be seen as a continuous attempt to find new ways, now that no more territory lies ahead, of putting the East, population, society, and history, behind him. Such a cast of mind must assume, in simplified outlines, that only man is ugly and that only nature or land

ROBINSON JEFFERS / 419 sparsely settled is beautiful. Jeffers was always acutely responsive toward the beautiful, and indeed it is expressly the beauty of nature that first enchants him and in which value inheres. Californians concludes with an "Ode on Human Destinies," which itself concludes as an ode to beauty, although in this instance a beauty less natural than ideal: I, driven ahead on undiscovered ways Yet predetermined, do not fail to see, Over the fog and dust of dream and deed, The holy spirit, Beauty, beckoning me. Jeffers did not publish any more poetry in book form for another eight years, but that long period of silent struggle, painful transformation, and eventual poetic self-revelation has been brilliantly reconstituted by Jeffers' lifelong devotee and self-styled disciple, the poet William Everson (Brother Antoninus). As a consequence of Everson's painstaking literary detective work, two books now exist that represent Jeffers at this interim time of most radical change. The Alpine Christ and Other Poems contains poems not collected elsewhere and adjudged by Everson to have been composed mainly in 1916. Brides of the South Wind: Poems 1917-1922 also consists of uncollected poems and fragments but in addition contains poems that were to appear in the 1924 publication of Tamar and Other Poems. "The Alpine Christ," despite its many missing pages and sections, is an immense dramatic poem, indebted in part to Shelley's Prometheus Unbound and in part, Everson is surely right to propose, to Thomas Hardy's The Dynasts. It is composed predominantly in blank verse, with passages of prose and colloquial dialogue, and with choruses reminiscent of measures as different as those of Algernon Charles Swinburne's "Hymn to Man" and Emerson's "Merlin." It is the poem of a man grieving the death of a father and, more to the point here, the

death of a father's religion and culture; and it is the poem of a man horror-stricken to the marrow after long, solemn, if distant,contemplation of the European war. It is no less than a total statement about the spiritual and psychological condition of the Western world after two years of carnage—a statement anguished, though not despairing, of heroically proportioned fatalism. (In 1916, it might be remembered, Mark Twain's determinist tour de force, The Mysterious Stranger, was posthumously published, final word from that post-Christian fatalist literary generation of Ambrose Bierce, Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, and in England of Hardy.) In the world of "The Alpine Christ," God is dead. Only impersonal Fate rules in Eternity. Power presides, not purpose, least of all justice. The sole value that can be given to life is in terms of human love, preached here by the holy simpleton, Manuel; but this love, in its very conception and being, is inseparable from grief and agony. "The Alpine Christ" is the unachieved work of an unformed poet, whose vision is running far ahead of his poetic and dramatic capabilities. But it is also the work of a man of rare seriousness and largeness of imagination, which for all its incompleteness is a valuable relic of the war years. The war continues to cast its shadow over many of the poems gathered by Everson for Brides of the South Wind; for instance, over "The Coast-Range Christ," which Jeffers liked well enough to retain for publication in Tamar. This is a narrative poem in rhyming couplets, whose protagonist, David Carrow, a conscientious objector and visionary Christian idealist, is erotically drawn to a married woman called Peace. He fights down her temptation, but she, scorned, has it rumored about that he has forcibly abused her, so that he is hunted out and killed for a coward and a rapist by his outraged father. Carrow is evidently a mask for Jeffers,

420 / AMERICAN likewise tormented at this time by problems of conscience and desire, both challenging his father's ghost and seeking chastisement from it. The armistice and its immediate aftermath are treated in "God's Peace in November," a sonnet sequence aching with the consciousness of insoluble contradictions, between those celebrating victory and those still suffering, between rich and poor, between God and man, between public and private, and between the terrible knowledge possessed by Europe and the ignorance of California, where "we have not suffered enough / To understand." Finally, in "The Beginning of Decadence," like Pound in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley and The Cantos although less vehemently, Jeffers gives vent to his retrospective fury against jingo poets and battle-hungry churchmen, against massacre-minded war leaders, against profiteers and liars and postwar avengers. But war is not the chief subject of the book. That subject is Jeffers' discovery, simultaneous and intertwined, of psychological integrity and a unique poetic speaking voice. Having experienced at length his own vulnerability, his suffering sensitivity, he was slowly learning, especially while building his house, how to stiffen his backbone and strengthen his breastwork "with ribs of rock round a hot soft heart." And within that lesson he was also learning, belatedly but definitively, how to speak in accents of his own ("To the Stone-Cutters"): Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated Challengers of oblivion.... and, in "Continent's End": At the equinox when the earth was veiled in a late rain, wreathed with wet poppies, waiting spring, The ocean swelled for a storm and beat its

WRITERS boundary, the ground-swell shook the beds of granite.

Here at last are the sounds of authentic Jeffers. The style, which served him for a lifetime, was forged over a period of about three years. Until the age of thirty, in virtually all the poems of Californians, Jeffers had employed regular meter and rhyme. The first release was from rhyme; and it was as a release that Jeffers explicitly felt it. During his turmoil in 1917, when war and sex together shattered his ethical composure, rhyme was one of the shapes of authority that in defiant, exhilarated, nihilistic abandon he pledged himself to cast off ("Mai Paso Bridge"): Therefore I swore to drink wine while I could, Love where I pleased, and feed my eyes With Santa Lucien sea-beauty, and moreover To shear the rhyme-tassels from verse. He went back to being a constant husband and to drinking wine in moderation; but apart from its intermittent, reassuring usage over the next year or so and its later appearance in occasional loose-limbed sonnets, rhyme had disappeared for good from his verse. The device of alliteration, however, was retained permanently, to be employed with decreasing conspicuousness and increasing subtlety. When used to excess or harnessed for a few strides to an anapestic canter, it is obvious that Swinburne has been the tutor; but often it has a regulating function in the manner of Old English poetry, which Jeffers admired. These lines from "The Beginning and the End" will show the persistent role and the various musical parts that alliteration (and indeed assonance) play in his verse: Meanwhile they had invented Chlorophyll and ate sunlight, cradled in peace

ROBINSON JEFFERS / 421 On the warm waves, but certain assassins among them Discovered that it was easier to eat flesh Than feed on lean air and sunlight: thence the animals, Greedy mouths and guts, life robbing life, Grew from the plants Shearing the rhyme from his poetry, and also the unrhymed pentameter on the grounds that blank verse had been exhausted by earlier masters, Jeflfers arrived by another route at the open ground that Pound and William Carlos Williams had cleared for themselves a few years earlier. As his characteristic poetry emerged, it was often taken to be either a free verse broadly in the tradition of Whitman's Leaves of Grass or a prose-poetry deriving from the Authorized Version of the Bible. Certainly, Jeffers owed much to both books. With Whitman he felt what has been called "a profound fellowship," despite their obvious great differences, some of which at least can be explained in terms of the two generations of fearful history that separated them. However, as far as form is concerned, what the poets share does not go much beyond the sheer, capacious length and adaptability of line; although this is enough to align Jeffers more closely with Whitman than with any other American antecedent. In the case of the Bible, as the son of his father, Jeffers could not help but be saturated in the Holy Book, so that every so often one may hear an echo of the verbal texture of the Song of Solomon or a rhetorical reminiscence of Ecclesiastes or the Book of Job. But as with Leaves of Grass, one staple element of Jeffers' verse is missing from the poetry of the translated Bible. And that is, for all Jeffers' absolute break with the world of rhyme and traditional

meter, a notion of rhythmic regularity, of predictability, of prior aural design. As Jeffers confessed in 1930 to Arthur Klein, a student of his work: "People talked about my 'free verse' and I never protested, but now I am quite touched to hear that someone has at last discovered the metrical intention in it." He goes on in the same letter to mention Coleridge's regularity of accent rather than syllable in "Christabel," Old English accentual verse, and, briefly, quantity. In principle therefore (if only in principle), or in gesture or intention, Jeffers' verse is governed by a rhythmic norm, which consists of a regular number of accents to the line or pair of lines, a stress prosody that is derived from such examples as those just cited. Within the lines the weight is also distributed according to quantity, as in the classical poetry familiar to Jeffers from childhood and, in the case of Greek, translated by him throughout his life, and as in some of the experiments of Swinburne, a more celebrated and flamboyant classical scholar, so many aspects of whose poetry (alliteration, phrasing, prosody) were incorporated more or less audibly into Jeffers' mature style. However, the primary influences on Jeffers' poetry are not literary but natural. Living within the sound of the ocean and within sight of the mountains, planting his long-lived trees, handling, transporting, and positioning his granite boulders, Jeffers in his few remarks about poetry and poetics always refers to the qualities of the natural world—to "tidal regularity" or "tidal recurrence," to "perpetual renewal"—and, for the subject matter, to the "essential element" of "permanence." What he was after was a natural condition, neither freedom nor strict rule, but the broadly timed recurrences and variable regularity of nature. If William Carlos Williams, seeking a freedom from the old that would nevertheless

422 I AMERICAN

WRITERS

be a "new order" to satisfy an inner need, discovered for himself the regularity of the variable foot, perhaps one may say that Jeffers for similar reasons discovered for himself the regularity of the variable line. His fullest statement is this:

They say that it swarms with rattlesnakes— right—the stored lightnings In the stone cloud. Guard it well, vipers. That Norman rockhead Mont St. Michel may have been as beautiful as this one Once, long ago, before it was built on.

I want it rhythmic and not rhymed, moulded more closely to the subject than older English poetry is, but as formed as alcaics if that were possible too. The event is of course a compromise but I like to avoid arbitrary form and capricious lack or disruption of form. My feeling is for the number of beats to the line. There is a quantitative element too in which the unstressed syllables have part. The rhythm comes from many sources—physics, biology, beat of blood, the tidal environments of life, desire for singing emphasis that prose does not have.

This natural, elemental rhythm was a fit vessel to carry the burden of his poetry—or its message, let us unabashedly call it—since he indeed was a man with a message, a preacher's lesson, even if he purported not to be much concerned whether anyone listened to it. The main clause of this message was that man had drastically abused, distorted, or wholly emptied out his relationship with nature, that he had lost touch with the primary elements of life, and that he had extravagantly overvalued the importance of his place in the cosmos and the natural order of things, all with catastrophic consequences for himself: that this was a universal human condition but especially was it true of the Western world, that is to say, the entire Judeo-Christian pale, and even more particularly was it true, perhaps with the character of a terminal disease, of modern, industrial, secular, or materialistic society. In some shape or other this was either the meditative focus or narrative spring of nearly all that he wrote over his forty years of mature life as a poet, in some fifteen narrative poems set around Carmel, in a half dozen dramatic poems based upon Greek, biblical, or Germanic legend, and in about two hundred and fifty shorter poems. Jeffers' first premise is not an intellectual proposition but a sensory commonplace: that the universe is beautiful, beautiful because it is beautiful, beautiful to behold as a spectacle, the eyes raised to the stars, beautiful to contemplate in its composition, the mind dwelling upon the cell and the atom. There can be few poets, and certainly there are no other modern poets,

"Morro Bay," from a late volume, Hungerfield and Other Poems, is chosen almost at random for its shortness, so that it may be printed in full to demonstrate in its typicality the simple aural constituents of Jeffers' poetry. These are alliteration, constant but irregular; and a stress pattern, regular but not fixed, here over five pairs of lines, the first line of the pair (of five or six stresses) being visually longer than the second (of basically four stresses), but since it contains many syllables of short quantity, lighter and swifter. Beautiful years when she was by me and we visited Every rock and creek of the coast— She gave life from her eyes. Now the bay is brown-stagnant With rotting weed, and the stranded fishboats Reek in the sun; but still the great rock hangs like a thundercloud Over the stale mist and still sea.

ROBINSON JEFFERS / 423 who employ the words "beauty" and "beautiful" as often as Jeffers does; and he does so without embarrassment, apology, or fanciful elaboration. He does not ask us to ponder the nature of the beautiful but merely seeks to remind us, since we are continuously forgetful, that it is always there, beside, before, and around us. Beauty may appear in many forms; in earlier years, during aviation's romantic youth, to this high priest of antimechanism it could come even in mechanical guise. In poems from his 1925 volume, it is in "the navy's new-bought Zeppelin going by in the twilight, / Far out seaward;" or in the "bitter earnestness" of the deep-sea fishermen returning to harbor, the engines of their boats throbbing through the fog, "following the cliff for guidance" as they go about "their business among the equally / Earnest elements of nature." Beauty may be "intense and terrible" with "great seas jagging the west and on the granite / Blanching" in "Gale in April"; or it may be come upon, not in energetic, elemental drama, but in quiet meditation upon "the beauty of things," the "one beauty," the rhythm of the wheel "of life as of death and of light as of darkness." Half a lifetime later, having come through the worst of his grief over Una's death, he knows once again that "to feel / Greatly, and understand greatly, and express greatly, the natural / Beauty, is the sole business of poetry," for "it is only a little planet / But how beautiful it is." It is altogether appropriate, therefore, that the last words of his last volume invite us to expect and enjoy, while watching the activities of the natural world, "not mercy, not mind, not goodness, but the beauty of God." God, the final word in Jeffers' works. For Jeffers, God may be either immanent or transcendent, to be perceived within the world, or to be sought within the self. The immanent predom-

inates: the universe is all-beautiful, a radiant manifestation of God, who is all, the all that is God. The eyes should merely have to see to believe, the lungs should merely have to breathe to inhale God's spirit. In "The Answer" we are told, simply, that "Integrity is wholeness, the greatest beauty is / Organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty of the Universe." In the long poem "The Inhumanist," the old man, who is the figure in Jeffers' poetry most nearly approaching a guru or fount of wisdom, rejoices in "the stars, the winds and the people: one energy, / One existence, one music, one organism, one life, one God." The American transcendentalist heritage is clearly visible here: the links with Emerson, whom he had read so thoroughly as a young man and who was also introduced to the perfect whole by his sense of beauty; and with Whitman, who heard and beheld God in every object and saw something of him each hour of the twenty-four. It is often a virtual pantheism, with God not only "the whole splendor of things and the sacred stars, but also the cruelty and greed, the treacheries / And vileness, insanities and filth and anguish." Above all, God and his beauty, the beauty that is God, are experienced in natural and elemental power, whether in the stallion, the hawk, and the eagle, or in the vast eons-long beating of the universal heart and in cosmic "faceless violence, the root of all things." That is Jeffers, the visionary pantheist, looking out on the physical world that had always seemed to him, he told a correspondent, "immeasurably more real" than the soul. But he could own to another, more inward conception of God, one closer to that of his Protestant forebears, a transcendent or at least an exclusive God, to be awaited in the patient, mystic air of the "soul's desert" at those times when, outside,

424 I AMERICAN WRITERS the dust storms of human fury, most likely of war, obscured the "astonishing beauty of things." But however meditative and mystically inclined, Jeffers did not travel in spirit across the Pacific to the faiths of the Orient, like so many fellow-Californian poets, especially of the succeeding generation. He might express a considerable regard for Buddhism and Oriental religions, for their quietism and cyclical view of existence, and he might scorn the "anthropoid God" of "decaying Christianity." But he was always at the farthest point of the West rather than at the beginnings of the East. Differing from an Asian contemplative in his poem "Credo," he finds "in my blood / Bred west of Caucasus a harder mysticism." The "harder mysticism" is a philosophical materialism that attributes a prior reality to matter before mind, to the world before the soul, to the light in "the beauty of things, not men." This materialism within an essentially religious temperament is testimony, first, simply to Jeffers' exceptional, respectful sensitivity toward the objective, tactile, physical world, his poetic comprehension of the thingness of things; and second, to the effect upon him at an impressionable age of nineteenth-century positivist modes of thought. The American literary generation immediately senior to him, whether influenced directly by science (for instance by Charles Darwin and his popularizers) or by literary-theoretical mediators like Emile Zola, must have seemed predominantly atheist and materialist, or at least cynically common sensical: the aging Mark Twain, Stephen Crane (another minister's son), Frank Norris, Ambrose Bierce and Jack London (local lights in California), and Edgar Lee Masters (who became a personal friend). In such an intellectual atmosphere, as he rebelled against his father's faith and undertook medical studies that required a scientific atti-

tude and curiosity, the foundations of a lifelong materialism were laid, never to be thoroughly broken up and demolished. Thus, although Jeffers may rightly if, loosely, be described as a quietist, and then again as a pantheist, he must also be recognized as a firm materialist, convinced alike of the primacy of matter and of personal mortality—a "hard, mystical" materialist, to use his own terms of self-description. Jeffers' is a poetic materialism that for closest analogy sends us back as far as two thousand years to one of the few figures he openly acknowledges in his poetry and to whom he pays tribute: the Roman poet Lucretius, author of the great expository poem, the epic of a joyous materialism, De rerum natura. Jeffers adapted Lucretius' title for his celebration of the earth and the galaxy, "De Rerum Virtute"; he gave Lucretius and Plato the heroic parts in one of his poems on historical decline, "Prescription of Painful Ends"; he deferred to Lucretius in his own powerful poem on natural origins and destiny, "The Beginning and the End"; and in general he seemed to watch and muse upon the world's aimless frenzy from a similarly cool, elevated position, "the little stone-girdled platform" of his Hawk's Tower, Lucretius' "quiet citadel, stoutly fortified by the teaching of the wise." Apart from the few English and American poets previously mentioned, the only other figure who ever came near to being as influential upon him was Friedrich Nietzsche, whose hostility to Christianity was another spur to his rebellion in those early years and whose dictum, "The poets lie too much," he was fond of repeating. It was this sense of the marvelous "divinity" of the physical universe that Jeffers felt to be so drastically missing from the mind of modern, Western man. The basis for any sort of sanity, any sort of integrity, must be reverence for the cosmos, in which man is such a tiny item, when viewed from amid the salutary dimensions of

ROBINSON JEFFERS / 425 Carmel Point, against the background of ocean and redwood forest, beside the time spans of mountains and planets. (A tiny item, maybe, but part of that divine whole, so that, of course, "even / The poor doll humanity has a place under heaven.") Thus, the best life that can be lived by man is one that leaves as much space as possible for silent wonder at natural processes and their invisibly slow evolution, for quiet amazement at the immense splendor and all the diminutive miracles. It should be a life lived in a simple relation to nature, such as can be found most readily in the pastoral stage of human development and in the less technologically advanced forms of cultivation. It can perhaps be discerned in an earlier American ideal, in Michel de Crevecoeur's American farmer, surviving in California in a few inaccessible valleys at the end of unpaved roads. "The Coast-Road" presents a picture of such life and what threatens it in the 1930's: I too Believe that the life of men who ride horses, herders of cattle on the mountain pasture, plowers of remote Rock-narrowed farms in poverty and freedom, is a good life. At the far end of those loops of road Is what will come and destroy it, a rich and vulgar and bewildered civilization dying at the core....

And the picture, repainted for his last volume, is virtually unaltered: What's the best life for a man? To ride in the wind. To ride horses and herd cattle In solitary places above the ocean on the beautiful mountain, and come home hungry in the evening And eat and sleep.... I will have shepherds for my philosophers,

Tall dreary men lying on the hills all night Watching the stars, let their dogs watch the sheep. But these are disappearing ways of life, or nostalgic myths and timeless idylls, as Jeffers knew only too well. The dominant theme in human history, certainly in Western history, has been quite different. It has been a history not of man's accommodation with nature, but of his separation from it, subjection of the earth, exploitation of its gifts, and self-appointment as lord of creation. In his lifelong treatment of man's relationship with nature, Jeffers writes both within and against the Judeo-Christian heritage. He can be said to be within it insofar as he subscribes to an idiosyncratic, naturalistic version of the doctrine of original sin and of the fall, and insofar as his work continuously illustrates the consequences of that sin and the manifestations of the fall in so many facets of human behavior. He is against it, radically, insofar as he would regard that heritage, and even more so its secular succession of whatever political emphasis, as being from its very beginnings a direct expression of that original sin, in its initial presupposition of man's privileged or central place in the universe. The sin, to put it in the most broadly traditional terms, is the sin of pride, man's arrogant promotion of himself above the level accorded him by God. And if God is identified with the cosmos, then the original sin occurred at that mythic moment when man first felt himself to be singled out as distinct from the rest of creation and superior to it, with the earth a stage for the drama of his energies and the heavens an auditorium concentrated on a God, formed in man's own image, whose attention is fixed upon the inner and outer life of his own proudest creation. For Jeffers, then, the loss of paradise coin-

426 I AMERICAN WRITERS cided with the development of an isolating selfconsciousness. (In "Margrave" he even plays with the fancy of the far, speeding stars of an expanding universe "fleeing the contagion / Of consciousness that infects this corner of space.") In terms of biological evolution, this moment, he intimates in "Original Sin," must be as original as the appearance of the species Homo sapiens. In consequence, the human race's few heroes include those whose scientific discoveries have had the effect of eroding man's self-importance and returning him toward his rightful place in the scheme of things. Thus, the old man of "The Inhumanist" wonders to whom he should dedicate the cairn of stones he has erected: "To whom this monument: Jesus or Caesar or Mother Eve? No," he said, "to Copernicus: Nicky Kupernick: who first pushed man Out of his insane self-importance and the world's navel, and taught him his place." "And the next one to Darwin." Because of this "insane self-importance" and the breaking of the umbilical connection with nature, "life's norm is lost" and "monsters possess the world," toying with atomic power. Twenty years before the invention of nuclear weapons, in a poem entitled simply and comprehensively "Science," Jeffers already envisages the potentiality of total destruction, as nature is reassembled into ever more terrifying new energies: Man, introverted man, having crossed In passage and but a little with the nature of things this latter century Has begot giants; but being taken up Like a maniac with self-love and inward conflicts cannot manage his hybrids. Being used to deal with edgeless dreams,

Now he's bred knives on nature turns them also inward: they have thirsty points though. His mind forebodes his own destruction; . . . And Aphrodite concludes in the dramatic poem "The Cretan Woman," composed in the early 1950's against a background of nuclear bomb testing, the Korean War, and accelerating domestic prosperity: In future days men will become so powerful That they seem to control the heavens and the earth, They seem to understand the stars and all science— Let them beware. Something is lurking hidden. There is always a knife in the flowers. There is always a lion just beyond the firelight. But of course the threat of doom appears in the shape not only of physical destruction but also of the spiritual reduction that follows upon the heedless abuse of nature by a too clever, too prolific race. So, decades before the word "ecology" ventured far from the textbooks and before lip service to conservationist sentiments became conventional piety, Jeffers in "The Broken Balance" was Mourning the broken balance, the hopeless prostration of the earth Under men's hands and their minds, The beautiful places killed like rabbits to make a city, The spreading fungus, the slime-threads And spores; my own coast's obscene future.... Jeffers saw megalomania and introversion as the major, pervasive psychological expressions

ROBINSON JEFFERS / 427 of this "broken balance," the species dangerously self-aggrandized and hopelessly self-centered. As he explained to James Rorty in connection with one of his narrative poems: There is no health for the individual whose attention is taken up with his own mind and processes; equally there is no health for the society that is always introverted on its own members, as ours becomes more and more.... All past cultures have died of introversion at last, and so will this one, but the individual can be free of the net, in his mind.... So the narratives and dramas, with their sexual heat, scorching jealousies, incestuous couplings, family murders and massacres, homestead holocausts, and crazed, towering 'ambitions, enact for us time and again individual catastrophes that are microcosms of the conclusive disaster overhanging our whole megalomaniac, introverted civilization. Nearly all these poems are flawed in some quite conspicuous respect; frequently they spill into melodrama, macabre or ludicrous, and into monstrous horror shows; and one or two are undoubtedly failures as vital poetry, coherent psychology, or credible stories. It is certairr that Jeffers' finest art is to be found either in his short poems or in sections of these longer poems that are in effect detachable, self-contained lyrics. Nevertheless, like few other modern writings, for powerful, extended stretches the best of these poems have something of the gravity, the awesomeness, and the grandeur of ancient tragedy. They are charged with Jeffers' dreadfilled, brooding knowledge of the seriousness of his imagination's task ("Imagination, the traitor of the mind, has taken my solitude and slain it."); and they are freighted with his sense of enormity in the breaking of taboo, in the bursting of conventional limits, in the upturning of nature, and in the excavation of the psyche's

depths. As he wrote in "Apology for Bad Dreams": It is not good to forget over what gulfs the spirit Of the beauty of humanity, the petal of a lost flower blown seaward by the night-wind, floats to its quietness. There is in Jeffers a primordial quality, at the very least an exceedingly old-fashioned quality, that touched him on several occasions with the original imagination of tragedy. "Tamar," the first of these narratives, was written in 1922 and derived from the story in the second Book of Samuel, where one of King David's sons, Amnon, rapes his sister, Tamar, and is later killed on the orders of his brother, Absalom. In this poem, as in several others, Jeffers makes incest central to his story, in part because within the world of the family it is the most intense, shocking form of the conflict between natural energy and customary morality, but, especially and programmatically, in his own explanation, because it is the appropriate symbol for the introverted character of the whole race. However, in contrast with the biblical Tamar, a passive victim distracted with shame, Tamar Cauldwell is the forceful, flamboyant, driving spirit behind the action of Jeffers' poem. She lives in the isolated family home, overlooking the ocean, with her widowed father, David, a Bible-reading farmer, her brother, Lee, her mother's sister, Stella, and another aunt, the idiot Jinny. The setting is specific and realistic (California at the time of World War I), but the story has an essentially mythic quality, with Tamar often as much elemental as human, a personified natural force upturning conventional morality, as when she seduces her brother in the cold mountain pool: Was it the wild rock coast Of her breeding, and the reckless wind

428 I AMERICAN WRITERS In the beaten trees and the gaunt booming crashes Of breakers under the rocks, or rather the amplitude And wing-subduing immense earthending water That moves all the west taught her this freedom? Tamar and Lee become lovers, until she finds herself with child by him. To cover herself, she takes another lover, Will Andrews, with a distaste that she did not feel for her brother, for now "the house is broken / And any thief can enter it." But this incest is not the family's first. From her Aunt Stella, who sees visions and hears voices, she discovers that the same license had been taken more than forty years previously by her father and his long-dead sister, Helen. The House of Cauldwell is rotten to the core from the root. In this putrid atmosphere, Tamar's desire turns to loathing, of men, of life, and of the source of life, with "all the world growing hateful, both her lovers / Hateful, but the intolerably masculine sun hatefullest of all." She dreams of the oblivion of the present human race and the beginning of a new race out of the union of her father and herself; and, to atone for the sins of her ancestors who had slaughtered the Indians or driven them from their lands, she is symbolically enjoyed in an orgy by the ghosts of a vanished tribe. She comes to wield over the hopelessly corrupted house ever greater destructive power, taunting her father, racked by his lustful body and Christian guilt, and the two young rivals for her bewildering affections. At length she maneuvers all the men into her bedroom and drives Lee and Will into a violent, maddened fight in which Will is stabbed to death. Aunt Jinny, unconscious agent of purification, sets fire to the house; and with Tamar in nihilistic delight

clinging to Lee against his escape and with the father calling upon the pity of Christ, the house collapses to its infernal doom, consuming all the inhabitants. A people turned inward upon itself has suffered an ultimate punishment for its selfabsorption. The human blot has been erased; the things of nature reassert their permanence. Grass grows where the flame flowered; A hollowed lawn strewn with a few black stones And the brick of broken chimneys; all about there The old trees, some of them scarred with fire, endure the sea wind. "Tamar" is an impressive and memorable poem, but a puzzling one, because of the author's ambivalent feelings about Tamar herself, who is simultaneously an emblem of exhilarating freedom and a vehicle of the utmost impurity. Jeffers himself recognized this confusion of purpose, when in retrospect he admitted to the poem's "tendency to romanticize unmoral freedom." "Roan Stallion," composed about three years later, is a more compact poem and possessed of a greater symbolic clarity. Again the central and exciting figure is a woman, of Scottish, Spanish, and Indian ancestry, whose name, California, immediately designates her as the quintessence of the West, "erect and strong as a new tower." The mother of an infant daughter, Christine, she is married to Johnny, a farmer of sorts but chiefly a drunken gambler, "burnt-out . . . twisted ... shriveled with bad living." He represents contemporary humanity at its most diminished and degraded, slothful, greedy, physically debauched, spiritually null. In contrast, California is characterized by her love and care for her child, by her sense of obligation, by her pertinacity and quiet courage, and by her religious imagination and faith.

ROBINSON JEFFERS / 429 Johnny and the humanity he typifies having nothing to offer her, she begins to look away from the human for a God "not in man's shape" to awaken and stretch her ready spirit. Humanity is the start of the race; I say Humanity is the mould to break away from, the crust to break through, the coal to break into fire, The atom to be split. The nonhuman shape in which this deity appears to her is that of Johnny's magnificent stallion, the embodiment of everything of which its master is a negation—beauty, power, nobility, cleanliness, aspiration. One night under a brilliant moon California steals out of the house and down to the corral, leaps onto the horse, and in a simulacrum of resplendent sexual union rides this "savage and exultant strength of the world" to the mountain top. Dismounting "here on the calvary" with "nothing conscious / But the possible God and the cropped grass," she prostrates herself before this natural divinity. After such communion, there can be no going back to suffering Johnny's abject humanity. The following night when, lurching and stumbling, he pursues her out of the house with his dog, she lures him into the corral, where the dog frets and snaps at the mighty stallion. Slipping out of the corral, she runs back to the house, fetches a rifle, shoots the dog, and watches from a distance in the moonlight, curious and detached, as the horse tramples Johnny to death. "Then California moved by some obscure human fidelity / Lifted the rifle." She shoots the stallion and "turned then on her little daughter the mask of a woman / Who has killed God." There will be no more degradation; there will be the dignity of loving and raising her child amid natural surroundings; but there

will be no more exaltation. At the last California has chosen humanity. The God, beautiful, powerful, elemental, but amoral and unhuman, she has killed. The announcement of a truth that is free of any human relation is also the end of "The Tower Beyond Tragedy," which was published in the same volume as "Roan Stallion." This dramatic poem is Jeffers' version of the Oresteia and the Electra plays. In character it owes most to Aeschylus, and the events of the story loosely follow those of the Agamemnon and the Choephori. However, Jeffers' final purpose is to release Orestes from history and human concerns rather than, as in the Eumenides, to have him return to Argos and participation in its affairs, after judgment and the lifting of the curse. For Jeffers' Orestes, history is hopeless, and the curse is to be human. His Cassandra foresees a cyclical future of ever swifter rises to ever wider power and ever greater catastrophe. She curses in succession Athens, Rome, Spain, France, and England, yet there is still A mightier to be cursed and a higher for malediction When America has eaten Europe and takes tribute of Asia, when the ends of the world grow aware of each other And are dogs in one kennel, they will tear The master of the hunt with the mouths of the pack: new fallings, new risings, O winged one No end of the fallings and risings? That future, perpetually gestating another Trojan war, another Vietnam, is what Orestes, in ancient Greece, in modern California, would cast off. And his sister's offer of her body to him, to entice him to reenter history, take up power, and rule in his father's place, is again, as in "Tamar," a small, single instance of the total

430 I AMERICAN WRITERS racial inversion. It is all a huge imbroglio in which Orestes sees men writhe like a full draught of fishes, all matted In the one mesh; when they look backward they see only a man standing at the beginning, Or forward, a man at the end; or if upward, men in the shining bitter sky striding and feasting, Whom you call Gods.... It is all turned inward, all your desires incestuous, the woman the serpent, the man the rose-red cavern, Both human, worship forever.... Bearing a message of salvation by detachment from the world, he takes to anonymity and the high, wild country, as one "Who had climbed the tower beyond time, consciously, and cast humanity, entered the earlier fountain." Jeflfers' next narrative poem, The Women at Point Sur, published in 1927, was his longest and the only one to occupy a volume by itself. Like Tamar Cauldwell, the poem's protagonist, the Reverend Dr. Barclay, is a demonic hero, source of chaos and destruction at the same time that he is often the voice of sentiments that Jeffers elsewhere approves. However, Jeffers claimed shortly after the poem's publication that this was exactly his cautionary intention, to point out the dangers of the idea of "breaking out of humanity" being "misinterpreted in the mind of a fool or a lunatic." So Barclay's inhumanism does not release him from the burden of human involvement and turn him outward toward nature and God, but throws him inward on destructive sexuality, nihilism, selfdeification, and the totalitarian domination of others. He is Jeffers' most Faustian creation, which is also to say most Ahab-like in his attempted refusal of human limits and pride in having "voyaged outside the maps, these waters

not charted," to "break through to" the "power behind the appearances." His exuberant self-reliance must furthermore be ironically reminiscent of Emerson: "Nothing you can do is wicked. I have seen God. He is there in the hill, he is here in your body." The preacher is very much a casualty of the war, in which he has lost in turn his son, his Christian faith, and his moral compass. Abandoning his church and his congregation ("I have nothing for you"), he wanders down the coast in search of more complete and pliant disciples, and finds lodging at a farmhouse. Here he begins to strip from himself the layers qf traditional, Christian restraint, in the main by ever more extravagant sexual acts. First, he buys sex from the farm's Indian servant girl; then he encourages a lesbian relationship between two of the other girls there; and finally he rapes his daughter, April, who has come looking for him. Gradually, this fiery revivalist is transformed into a diabolic messiah, exerting a lethal influence upon those he has gathered around him, in a manner that must bring to mind certain other horrifying evil geniuses of more recent years, also emanating, significantly, from California. One of his entourage murders her infant daughter to save her the pain of life and to atone for the "crime" of conceiving her; Barclay's daughter, "without brakes, without rudder" since her father's rape of her, kills herself in front of him to feel at the last "one thing done wisely / In the vast insanity of things." Ever more nihilistic ("I preserve nothing") and ever more megalomaniac ("believing himself God"), delirious with Salvationist mission ("I'll save the beasts, too"), the crazed minister makes his way alone into the hills, where at the entrance 10 a deserted mine he collapses, dying but still self-exalting ("I am inexhaustible"), bequeathing a legacy of madness and despair. Although The Women at Point Sur is not en-

ROBINSON JEFFERS / 431 tirely successful as a narrative, it does present a disturbing, compelling study of revivalist excess and mesmeric, apocalyptic leadership, lunatic or evil forms that have cast such shadows over the forefront or corners of later history. "Cawdor," published the following year, has less overt didactic purpose than the previous long poems. It is a tale of sexual rejection and revenge, of accidental killing and fearful selfpunishment, set in California in 1909. The title, of course, sends us to Macbeth, but for little more common property than blood and atmospherics; it may also bring to our notice how often Jeffers' main characters have names with Scottish associations (Cauldwell, Barclay, Cawdor, and later Thurso, Fraser, Bothwell, and Ferguson), presumably to suggest from the first instant an ambience of repressed, explosive, puritanical passion. In "Cawdor," Martial, an old farmer, just now blinded in a fire from a bursting oil drum, is led down the valley by his daughter, Fera, to Cawdor's farm, where he stays for the brief remainder of his ill-fortuned, maimed life. Cawdor, a brooding widower with three grown children, takes pride in the hard, tough life he has led and in the violent, populist hatred he feels for "the fooled and rotten faces of rich and successful men. / And the sons they have." After Martial's death, he marries Fera, who is as wild-natured as her name, a being from an earlier time easily at home in a bloody, freshly flayed puma skin. She falls for Cawdor's elder son, Hood, and having been resisted by him, tells Cawdor that he has raped her. Cawdor pursues his son up the mountain, where after a brief struggle Hood falls to his death over a precipice. There remains for Fera first to attempt suicide and then, after teasing her husband with further lies and fantasies, to reveal the truth to him of his son's innocence. Tempted to strangle her but then turning upon himselfr

Cawdor, his horror and remorse overflowing, gouges out his own eyes, those offending eyes that had first desired Fera—a modern Oedipus on a farm in California. Those are the principal events of the story; but there is yet to be mentioned the finest passage in the poem, several pages of Jeffers' greatest poetry, in which he wrote of the death by revolver shot of a caged eagle, its spirit soaring away from its body and from the physical earth in ever wider circles of space and time. Like the roan stallion, like the many hawks in his shorter poems, the eagle is the symbol of a strength, a purity, a nobility, a wisdom, and a farseeing vision beyond the scope of shortsighted, entangled, enervated humanity. Higher still and higher, it looks further still and wider upon the alternations of pride and pain, of life and death, of the yearning to be born and the yearning to be quiet, until its visionary spirit enters and encloses itself in peace at the zenith. It is a sustained piece of sublime writing. Jeffers' Jesus, the subject of his next dramatic poem, "Dear Judas" (1929), has more than a little in common with the megalomaniac, power-hungry Barclay of The Women at Point Sur. This poem, the form of which was influenced by the Japanese No plays, is a treatment of the later stages of the gospel story, in particular of Judas' betrayal of Jesus. It opens with the flat statement of a materialist premise: "They have all died and their souls are extinguished." Jesus is not metaphysical; indeed, the mainspring of his psychology is his obsession with his physical parentage. It is the shame of his probable bastardy that has driven him to discover God to be his father and to make his mark upon the world with a supposedly supernatural authority. He burns with a truly revolutionary ardor to transform the world and rule the future. His zeal, though, is purificatory and

432 I AMERICAN uplifting rather than humanitarian; it is inspired by his mystic confidence in his own lofty, magnificent spirit. As with Barclay, it is of Ahab stretching after the mystery of the white whale that we are reminded, as Jesus proclaims the "lightnings," "pinnacles," and "towers" of his soul and its "immeasurable height above men." "All greatness is a wrestling with time." Recognizing that he will not be able to establish his revolutionary kingdom during his lifetime, Jesus invents heaven and hell as devices of reward and terror with which to implement his sway over the future. He goes to his death exulting in his unprecedented domination of human history. I go a stranger passage to a greater dominion More tyrannous, more terrible, more true, than Caesar or any subduer of the earth before him has dared to dream o f . . . no man shall live. As if / had not lived. In contrast with this Jesus who is all energy and leaping spirit, Judas is introspective, moral, and ethical, a decent, worried, concerned, liberal humanist. Aching with pity and bowed beneath the world's suffering ("the moaning of men and beasts torments me . . . . others' joy is not mine, / Only their pain"), he has sought in Jesus a reformist leader who would make living a little kinder and sweeter for all. But as Jesus' dream goes wild and mad, his modest hope turns to a nightmare vision of Roman suppression, with "all the roadside masted with moaning crucifixion." Sensitive and anguished, he betrays Jesus "to get the firebrand locked up, to save the city," expecting, in his softheaded benevolence, that Jesus will go to the lunatic's cell rather than the rebel's cross. He leaves the drama, pathetic, well-intentioned, self-loathing, to hang himself; in his ears ring Lazarus' terrible last words upon this good neighbor's in-

WRITERS

volvement with the overreaching superman who was Jesus: you enter his kingdom with him, as the hawk's lice with the hawk Climb the blue towers of the sky under the down of the feathers. "Dear Judas" was coupled in its volume with "The Loving Shepherdess," a study, commented Jeffers, of "nearly pure" love, in contrast with the misdirected affections and passions of the gospel figures. It is the least eventful and the most tender of Jeffers' poems, and of lighter weight than others, although it has not wanted for admirers. Clare Walker, the shepherdess, with her little flock of sheep wanders the Californian coast along much the same paths as Barclay (who is mentioned in the poem, as are Tamar and Cawdor, all inhabitants of this Jeffers country); but, unlike Barclay's, her spirit is formed not of the will to power but of love, and her vision is a selfless one of peace and delight for all created things. Rather than being a child of the Protestant fundamentalism in which most of Jeffers' characters have been molded, she has about her a quality of the Franciscan or even, loosely, of the Hindu, in her refusal to restrain love or to interfere with the processes of nature, even at the certain cost of her own life. Six years later, in 1935, Jeffers again made Christianity the central issue of a dramatic poem. This was in "At the Birth of an Age," which was derived from Germanic legend and set at the time of Europe's change from a heroic, pagan culture to the Christian one. Writing of the birth of this Christian age within sight of its end (of its faith,, he considered, although not of its secularized ethics), Jeffers could charge his poem with an ominous historical significance that more than compensates for the dramatic weaknesses. For the poem is structurally Jbroken-backed: its first part is a

ROBINSON JEFFERS / 433 dramatic reenactment of the deaths of Nordic heroes, dying by their honor and their dishonor, by their courage and their treachbry; and the second part is a series of spiritual and philosophical tableaux, revealing some of the components of the culture that will supersede this paganism. These include the Greek Prometheus, the Norse Hanged God, and Christ. Masked simply as The Young Man, Christ speaks here not as the exhilarated megalomaniac of "Dear Judas," but as a disillusioned, self-confessed, false prophet, who has clamped upon mankind a "ridiculous delusion" of personal immortality in a further world. Self-tormenting ("If Judas for a single betrayal hanged himself, / What for me, that betrayed the world?"), he prays that he himself and his myth of divinity be forgotten and that only his message of human love and brotherhood be remembered. Predictably, Jeffers does not end on such an uncharacteristic note, and the most compelling and conclusive poetry is given to the Hanged God, whose privilege it is to speak the language of exalted, inhumanist indifference: I am also the outer nothing and the wandering infinite night. These are my mercy and my goodness, these My peace. However extravagant and horrifying the incidents of their plots may be, Jeffers' narratives from the 1930's are all predominantly realistic in conception and characterization rather than mythic. The principal poems are "Thurso's Landing" (1932), "Give Your Heart to the Hawks" (1933), "Solstice" (1935), and "Such Counsels You Gave to Me" (1937). They are all tales of unrelieved disaster and destruction: in "Thurso's Landing" of infidelities, two suicides, an accidental crippling, and a mercy killing; in "Give Your Heart to the Hawks" of infidelity, fratricide, subsequent corrosive guilt, and two further suicides; in "Solstice" of a

mother's murder of her children to keep them from their father and her flight into the mountains; in "Such Counsels You Gave to Me" of a son's patricide and attempted incestuous seduction by his mother. In each poem the strongest personality is a woman: Helen Thurso, Fayne Fraser, Madrone Bothwell, and Mrs. Howren. And each of these women is the lively but unfulfilled and discontented wife of a dour or coarsened husband. It is the wilder, more instinctual female energy that directs the turn of events. The men, further from nature, are governed by stubborn will and the pride of possession (Reave Thurso); by whiskey and the inward torture of a Puritan conscience (Lance Fraser); by the values of the city and mechanical progress (Bothwell); by an anti-imaginative materialism (Howren); and by intellectual ambition (his son Howard). Between sexual desire and traditional morality, between independent self and conformist society, between nature and culture, the people of these stories, of this coast and country, are bruised, cracked, and crushed. There are, it is true, positive attributes to be distinguished amid the welter of catastrophes: such qualities as courage and endurance, responsiveness to the natural world, self-reliance, and a preparedness to face the music, however discordant. And there are moments of awe (humanity's "terrible shining" against "the dark magnificence of things" in "Thurso's Landing") and of melodramatic elevation (Madrone Bothwell's barbaric "fierce unsubdued core" that is translated into the storm-wracked heights of the Rocky Mountains in "Solstice"). But the prevailing sense is of man's contemptible insignificance, of the unimportance of his self-induced suffering, and of the inconsequence and superfluity of his life. The emphasis in these poems falls on the pettiness and ugliness of humanity rather than on the inhuman beauty and the natural divinity

434 I AMERICAN that Jeffers tells us elsewhere it is the poet's business to praise and in so doing restore man to his right, small, contented place. Without such constructive purpose, with few such rhapsodic notes, with little of the mythic or transcendent dimensions, these realistic narratives risk too much becoming mere dismal catalogs, newssheets of crime and cruelty, fury and folly. These furies and follies Jeffers saw gathering over many years toward their inevitable conclusion in a second world war. Virtually all that he wrote at this time sounded with the approach of war, so that in the prefatory note to Be Angry at the Sun (1941) he felt bound to lament his "obsession with contemporary history." This volume opens with "Mara," another tale of infidelity, marital hatred, and suicide, set as usual in California, but now in a world enlarged by radio to include the voice of Hitler, "wailing" like "a lost child." The situation is familiar. A heavyhearted protagonist, Bruce Ferguson, is married to a lively, spirited wife, Fawn, who is having an affair with Bruce's more vigorous younger brother, Allen; while upstairs in the same house their father lies painfully dying, despised by their misused and embittered mother. However, what differentiates Ferguson from most of the previous characters in the realistic narratives is that his pain is primarily philosophical. His thoughts and dreams run on the coming of war and its attendant horrors, on historical decline and the collapse of values ("Nobody knows the difference between right and wrong. / So the wolves will come back to Europe"), and on the crippled weakness of good in the world and the brute strength of evil. "I guess you think too much, honey," says a girl in a bar. And weighed down with thinking, he hangs himself, so as not to feel "two thousand years of instruction sag underfoot / Like a rotted floor," and "the great retreat from truth and the moral confusions / Deeper confounded." He dies a victim of mind and pessimism, leaving

WRITERS

to his wife and brother the gift to pursue their affair in "freedom and happiness." Also in this volume is "The Bowl of Blood," a masque that features Hitler, who comes anonymously as The Leader to seek counsel from a medium. Jeffers' attitude toward Hitler here as elsewhere is a most ambivalent one, deriving from the poem's basic contention, which is that Hitler is no more than anyone else a master of history but its creature: "Listen: the man does not have power, / Power has the man." "Whoever thinks this man is more wicked / Than other men knows not himself." Hitler's original patriotic motives were unambiguously commendable ("Blood and soil are poetry, you can fight for them"), but now, having put on power and taken to himself a cast of disciples, like Jeffers' Barclay and Jesus before him, he is caught on the public stage and destined to "play out the tragedy," the requisite descent into "Exhaustion and shabby horrors and squalid slavery, / The Russian theme." It is an utterly fatalistic view of history, working itself out here in Europe. Hence, while always fearfully assuming the likelihood of America's eventual involvement, Jeffers was politically an absolute isolationist, at this time of American history when isolationism had ready political meaning. For, history was "what our people came over / From stifled Europe to escape." That last statement of unqualified, separatist Americanism, in the tradition of Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman, was made by Hoult Gore in Jeffers' most shocking and sensational poem, "The Love and the Hate," which forms the first part of The Double Axe, published in 1948 with his publisher's disclaimer. The volume consists almost exclusively of poems inspired either by the war or by the still vaster theme of the collapse of the Christian era. In "The Love and the Hate," written in 1944, the young soldier, Hoult Gore, having died in

ROBINSON JEFFERS / 435 battle on a Pacific island, returns home not just as a ghost, but as a stinking, slimy, putrefying corpse. Licensed by his personal fate to speak on behalf of the slaughtered, he is the uninhibited mouthpiece of all Jeffers' horror of war, mutilation, and violent death, and all his irrepressible hatred of those who, for whatever cause, send others out to die. Through Hoult, who before his final decomposition, in this witches' broth of a story, shoots his father for supporting the war, Jeffers gives voice to sentiments of quite amazing ferocity: I wish that every man who approved this war, In which we had no right, reason nor justice, Were crawling there in the fire's way with his back broken,... Three years after this unrestrained howl of rage and vicarious pain, Jeffers attached to the poem—for relief, for balance, for transcendence—a second part entitled "The Inhumanist." This latter poem is less a narrative than a treasury of wisdom, a new book of proverbs, a seasonal round of fifty-two sections that ends with the beginning of a fresh dawn, after the utter dead end of "The Love and the Hate." The only common element is the Gore estate, which is now the home of the main character, who is called simply "the old man." After Hoult Gore's obliterating nihilism, he purifies a cursed spot with the most extended articulation of "inhumanism" that Jeffers ever composed. From mass society and mass politics, from secular humanism and from anthropocentric religion, even from the human race, the old man is unequivocally disaffected. "But still remains the endless inhuman beauty of things . . . and there is endurance, endurance, death's nobler cousin. Endurance." He counsels stoicism and self-adjustment on the personal level, with space enough between fellow men to permit steady contemplation of the whole, marvelous, sentient, natural divinity ("nothing is not alive"),

the quiet adoration of which restores and redeems man. Precisely: Moderate kindness Is oil on a crying wheel: use it. Mutual help Is necessary: use it when it is necessary. And as to love: make love when need drives. And as to love: love God. He is rock, earth and water, and the beasts and stars; and the night that contains them. And as to love: whoever loves or hates man is fooled in a mirror. Of his remaining longer works two were adaptations from Euripides, the Greek tragedian who lived in a time of deep-seated cultural change most like Jeffers' own. In his Medea (1946), the title figure, after only slight modification of her Euripidean character, takes her fit place in Jeffers country among his other wild, passionate women confronting the less instinctive world of men. (She had indeed been reincarnated previously in "Solstice" as Madrone Bothwell.) Jeffers' language thrills to her barbaric, elemental, "dark" nature, as it is thrown in deathly conflict with Jason's convenient, opportunistic, "better-lighted" reason. She begins with the wish that "from that blue sky the white wolf of lightning / Would leap, and burst my skull and brain." She goes out, revenged, inaccessible to pity, beyond humanity: "Now I go forth / Under the cold eyes of the weakness-despising stars:—not me they scorn." The second adaptation was of Hippolytus, published in 1954 under the title "The Cretan Woman." The most conspicuous aspect of this poem is Jeffers' attribution to Hippolytus of an explicitly homosexual formation, which finds expression in his fastidiousness, his cleanlimbed, athletic camaraderie with Alcyon and Andros, and in his fatal inability to respond to Phaedra. Over the tragedy Aphrodite presides

436 I AMERICAN WRITERS and disposes, delivering in the closing lines a homily on hubris that seems pertinent less to the particular drama it concludes than generally to the technological civilization of the twentieth century. In the same volume with "The Cretan Woman" is "Hungerfield," a short narrative written a year or so after Una's death, the finest passages of which are addressed to her memory. The poem had first and last a therapeutic function for Jeffers, for its subject is the coming to terms with the death of loved ones, with the pain of their dying, and with the fact of their deaths. Hawl Hungerfield's failure to do so, his refusal to let his mother die and be dead, starts a plague of death that does not complete its course until it has devoured all the animals around his farm, his brother, his wife and children, and himself. While Jeffers resigns himself: It is no good. Una has died, and I Am left waiting for death. He waited many years and learned, doubtless with the help of "Hungerfield," how to renew purpose in his daily living and rediscover "the beauty of God." Such beauty was a common one, the beauty that is all around us, of which we are a part; but perhaps it was a rare God, emanating from the peculiar intensity of Jeffers' response to that beauty. He responded simply and powerfully at a time when complication and subtlety were the prevailing poetic modes. It is in part owing to this direct accessibility of speech that he has been found to be "the most sui generis" of modern American poets, the most "his own man." Indeed, as a poet, he does seem to stand apart from his generation, and the literary contemporaries he calls to mind are quite miscellaneous.

In the case of the claustrophobic, doomed, self-destroying families of his narrative poems, there is surely a correspondence with Eugene O'Neill, and with William Faulkner, who would seem to have read "Tamar" closely. But neither of his major connections is American. First there is Yeats, fellow dweller in a stone tower in the west of a country, similarly patrician in temper and declamatory in style, albeit in more traditional meters, and likewise haunted by images of disastrous change. And second, there is D. H. Lawrence, for a posthumous volume of whose poems Jeffers wrote an introduction, and whose widow the Jeffers family came to know and visit. Both Lawrence and Jeffers were rebellious scions of Protestant fervor and the puritan conscience; both were resounding, vatic voices improvising on the freeverse line of Whitman; and both were in pursuit of sources of power and light beneath and beyond the human. O'Neill, Faulkner, Yeats, and Lawrence make a most various company. But if a single category is sought in which Jeffers may be properly situated, it must be a geographical one. He is very much a western American, a Californian poet, to be read as an elder poetic kinsman of Kenneth Rexroth (for all that writer's surprisingly heated antipathy to Jeffers), and of such diverse but distinctively western poets as William Everson, Gary Snyder, Charles Bukowski, and Jack Spicer, all of whom have acknowledged, briefly or at length, Jeffers' extraordinary achievement. Indeed, it is impossible to imagine Jeffers living and writing anywhere except in the west of the American continent, perhaps even anywhere except in a house within sight and sound of the Pacific Ocean. For he is in every respect and in all assumptions a westerner, an heir of the frontiersman of myth, a direct descendant of the westward-looking literary romantics. Be-

ROBINSON JEFFERS / 437 hind him stand Emerson and Whitman, travelers in mind and gesture, and Henry David Thoreau, frontiersman by analogy in Walden. And larger still out of a further past looms James Fenimore Cooper's exemplary hero, Natty Bumppo, for whom also God disclosed himself in natural beauty, albeit in more Christian, less pantheist shape; for whom also the good life consisted of living as closely as possible in accord with nature, taking from it only what was essential in the way of food and clothing for survival; and for whom also the greatest threat to the good life (of society as well as of the individual) lay in the heedless, exploitative misuse of the natural world by a proliferating, densely packed population. In a late poem, "Passenger Pigeons," Jeffers considers the possibility of man's self-extinction despite his present billions, just as in his deathdealing arrogance he had previously annihilated the countless numbers of the passenger pigeon. By a nice, absolutely appropriate irony, this is the species that is subjected to wholesale, blackfarcical massacre, to Natty's contemptuous disgust, in the first book of the Leatherstocking Series, nearly a century and a half before, in the early years of American westward and industrial expansion. Cooper saw ahead with such alarming clarity; and it was further along the same line of sight that Jeffers gazed. Thus, a redeemer, in the poem of that title, has to redeem a history of indiscriminate rapacity, mechanized utilitarianism, extirpation, and genocide—the history of a people who . . . have done what never was done before. Not as a people takes a land to love it and be fed, A little, according to need and love, and again a little; sparing the country tribes, mixing Their blood with theirs, their minds with

all the rocks and rivers, their flesh with the soil: no, without hunger Wasting the world and your own labor, without love possessing, not even your hands to the dirt but plows Like blades of knives: heartless machines; houses of steel: using and despising the patient earth . . . Oh, as a rich man eats a forest for profit and a field for vanity, so you came west and raped The continent and brushed its people to death. Without need, the weak skirmishing hunters, and without mercy. So, removing himself as far as possible from that continuous process of history, Jeffers found himself a place where, with hands to the dirt, he planted his trees in the patient earth and slowly built his house, not of steel, but of stone. It was a life's work, a life's dedication; but in any time span longer than the individual's, merely a moment's holding action. History (which is "what our ancestors came over / From stifled Europe to escape") advances, a progress that may be delayed but not deflected: We have built the great cities; now There is no escape. We have gathered vast populations incapable of free survival, insulated From the strong earth, each person in himself helpless, on all dependent. The circle is closed, and the net Is being hauled in. There was no further to go. Centuries, millennia even, of westward yearning and outreaching were coming to an end. The globe's circle was closed. It was the moment that Whitman had awesomely imagined years before, projecting himself in space and time until, in "Facing West from California's Shores,"

438 I AMERICAN WRITERS "Long having wander'd since, round the earth having wander'd / Now I face home again." What then, he had wondered, what then?—and indeed he had left his poem on a question: "But where is what I started for so long ago? / And why is it yet unfound?" In that same cast of westward mind, Jeffers spent most of his life "facing west from California's shores," with no further western land before him but with the end of the West, he felt, piling up and darkening the sky behind him, as he looked outward, away from humanity. This circular shape of westward movement around the globe was repeated for Jeffers in the shapes he discerned of the many cycles of culture. The cycles, smaller and larger, intersected one another—Judaic, Greco-Roman, Nordic— and were all contained within the vaster cycle of Western history. During his lifetime, he believed, the Christian cycle had turned, with its weight of at least fifteen centuries, heavily downward. Rising swiftly to meet its fall, to cut its descending path with terrifying, clashing possibilities, was the age of the machine: The first of these curves passing its noon and the second orient All in one's little lifetime make it seem pivotal. Truly the time is marked by insane splendors and agonies. But watch when the two curves cross: you children Not far away down the hawk's-nightmare future: you will see monsters. As with cultures, so with nations. In the case of his own country, Jeffers saw its history in terms of an ever steeper decline from a high point, probably in the early years of independence, as a republic of austere, self-reliant libertarians, to its present condition of a sprawling, luxury-loving, parasitic, bureaucratized empire. From his "ideally, aristocratic and republican"

position, as Una characterized his politics, he addressed a number of public poems over the years to the American nation. Already in the early 1920's he felt that a "perishing republic" was "heavily thickening to empire"; by the 1940's "Now, thoroughly compromised, we aim at world rule, like Assyria, Rome, Britain, Germany, to inherit those hordes of guilt and doom." No, he saw little hope for the world, if by the world is meant the world of power politics and historical tendency. That story was just the one about original sin, the tale of hubris writ large, larger, and ever more destructive. As a result of his political pessimism, he has often, although much less frequently of late, been misinterpreted as nihilistic or life-denying or despairing. Such judgments are very far from the truth. Of course, Jeffers knew that to be alive was to suffer, that pain was intrinsic to life: "The poets who sing of life without remembering its agony / Are fools and liars." But he also knew for himself that to be alive was not, very much not, to be in despair, nor, save when personal sorrow or public catastrophe prompts it, to be unhappy. As he politely replied to Dorothy Thompson in 1938: "You speak of the present isolation and spiritual despair; and I must confess that I value the isolation and don't feel the despair." He valued the isolation because it enabled him to concentrate his rapt attention upon the enormous beauty of the world; and he didn't feel the despair because, with the "bad dreams" exorcised in his stories, as he explained early on in his "Apology for Bad Dreams," from contemplation of the world's beauty his spirit drew a constant serenity. In fact, Jeffers should be seen as finally and essentially a religious poet. His was a great, solemn, watchful, meditative spirit, concerned, as he wrote, "with permanent things and the permanent aspects of life." It is in such a spiritual context that he may be associated with the

ROBINSON JEFFERS / 439 Greek tragedians and with the Old Testament prophets. He has that kind of weight, that kind of seriousness, that kind of salutary fierceness. He is a major poet, uncomfortable, disturbing, savage at times, yet inspiriting and enhancing. We neglect him at the peril of our own seriousness.

Selected Bibliography WORKS OF ROBINSON JEFFERS POEMS

Flagons and Apples. Los Angeles: Grafton, 1912. Californians. New York: Macmillan, 1916. Tamar and Other Poems. New York: Peter G. Boyle, 1924. Roan Stallion, Tamar, and Other Poems. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1925. The Women at Point Sur. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1927. Cawdor and Other Poems. New York: Liveright, 1928. Dear Judas and Other Poems. New York: Liveright, 1929. Descent to the Dead. New York: Random House, 1931. Thurso's Landing and Other Poems. New York: Liveright, 1932. Give Your Heart to the Hawks and Other Poems. New York: Random House, 1933. Solstice and Other Poems. New York: Random House, 1935. Such Counsels You Gave to Me and Other Poems. New York: Random House, 1937. The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers. New York: Random House, 1938. Be Angry at the Sun. New York: Random House, 1941. Medea. New York: Random House, 1946. The Double Axe and Other Poems. New York: Random House, 1948.

Poetry, Gongorism and a Thousand Years. Los Angeles: Ward Ritchie, 1949. Hungerfield and Other Poems. New York: Random House, 1954. The Beginning and the End and Other Poems. New York: Random House, 1963. Selected Poems. New York: Vintage, 1965. Not Man Apart, edited by David Ross Brower. San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1965. Jeffers Country. San Francisco: Scrimshaw Press, 1971. The Alpine Christ and Other Poems, with commentary and notes by William Everson. Monterey, Calif.: Cayucos Books, 1974. Brides of the South Wind: Poems 1917-1922, with commentary and notes by William Everson. Monterey, Calif.: Cayucos Books, 1974. The Double Axe and Other Poems, Including Eleven Suppressed Poems. New York: Liveright, 1977. LETTERS

The Selected Letters of Robinson Jeffers, 18971962, edited by Ann N. Ridgeway. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1968.

BIBLIOGRAPHIES Alberts, Sydney S. A Bibliography of the Works of Robinson Jeffers. New York: Random House, 1933. Nolte, William H. The Merrill Checklist of Robinson Jeffers. Columbus, Ohio: Charles E. Merrill, 1970. Tate, Allen. Sixty American Poets, 1896-1944, rev. ed. Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1954. Vardamis, Alex A. The Critical Reputation of Robinson Jeffers. Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1972.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL STUDIES Alexander, John R. "Conflict in the Narrative Poetry of Robinson Jeffers." Sewanee Review, 80:85-99 (January-March 1972). Bennett, Melba Berry. The Stone Mason of Tor House: The Life and Work of Robinson Jeffers. Los Angeles: Ward Ritchie, 1966.

440 I AMERICAN WRITERS Boyers, Robert. "A Sovereign Voice." Sewanee Review. 77:487-507 (Summer 1969). Brophy, Robert J. Robinson Jeffers: Myth, Ritual and Symbol in His Narrative Poems. Cleveland: Case Western Reserve University Press, 1973. Carpenter, Frederic I. "The Values of Robinson Jeffers." American Literature, 11:353-66 (January 1940). . Robinson Jeffers. New York: Twayne, 1962. Coffin, Arthur B. Robinson Jeffers: Poet of Inhumanism. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1971. Cunningham, Cornelius C. "The Rhythm of Robinson Jeffers' Poetry as Revealed by Oral Reading." Quarterly Journal of Speech, 32:351-57 (October 1946). Demott, Robert. "Robinson Jeffers's TamarV In The Twenties, edited by Warren G. French. Deland, Fla.: Everett, Edwards, 1975. Dickey, James. "First and Last Things." Poetry, 103:320-21 (February 1964). Everson, William. Robinson Jeffers: Fragments of an Older Fury. Berkeley, Calif.: Oyez, 1968. . "Archetype West." In Regional Perspectives: An Examination of America's Literary Heritage, edited by J. G. Burke. Chicago: American Library Association, 1973. Flint, Frank S. "Verse Chronicle." Criterion, 11:276-81 (January 1932). Gregory, Horace. The Dying Gladiators. New York: Grove Press, 1961. Highet, Gilbert. People, Places, and Books. New York: Oxford University Press, 1953. Kunitz, Stanley J. "Day Is a Poem." Poetry, 59:148-54 (December 1941).

Lutyens, David B. The Creative Encounter. London: Seeker and Warburg, 1960. Monjian, Mercedes C. Robinson Jeffers: A Study in Inhumanism. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1958. Nolte, William H. "Robinson Jeffers as Didactic Poet." Virginia Quarterly Review, 42:257-71 (Spring 1966). Powell, Lawrence Clark. Robinson Jeffers: The Man and His Work. Pasadena, Calif.: San Pasqual Press, 1940. Robinson Jeffers Newsletter. Los Angeles: Robinson Jeffers Committee, Occidental College (1962). Scott, R. I. "Robinson Jeffers's Tragedies as Rediscoveries of the World." Bulletin of Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association, 29:147-65 (1975). Shebl, James M. In This Wild Water: The Suppressed Poems of Robinson Jeffers. Pasadena, Calif.: Ward Ritchie, 1976. Squires, James Radcliffe. The Loyalties of Robinson Jeffers. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1956. Waggoner, Hyatt H. The Heel of Elohim: Science and Values in Modern American Poetry. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1950. White, Kenneth. The Coast Opposite Humanity. Llanfynydd, Carmarthen: Unicorn Bookshop, 1975. Wilder, Amos N. Theology and Modern Literature. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958. Winters, A. Yvor. "Robinson Jeffers." Poetry, 35:279-86 (February 1930). —R. W. BUTTERFIELD

Cotton Mather 1663—1728

A

Mather's hopes for prominence were in a sense fulfilled. From his early twenties until his death, he was pastor of the Second Church of Boston, perhaps the most prestigious pulpit in New England. From that vantage point he was able to embroil himself all his life in the politics of the colony; he led a small revolution, served as a spokesman for the next governor, and carried on a running battle for years with another governor. While still in his middle thirties he sent off to the press his Magnalia Christi Americana (1702), a vast history of New England. Over the course of his life Mather produced a staggering volume of work; his bibliography numbers 468 separate items. In his own time he was acknowledged to be New England's representative in the world of letters, through his wide correspondence and his membership in the Royal Society. Both as the historian of the Puritans and as a vivid instance of Puritanism himself, he has never disappeared from the general consciousness; many people who have never read a word of his feel that they have a distinct sense of his personality. In the style and emotional tone of his writings and in the extent of his public reputation, Cotton Mather has stood out from the Puritan ministers of New England. Only Jonathan Edwards, two generations his junior, is comparably recognized as a representative Puritan. Of that group, some were arguably more tough-

. LL his life, Cotton Mather worried over his importance in history. Was he only an insignificant provincial, ineffectually trying to prop a moribund Puritan tradition with a grab bag of pedantic tags? Or was he chosen to counsel and lead his people into the final new day? His questions parallel our own. Is Mather any more than a literary grotesque, a credulous witch-burning embarrassment to American history and even to the history of American Puritanism? Or is he a neglected ancestor, the first to articulate some central problems of American culture? The question of whether he was central or irrelevant will not go away, in part because it was the problem he could never settle for himself. Mather wanted urgently to be more than just another New England minister. On one of his special days of fasting and humiliation in 1692, he pleaded characteristically with God "that Hee would accept of Service at my hands, and make a singular Use of mee, in the Awakening of my people." To be singularly used was always Mather's hope. He had been a child prodigy, entering Harvard College at the age of eleven. He came from the most distinguished family of intellectuals that had yet existed in America, and he wanted to be worthy of that heritage. He believed, in fact, that God had promised him a special role in his country's history and that an angel had been dispatched to him bearing that promise.

441

442 I AMERICAN minded than he, or more impressive as theologians. His father, Increase Mather, no doubt exercised more influence. But succeeding generations have remembered the name of Cotton Mather when they have sought for an exemplar of American Puritanism. The cost of his prominence has been ridicule and abuse, beginning in his own time. His writings on witchcraft provoked a malicious and influential personal attack that has been successful up to the present in making him look like a superstitious booby and an exploiter of mass hysteria. John Oldmixon, an English Grub Street historian who relied on Mather's work for his own account of America, sneered at the Magnolia as a medley of "Puns, Anagrams, Acrosticks, Miracles, Prodigies, Witches, Speeches, Epistles, and other Incumbrances." When Mather initiated inoculation for smallpox in 1721, the first significant medical innovation in America, he was rewarded with savage abuse in the newspaper of James Franklin. And James's sixteen-year-old brother Benjamin satirized Mather's often prolix defenses of benevolence by naming the author of his first periodical letters Silence Dogood. Mather accepted such abuse as an inevitable part of his calling. To be "despised and rejected of men" was even evidence of a Christlike vocation, and Mather was bolder than other Puritan ministers in seeking parallels between his own life and that of Jesus Christ. Abuse was to be suffered, not returned in kind. God would at last exalt his suffering servant. What distressed Mather far more than abuse, as his diary and letters indicate, was indifference. There could hardly be any spiritual significance in being ignored and unread. His predecessors in the Puritan clergy had enjoyed considerable political influence and even power; his own career saw that influence fade almost completely. Puritanism was in decline by the end of the seventeenth century, and by the time

WRITERS

Mather died the old fighting faith had evolved into a staid and comfortable weekly routine. However much Mather may have denied the decline, he was too sensitive an observer not to have registered the change. After the mixed response to the Magnolia, Mather found it impossible to find a publisher for his longest and most ambitious works. To his lasting humiliation, his longest work, a massive commentary on the Bible entitled the Biblia Americana, went unpublished (as it remains to this day). His audience, his publishers, and his friends of importance in England had silently pronounced him and his style of writing dated and irrelevant. "I have no Expectation that any thing performed by my Mean Hand, should find any great Reception on your side of the Water," he wrote to an English correspondent in 1724. "Especially since the prodigious Depravation of Gust among you, which renders every thing unpalatable, but what shall have Qualities which I will never be reconcil'd unto." The style he adopted was in his eyes part of his New England identity. If such a style was despised, it seemed as if America itself was pronounced inconsequential. History has freed Mather from the irrelevance he feared. Not the victory of Puritanism but its defeat has thrust him into continuing grotesque prominence. For three centuries he has been an emblem of the narrow-minded, credulous, long-winded provincial minister. His contemporary adversaries have been succeeded by generations of commentators who have scored points against the Puritans by attacking him. Cotton Mather is the favorite author of that transplanted New Englander Ichabod Crane; long hours of reading Mather's accounts of witchcraft prepared Ichabod for his midnight ride through Sleepy Hollow. During the nineteenth century a succession of Unitarian minister historians exorcised the specter of their Pu-

COTTON MATHER / 443 ritan ancestry by denouncing Mather. William Carlos Williams includes Mather as one of the life-denying forces in his narrative of false directions, In the American Grain. Katherine Anne Porter planned to write a biography of Mather, of which only a few sketches were published; in them he is depicted as a hideous prig. Even when the Puritans enjoyed a revival of scholarly reputation in the twentieth century, at the hands of Samuel Eliot Morison and Perry Miller, Cotton Mather was conspicuously excluded from favor. The scorn of a great historian endures; Perry Miller uses Mather to exemplify the intellectual and spiritual disintegration of New England. The most recent students of Mather's career have tried to rescue him from this slough of abuse, but he will not readily be restored. I suspect that so long as the country's Puritan heritage is an uncomfortable memory, Cotton Mather will have to be ritually excoriated. Cotton Mather's importance cannot be separated from the general impact of Puritanism on American writing and culture. Few would deny the lingering aftereffects of Puritan habits of mind in America—least of all those who have seen those influences as pernicious. But Mather's own experience was, rather, of Puritanism's waning force. He survived into a time terribly foreign to him, an era dominated by shrewd, quarrelsome, and secular men. In his last years he was all alone, the last man who had dared to believe in a glorious national destiny for America as the vanguard of Reformed Christianity. Mather's real strength came from his consciousness, never fully explored or acknowledged, that he was defending a dying tradition. It was that tradition that made him distinctive, since he could no longer enjoy that sense of membership in an ongoing movement that firstgeneration Puritans could feel. That consciousness brought on his extraordinary productivity.

He was determined to restore the faith of the first days, even if that restoration could be no more than his own imaginative act. "But whether New England may live any where else or no," he wrote in the introduction to the Magnaliaf "it must Live in our History!" Even Mather's early years would have provided much to perplex and disorient him. The New England with which he identified so strongly was gradually growing and expanding. From the small beginnings at Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay, it had become four sturdy colonies that worshiped as independent congregations. But expansion had been mixed somehow with decline—a paradox for Mather, who saw God's hand in the expansion. Persistence in belief was somehow combined with vague symptoms of a disintegration of belief. As the church historian of New England he could not readily identify a single direction that the country was taking. Much of what he saw was discouraging. The Puritans who settled in America started off with a belief in their own historic centrality. They were to be a city upon a hill, looked on by all nations. Puritanism in those days was a mass movement possessed by a sense of its own irresistible historic mission. So strong was the desire in early Massachusetts to hear at last an awakening ministry that a limit had to be set for the number of sermons a person might attend in a week. Succeeding generations of Puritans would look back on the zeal of those founding fathers and compare it to the faith of the first-century Christian Church, the great age of saints and martyrs. Such a standard of piety, recovered now after 1,500 years, could hardly fail to be a sign of Christ's glorious return and the beginning of the millennium. It does not need to be mentioned that such a belief was inherently vulnerable. Even at the time of Mather's birth, on Feb-

444 I AMERICAN ruary 12, 1663, Puritanism as an international movement was in retreat. Charles II had recently recovered the throne that his father had lost in the English Civil War. English Puritans, their revolution won but unfulfilled, turned away from their former public ambitions and resigned themselves to being the godly minority in a country that would not be a New Jerusalem. American Puritans clung to the earlier sense of historic mission, but their persistence was threatened in all directions. The first generation in New England had set high standards for admission to church membership in order to preserve the purity of each congregation. The standards were intimidating to the next generation; the so-called Half-Way Covenant of 1662 had to be introduced in order to baptize the children of those believers who could not report the requisite religious experiences. The political solidarity of the church-state in Massachusetts was based on the charter granted in 1629, which allowed the colony virtual self-government. That charter conflicted with the royal government's colonial policy. Although adroit stalling measures preserved the charter from revocation for a while, the Massachusetts Puritans were ultimately protected by little besides the government's relative indifference to them. They could remain in charge at the cost of seeming to be insignificant. There were more signs of deterioration during Mather's youth. To the north French Canada was expanding. A handful of Quakers appeared in Massachusetts preaching and disrupting Puritan religious services; banishment and, later, executions dealt with those inroads, but the punishments stirred up controversy inside the colony and out. In 1675 King Philip's War broke out suddenly, an Indian war that left the frontier settlements in ruins and their population decimated; the Indians of New England would never again seem like a people

WRITERS

reaching out for conversion. By the end of the reign of Charles II, when Mather was in his early twenties, the Massachusetts charter was revoked; the elected legislature was abolished, and under James II the colony was to be governed by the Anglican Sir Edmund Andros. In response to such discouraging developments, the Puritan clergy took to denouncing the country for its errors and spiritual inertia in sermons of which the standard formula was later to be called the jeremiad. The denunciations of the jeremiad have been taken as symptoms of growing secularization among the people and despair among the clergy. It seems more accurate to say that those reiterated warnings of God's wrath kindled against New England represent the most fervent assertion of the country's continued importance in history. The New Englanders were still God's chosen people, the jeremiads said; and those whom God loves, he chastens. Increase Mather, the father of Cotton Mather, was perhaps the most powerful and influential of these denouncers of the country. This was the situation in New England as Cotton Mather was growing up. He could not have viewed these confusing symptoms with detachment, nor could he have failed to try finding some meaning in them. His identity was tied to New England; unless God had a special purpose in mind for America he was nothing but a ridiculous provincial. Even his name attached him to America. "Cotton" came from his grandfather, John Cotton, one of the leading first-generation ministers. His other grandfather, Richard Mather, hardly fell short of Cotton in prominence. The two had done much to formulate and defend the New England position on theology and church government. Richard Mather had married John Cotton's widow; Increase Mather, Richard's youngest son, had then married his stepsister, Maria Cotton. Cotton Mather's connection to the New

COTTON MATHER / 445 England way was biological; he could not have discarded it without defying an especially potent set of ancestors. His father Increase had graduated in one of the earliest Harvard classes and soon after emigrated to England, where he continued his education and preached in the last years of the Commonwealth. When the restoration of Charles II closed opportunities for him in England, he returned to America and soon succeeded to a prominent Boston pulpit. On the first important public occasion after his return, he disagreed with his father on the Half-Way Covenant, though he later changed his mind and joined in the consensus position. Increase Mather's years in England helped to give him special prestige in New England; when he returned to England in 1688 to represent Massachusetts in negotiations for a new charter, he could move familiarly in social circles that included Richard Baxter, the leading dissenting minister in England, and Robert Boyle, the scientist and theologian. From 1685 to 1701 Increase Mather was president of Harvard. He continued to serve as the teacher of the Second Church in Boston (the North Church) until his death in 1723 at the age of eighty-four. Cotton Mather spent his entire life in the shadow of his father, whom he survived by only five years. It was a shadow he welcomed. Prominent fathers can easily be a burden, an obstacle to the development of a distinct and viable identity. Cotton Mather, however, insisted on seeing his father as his greatest advantage. He became his father's associate at the Second Church and remained at that post until his death. In his own writing he would refer to himself as "Mr. Mather the younger." Few people would openly challenge Increase Mather; his power and presence were too imposing. Cotton Mather was more exposed to attack. The father could be described in the New England context as cosmopolitan. The son never

traveled out of New England and scarcely ever left Boston. Increase Mather had differed from his own father. Cotton Mather consistently took his father's public positions, in keeping with the commandment to honor his parents. Of Cotton Mather's profoundest hopes recorded in his diary, many regard fame and prominence for Increase Mather. In later life he referred to his father as Adoni Avi, meaning in Hebrew "Lord my Father." Only once is there any record of Cotton Mather's directly contradicting his father. When Increase, piqued by what he considered the colony's ingratitude, threatened to stay in England in 1690, his son wrote a stern reminder of his responsibilities to New England. To remain in England would be a yielding to temptation, wrote the younger Mather, a desertion of his identity, his family, and his son. Throughout his life Cotton Mather looked to his father for approval. He did not seek to discover or establish an independent stance; real independence from his father and his father's beliefs would have been horrifying to him, because he believed his father to be a saved man. Instead he sought acceptance, a state inevitably beyond his control. For no matter how hard he tried or how dutiful he might appear, his acceptance could be withheld by his father or by God. This was the psychological situation of any Puritan. A strong analogy linked Mather's father, the rightly constituted powers that be, and God; scripture demanded obedience to them all. Other Puritans might rebel against the parental heads of governments by seeing rebellion as obedience to God. Cotton Mather found such a position difficult to sustain; even at those moments in his political life when he was acting as a resister of authority, he insisted on voicing his resistance through the rhetoric of submission to a superior political authority. His father was for him "our patriarch," and he could describe showing his work to his father as if he were submitting it to a spiritual arbiter.

446 I AMERICAN That Mather's father was loving and fiercely protective made his attachment all the firmer. Cotton Mather came, in fact, to expect from others the sort of deference and sense of place that he rendered unhesitatingly himself. In those changing times that deference was not so readily granted. Much was expected of a child with such a father and such ancestry. Cotton Mather responded early to those expectations. His father's journal records the evidence of his early childhood piety. At the age of eleven he was ready to enter Harvard, demonstrating like other entering students a spoken command of Latin and a reading familiarity with Greek. He had already begun to study Hebrew. During his adolescence he was troubled by stuttering, to the point of thinking himself incapable of entering the ministry. Prayer and discipline brought his speech under control, so that he was able to preach his first sermon in 1680 at the age of seventeen. Around this time he began keeping a sort of diary that he called his "Reserved Memorials," a record primarily of his spiritual exercises through life and the evidences of divine attention to him. Later on, the diary also recorded Mather's occasional bitter reflections on the neglect and abuse he was receiving. It was also a sort of spiritual account book; Mather would record his prayers and then later note in the margins the time when they had been fulfilled. Mather never achieves the depth of self-analysis that one can see in the journals that Jonathan Edwards kept during his college years. Edwards' account of his sinfulness reveals a capacity for psychological penetration; Mather's recorded failings seem more the spontaneous outbursts of a complex and emotionally charged personality. "Was ever man more tempted, than the miserable Mather!" he exclaims in his diary in 1703. (The wonder of it can be expressed only in a sentence artfully rich in m

WRITERS

sounds.) "Should I tell, in how many Forms the Divel has assaulted me, and with what Subtilty and Energy, his Assaults have been carried on, it would strike my Friends with Horrour." A powerful narcissistic impulse betrays itself throughout the "Reserved Memorials," but they preserve a fuller record of his interior life than we have from any other Puritan of comparable intellectual powers. His focus is on his own inner state; there are fewer of the specific details of daily life that are so well preserved in the diary of his friend Judge Samuel Sewall. The diary is a record of attempts to see in all his worldly encounters the material for spiritual insight. He prepares a list of ejaculatory prayers that he is to utter to himself on seeing commonplace events. On seeing a man on horseback, for example, he is to pray, "Lord, thy Creatures do serve that man; help him to serve his Maker.''' For Mather there was no contradiction involved in anticipating or even programming pious perceptions. He was continually at work trying to set his inner life in order, not through the attainment of some ruling insight but through painstaking attention to a host of separate duties. Benjamin Franklin later tried to achieve moral perfection by a comparable procedure, but he eventually gave up the effort and adjusted to a workable but imperfect character. Mather never stopped trying to make himself worthy. Mather's attention to his own inner state was no doubt a manifestation of deep self-absorption. As a celebrator and inviter of himself in his diary, he can make Walt Whitman (in his Song of Myself) seem by comparison cool and dispassionate. But the demands of Puritan belief strongly seconded a person's impulse toward a preoccupation with self. Salvation was to be achieved by faith, a particular psychological condition, and not by works, the sum of one's overt behavior. The saved person had available a state called "grace," in which God entered

COTTON MATHER / 447 into the heart to console and redeem it. To attain this state of grace it was necessary to be "reborn," a metaphor intended to suggest an utter change of personal identity. This rebirth was expected to be as important an event as one's original birth; it could be as terrible and wonderful as birth. But it was not easy to be sure that one had been reborn. If one returned completely to one's former life and mental habits, the experience assuredly had not been authentic. In his teens, after graduation from Harvard, Mather had experienced traumatic fears that he was only a "Refined Hypocrite," one who behaves well overtly and believes smugly in his own spiritual well-being. On the day of the last judgment the secret hearts of all would be laid bare; he would have to face the saved citizens of Boston as one of the elect or of the reprobate. Worse still, he thought, "How shall I be able to Look my own Father in the Face, at the Day of Judgment?" Cotton Mather turned to his father for spiritual counsel, and his father was strongly encouraging. Soon the son came to enjoy feelings of divine acceptance. Throughout his life Increase Mather himself lived with spiritual terrors and uncertainties that his son never experienced. Remaining unsure of his salvation, he wished for his son a better inner life than his own. The message that Cotton Mather preached, especially in his early years, was one of hope and comfort. He was only twenty when he was asked to become pastor of the Second Church; he could not pretend to the wisdom and accumulated authority of the senior ministers of Massachusetts. What qualified him in his mind to speak was a sense of his special ancestry and of his special gift of eloquence. He eagerly recorded in his diary his success in moving congregations to strong emotions, and there is every reason to believe his reports. His emphasis on hope was new in Boston. His father's char-

acteristic note had been that of somber warning; in a sermon to Harvard undergraduates about the drowning of two students while ice skating he could see the deaths as an omen of the decline of the college, of the New England churches, and of New England itself. The son, by contrast, could find even in the execution of a murderer an occasion to depict God's forgiveness. Though there were genuine temperamental differences between the two Mathers, their differences of emphasis derive also from a difference in their roles. New England churches, where possible, were supposed to have two ministers, a teacher and a pastor. The teacher was to speak of right doctrine; the pastor was to concern himself with the care of souls. This division of labor was another American Puritan tactic to keep in balance potentially divisive forces: a cold, intellectual rigor that might disregard psychological needs and a fervent evangelical spirit that might lack theological respectability. Increase Mather was the teacher at the Second Church; Cotton Mather was its pastor. Mather's diary records how eagerly he embraced his pastoral responsibilities, praying for particular people who were still unredeemed, tending to poor widows, organizing prayer groups and seminars. It was also more natural for the pastor to respond spontaneously in his sermons to immediate occasions—the death of a child (including his own, in several cases), the departure of troops in a campaign against Canada, an outbreak of smallpox. On one occasion Mather delivered extemporaneously a sermon on God's voice speaking through the thunder, to accompany a violent storm that broke out at meeting time. Mather took special pride in his ability at what New Englanders would call "improving" an occasion. By far the largest number of Cotton Mather's published works were sermons. Even his other works include or adapt sermons or ser-

448 I AMERICAN WRITERS monic rhetoric. To literary people the Puritan sermon has commonly seemed to bear no relation to the products of the literary imagination. It is even widely felt that the sermon is a form inherently dreary and deadening to both preacher and hearer. This attitude would perhaps have seemed curious to the Puritans, who found sermons profoundly appealing to the imagination. So emotionally satisfying were Puritan sermons in the mid-seventeenth century that they were able, in effect, to drive their competition, the London stage, out of business. For Puritans the sermon was a highly ambitious form of expression, since it was an attempt to convey the inexpressible presence of God. It was also the most valuable mode of public expression, because its aim was to produce salvation. The Puritans trimmed away other elements of the religious service so as to make the sermon stand out. By itself a sermon was a dramatic occasion. The minister confronted the congregation; together, both confronted God. Often there was more tangible drama on hand as well. Cotton Mather's first published sermon, The Call of the Gospel (1686), was addressed to a condemned murderer, James Morgan, who had repented and hoped that his change of heart might save him in his imminent future existence. Though not unusual in itself, this one instance will serve as an example of Mather at work in his natural form. Even here, when Mather is only twenty-three, a striking difference between the father and the son appears, as well as those special qualities that made Mather's sermons distinctive. Two other sermons were preached in the days before Morgan's execution, one of them by Increase Mather. Increase's sermon is a baleful underscoring of the heinous nature of the murder, which was done in a fit of passion with an iron spit. The sermon sets forth the condemned man as a horrid example of the consequences of

drunkenness and neglect of sermons, sins that Morgan had confessed to committing. Although the prisoner had repented and urgently hoped before his death for divine forgiveness, Increase felt it necessary to emphasize in the preface to the published sermon that "Late Repentance is seldom true." Cotton Mather's sermon takes quite a different approach. His text, from Isaiah, is an invitation from God to look on him and be saved, and Cotton insists on applying the text to Morgan as well. "Yea, who among us all, at the reading of these glad Tidings unto us, can forbear joyning with the Rapturous shouts of Heaven, with that Angelical, and Evangelical Out-cry . . . Glory to God in the highest, on earth peace, Good-will towards men?" The rhetoric implies a minister and a congregation unified by a common fervent belief. Where Increase's sermon is austere, precise, and analytical, Cotton's language tries to convey a note of rapture and collective solidarity that includes even the criminal in chains before him. To generate this sense of rapture, he employs metaphors that are deliberately paradoxical, forcing his hearers out of the conventional sense of things. "Verily," he says, "a man does no sooner look on Jesus Christ in a way of Believing, than a Sentence of Salvation is passed upon him, and all the Promises yea, and all the Attributes of the Eternal Jehovah are engaged for the execution of it." Morgan's condemnation provides a metaphor for assured salvation. Both the Mathers had spoken to Morgan, who had specially requested that Cotton preach for him. Also at Morgan's request, Cotton accompanied the condemned man on his final walk to the gallows. Already elevated to the status of a symbolic figure in the drama of salvation, Morgan turned to the young minister for his cue. "I beseech you Sir," Morgan said (as Mather recalled later), "speak to me. Do me all the good you can: my time grows very short:

COTTON MATHER / 449 your discourse fits me for my Death more than any thing." As the two men walked along the Boston streets, they went through a final cram course in redemptive theology; Morgan acknowledged the justice of his sentence and repented of his earlier anger at being buried in a mean grave. The execution sermons (printed after the first edition with a transcript of Morgan's last conversation with Mather) sold well; Mather's sermon was the first fulfillment of his early promise and an indication of his readiness to involve himself actively in the spiritual lives of others. This trait has commonly been described as meddlesomeness, but it seems likely that Morgan was grateful for it in his last minutes. Cotton Mather's sermons of his twenties were sufficiently in demand to be published. A common stance in those sermons was that of the redeemed youth speaking against unregenerate age. Nearly all the members of his congregation would have been older than he, and his status as a young prodigy was already making him vulnerable. It would have been hard for any young man to dominate a settled congregation by the sheer force of personality, even if his authority had not seemed to depend in part on his father. And the young Mather was not disposed to intimidate; he wished, rather, to inspire. He could not pretend to a large experience of the world; he relied rather on a body of surrogate experience derived from his multifarious reading, in the Bible, the church fathers, and the classics. (Mather's library eventually came to be the largest in New England and perhaps in all the colonies.) The rhetoric of Mather's sermons required a sense of common feeling with his congregation that would enable him to express their spiritual longings and to experience their spiritual trials. But the established and comfortable congregation of the North Church was two generations away from the founding of the colony. When

Mather employed the first-person plural with them, his usage did not reflect a mutual sense of kinship. He was urging a relationship that his hearers must have understood as a sermonic convention. Mather was grateful for the opportunity to preach to a congregation that was so large and had such traditions. By contrast Jonathan Edwards, who succeeded to the pulpit of a distinguished grandfather, always treated the Northhampton church as his rightful portion and maintained that post with such independence of his congregation's good feelings that at last it removed him. We can have no sure way of gauging the effect of Mather's sermons on his audiences. Many were printed and some reprinted, so he must have been widely read. But the Puritan sermon had always called for more than pleased acceptance. It was a call to salvation. The first generation of ministers often counted sermons as the decisive spiritual stimulants in their lives. When young Samuel Sewall was joining the church and agonizing over the authenticity of his own sense of conversion, he studied old sermons as textbooks in self-questioning. Cotton Mather's sermons seem not to have been studied in the same way. His popularity was clearly connected to certain literary qualities. It was his standing as a man of letters, as much as his piety and doctrinal correctness, that ensured his good reception in Boston. But local success was not enough. His "Reserved Memorials" indicate that he hoped for a wider field of action; he felt that he had received divine assurances that Europe would soon be moved by the Holy Spirit to cast off false belief and that he himself would be significantly involved in that spiritual transformation. Mather had no thought of leaving New England, so Europe was an audience that could be reached only by the written word. Even his earliest preserved letters indicate his interest in

450 I AMERICAN contemporary European history; when he writes about it, he displays an intense excitement with the scale of events and the rapidity of change. He feels no transoceanic separation from the campaigns of William of Orange or the policies of Louis XIV. Later he even learned French and Spanish so as to write treatises in those languages urging conversion. England was the audience he addressed most directly in his early years, after his own New England. The disparity in character between his two audiences was a problem he could never resolve and, I think, never fully understood. Mather's pastoral impulses drew him into the politics of New England beginning in the late 1680's. From the start New England had proudly called itself a theocracy, and the minister's duty was to advise the temporal authorities about the Lord's will. After the Massachusetts charter was revoked and the arbitrary government of Sir Edmund Andros was imposed by James II in 1686, Increase Mather was sent to London to plead for a restoration of the charter. Cotton Mather represented his father's position during the three years that Increase was in England. When the news of the Glorious Revolution arrived in Boston, the citizens used the opportunity to overthrow the government and imprison Andros. Cotton Mather was involved in the insurrection and wrote a defense of it, A Declaration of Gentlemen and Merchants and Inhabitants of Boston, and the Country Adjacent, that was published immediately (on April 18, 1689). That brief document links the overthrow of Andros (and implicitly of James II, his master) with the overthrow of Catholicism. In other respects it is an early appearance of the rhetoric of the Declaration of Independence. At this moment, when he was twenty-six, Cotton Mather had the greatest public influence that he would ever attain. He had engineered a revolution, albeit tiny, and defended it to the world.

WRITERS

His father found it impossible to win back the old charter from King William, whose military campaigns on the Continent delayed the decision for some time. The best deal that Increase Mather was able to get included a royal governor and an elected colonial legislature; the king would let the elder Mather nominate the governor. Back in Massachusetts, Increase was widely criticized for not getting back the old charter. In defense of his father Cotton wrote and circulated in manuscript a set of four "Political Fables." In each of them Increase is represented by some flying, exalted character that is beyond the range of the other figures, including Cotton himself. The opponents of the Mathers and the new charter are represented as contentious and ungrateful animals. In tone the fables are debonair and good-humored; they are more an attempt to defuse the antagonism than to counterattack. By describing the confrontation as a quarrel of animals, Mather lifts the issue out of the context of moral error, where satire or denunciation would be called for. His aim is not to ridicule his opponents but to cajole them into agreeing. But the new charter remained widely unpopular. When Mather's handpicked governor, Sir William Phips, arrived, a body of disgruntled opposition was already mustered. Phips was a Massachusetts man who grew up a poor boy in Maine and made his fortune by recovering sunken treasure in the Caribbean. In 1690 he had joined the Mathers' church. Cotton Mather eagerly took on the task of representing Phips's position. His attachment to Phips reveals his crucial weakness as a political writer. He had no genuinely independent position; he was an apologist, not an advocate. The role of apologist forced him into asserting that the new charter was even preferable to the old from the perspective of the people. He felt he had to defend Phips at any cost, even though the bluff former sea captain showed himself to be ill-tempered, imprudent, and incompetent as

COTTON MATHER / 451 a commander in a disastrous military expedition against Quebec. Even after Phips's governorship broke down, Mather began a biography of him, an urgent defense of the governor as New England's representative. Phips was recalled to London and died there. Mather brought out the biography anonymously in 1697, though his hand in it was inescapable. One function of the Life of Phips was to defend the Mathers' position. The previous seven years had brought the new charter, the witchcraft trials, and the ill-fated expedition against Quebec; they were not easy years to applaud. It seemed natural to Mather to use biography as his means. The wisdom of the Mathers' policies would be vindicated by their intimate connection with the life of a redeemed and public-spirited man. The genre of the Protestant saint's life dictated a glorious ending won through difficulties; difficulties could thereby seem a portent of the happy end. Unfortunately, Phips himself was not really plausible as a saint, and the Mather policies still looked vulnerable. Cotton Mather's political stances were inconsistent, and not simply because he made considered adjustments to new circumstances. He tried both to defend his father's position and to seem to speak for the consensus position of New England as a whole. Mather was really temperamentally unsuited to cope successfully with the political life of Massachusetts in his times. His special virtues as a writer brought on that unsuitability. His eye was too fixed on an ideal vision of New England, a mythic version of its history, for him to respond appropriately to the factional differences then current. As a writer he faced a dilemma. His ultimate concern was with history, not local but universal; he wrestled, as his ancestors had, with the question of how New England fit into the cryptic plans in the Bible for redemption of the world. In the course of his life Mather became increasingly preoccupied by the millennium, the

grand conclusion to history. Yet his belief in the existence of such a grand preordained scheme obliged him to examine closely the local symptoms that might suggest God's intentions. He could be most sure of himself in dealing with an event like the Andros insurrection, an occasion in which dramatic actions were to be taken with some awareness of larger meanings. But in the petty politics of Massachusetts under the new charter, he could find no sense of proportion. He was not inclined to dismiss an event as trivial. Instead, since he knew that God communicates continually with his people, he seized on the trivial as evidence of God's will. Mather's attempts at anonymity in the Life of Phips suggest another problem. He was like a man who believes that his voice is too loud but cannot make it softer. His early problems with stuttering must have taught him the importance of speaking out clearly. His experience and his culture would not have prepared him for anonymity or the concealment of identity; how could one conceal being a Mather? Humility was a crucial spiritual virtue that might seem counter to self-display, but humility could also entail the public confession of one's own inadequacies and imperfections. Mather's political involvements in the late 1680's and 1690's left him feeling exposed, inescapably the object of public attention. He could not conceal his own style, nor could he pretend to be someone else. And from Saint Augustine in particular, whom he quotes throughout his writings, he would have learned the dangers to one's soul of pretending to be another person. Yet concealment of identity was a prevailing literary strategy in his times. The English Augustan writers were perfecting a prose style that brought out ironies and nuances and avoided insistent and unqualified statement. Mather at times tried to conceal his own hand or to curtail his use of the first person. When he began his autobiography, which he entitled Paterna, he resolved not to say who he was. The omission

452 I AMERICAN was awkward, because it prevented him from referring to any of his own writings and because the manuscript was specifically meant to be read by his own son and was not explicitly intended for publication. (It was finally published in 1976.) It was far more natural for Mather to proclaim his own authorship boldly, as he did in the general introduction to the Magnalia Christi Americana. He describes there various strategies of anonymity or concealment that he might have employed. "Whereas now I freely confess, 'tis COTTON MATHER that has written all these things." The Magnalia Christi Americana (the title means "great works of Christ in America") is an immense history of New England, running to 850 closely printed folio pages in its first edition of 1702. Mather's subtitle reads "the Ecclesiastical History of New-England, from Its First Planting in the Year 1620. unto the Year of our LORD, 1698," but he was in no way limiting it by its title to a mere aspect of New England history. Other histories of New England had been written. Governor William Bradford, for example, had written Of Plymouth Plantation, an extensive and often eloquent history of the Pilgrims. Mather consulted Bradford's unpublished manuscript and followed it closely. But none of the earlier histories was as ambitious in scope as the Magnalia. It quickly superseded all other records as a source of information about New England, and even those who criticized or ridiculed Mather borrowed from him and accepted his view of events as the standard Puritan view. Benjamin Franklin cites the Magnalia in the early pages of his Autobiography for Mather's characterization of his grandfather. Mather himself quoted the English dissenting minister Vincent Alsop, who had said of it that his colleagues should read the whole thing through twice, as he had done. In a half-mocking but appreciative mention of Mather in 1869, Har-

WRITERS

riet Beecher Stowe pointed to the work's centrality to New England's historical self-awareness. And Nathaniel Hawthorne paid Mather's literary imagination a mixed but genuine compliment in describing the Magnalia as a "strange, pedantic history, in which true events and real personages move before the reader with the dreamy aspect which they wore in Cotton Mather's singular mind." The work as a whole was divided into seven books (the number seven had, of course, numerous biblical significances). The first book, "Antiquities," describes the earliest conceptions of the New World and the first process of settling. The second book is devoted to the biographies of the governors of New England, starting with William Bradford and John Winthrop and continuing to Mather's own time; he added the already published Life ofPhips as an appendix to that book. In the third book Mather provides biographies of sixty of the founding ministers of New England. Harvard College and its most significant graduates are the subject of the fourth book. (Writing before Yale, the second college, had been founded, Mather could see this as a full account of advanced education in New England.) The fifth book records the church platforms and assorted statements of principle that assemblies of the American Puritans had arrived at, going back to the Cambridge Platform of 1648 in which Richard Mather had been instrumental. The sixth book is a loosely organized collection of strange and marvelous occurrences that manifested the presence of God's will in New England. And the seventh book presents a record of the conflicts that the church in New England had gone through—with Roger Williams, Anne Hutchinson and the Antinomians, the Quakers, the Indians in King Philip's War, and the war with the French and Indians that had been going on since 1688. The structure of the entire work is loose and flexible; individual sections could be

COTTON MATHER / 453 filled out by pieces that Mather had already published separately. His biography of his younger brother Nathaniel and a sermon on Boston city improvement, for example, are included in the Magnalia. The inclusion of such material has been used as evidence that the work as a whole is merely an anomalous omnium-gatherum that lacks any coherent structure or sense of movement. But Mather felt strongly that his method of organization permitted him greater scope. When Daniel Neil's history of New England, with a more conventional organization, appeared seventeen years later, Mather complained that its chronological sequence had made it merely "a dry political story." Mather understood that a chronological order would lead to a necessary emphasis on specific events, and the real history of New England that he wished to chronicle had involved much more. When he writes the life of John Winthrop, the first governor of Massachusetts, in the second book, his title is "Nehemias Americanus," the American Nehemiah. The crucial fact that Mather wants to convey is not that Winthrop was a patient and adroit leader of the young colony but that he realized in America the biblical role of Nehemiah, the just governor who built the walls of Jerusalem. Winthrop's actions and personal qualities are implied by his relation to the Bible; "Nehemias Americanus" is the most inclusive description that can be made of him. Much of the Magnalia is biography. In relying on biography to convey the growth of the American church-state, Mather was imitating the precedent of John Foxe's Acts and Monuments of These Latter and Perillous Dayes (1559), best known as Foxe's Book of Martyrs. (That work, probably the most likely book after the Bible to be owned by an English-speaking Protestant, describes the growth of the English Reformation as a story of individual martyrs,

especially under Queen Mary.) For Foxe, and in a somewhat different way for Mather, the divinely inspired character of the national church can best be dramatized by seeing the lives and deaths of its saints. As a biographer Mather was careful about searching out facts. He does include material critical of his subjects, always including the attacks made against them in their own lives. He says of John Cotton, for example, that he was perhaps too self-denying and forbearing. There is even humor in many biographies, although characteristically it takes the form of illustrating his subjects' good natures. The names of these ministers and governors are the occasion for continual puns: Samuel Stone is "a precious jem"' "a Load-Stone and a F/mf-Stone"; Ralph Partridge had the innocence of a dove and the loftiness of an eagle and at last "took Wing to become a Bird of Paradise." Names were not irrelevant to Mather, whose urge was always to find meaning everywhere. Overall, despite the individual characterizing touches, the impression that these biographies leave is not one of diversity. For one thing, there is no clear sense of difference between them and Mather; there is no acknowledgment that aspects of their lives have been uncommunicated and are not fully known and understood. There is no genuine order of priority among them. Each in turn is remarkable for goodness, but no one stands out above the others. In the third book Mather includes a set of four longer biographies entitled Johannes in Eremo (John in the Wilderness) as well as The Triumphs of the Reformed Religion in America, a longer biography of John Eliot, the apostle to the Indians. These are out of proportion with the other lives of ministers because they had already been published separately. The other ministers treated in this book are organized in the order in which they died, rather than in any order of importance or merit. It

454 I AMERICAN would be hard to say, on the basis of the Magnalia alone, which figures had been central in the making of New England. The subjects blur together as one reads. A main motivation for writing the Magnolia was to vindicate New England's existence. In the first chapter of the first book Mather alludes to a pronouncement of Pope Zacharias in the eighth century that it was heresy to believe in the existence of unsuspected and inhabited lands in the antipodes of Europe. The Church of Rome, says Mather, is not only the enemy of Protestantism; it has denied the existence of America. Even Saint Augustine denied that human beings lived anywhere besides Europe, Asia, and Africa. The American continents had been concealed by God until the right moment in history, Mather observes—until the Renaissance and the Reformation revived true learning and true religion. America has a special place in biblical prophecy, according to him; in the last days before the end of the world, the four corners of the earth will acknowledge Christ. America's place in prophecy explains its importance in history. All historians have been restive with Mather's treatment of his material, but he was not really writing history. Though Mather seems to have been careful in his use of materials and energetic in seeking information, the Magnalia in essence is really an exposition of the ways in which New England's history fits a biblical pattern. The history in the Old Testament of the Jews, who had escaped from Egypt and then later from captivity in Babylon to settle in the land that the Lord had given them, was for Mather a systematic prefiguration of the story of God's people in New England. The resemblances were not fortuitous but inevitable. Bradford had been an American Moses, leading his people into an American wilderness. John Eliot, the Puritan missionary to the Indians who translated the Bible into Algonquin, is com-

WRITERS

pared to Enoch and Aaron. The number of references to the Hebrew patriarchs, church fathers, and leaders of the Reformation can seem baffling unless the reader recognizes that they are central to the work's interpretive scheme. Mather's narrative procedure is based on a method of biblical interpretation called typology. According to typology the events and personages of the Old Testament are meant to be seen as a systematic foreshadowing of the life of Christ, who is the great antitype (the figure whom those types describe). Typology is thus a mode of symbolic interpretation, but the symbolic relationships are not subject to varying interpretation. Meaning is fixed and intrinsic; it is the work of God. Just as the Hebrews had come out of Egypt through the Red Sea, Christ was baptized in water by John before he began his ministry. As Moses had given laws or as David had led the people of God, Christ was lawgiver and king. In all ways Christ was greater than the types of him, but the types serve to explain more fully the significance of his life. From the beginning the American Puritans had described their collective experience in terms of such biblical parallels. Mather's Magnalia realizes that rhetoric in literature, laboriously dramatizing the parallels between Israel and New England until at last his reader can no longer see the uniqueness of events or personalities. New England's history becomes, in Mather's hands, a fulfillment of biblical prophecy. One inherent danger for a Christian in describing New England as a new Israel is that the prophecies describe doom as well as promise. Israel broke its covenant with the Lord. Mather cannot affirm the past without warning about the present, and yet his own impulse to celebrate the goodness of New England would not permit him to see episodes such as the antinomian controversy as anything but a momen-

COTTON MATHER / 455 tary interruption in the colony's development. There had been change since the first generation, but change had to mean progress, ultimately considered, since every change brings the millennium closer. The date of that great event was already set, and Mather tried hard to guess it. At one point he had speculated on 1697; he later predicted that Roman Catholicism might collapse on schedule in 1716. His thoughts in his later years turned increasingly toward describing an apocalyptic future that would vindicate his persistence in the New England way. In this light he read the conflicting signs of the present. The Magnalia insists on classical parallels along with the biblical parallels for New England's history. Winthrop is like Lycurgus of Sparta or Numa Pompilius of early Rome, lawgivers to their peoples. But Winthrop is also superior to the figures of the classical past, through his peculiar qualities of Christian selfrestraint. "In fine, the Victories of an Alexander, an Hannibal, or a Caesar over other Men, were not so Glorious, as the Victories of this great Man over himself, which also at last prov'd Victories over other Men." It was traditional to combine classical and biblical antecedents, especially in the most ambitious work: Dante Alighieri and John Milton, for example, systematically blend these two great sources of knowledge. The Magnalia is full of echoes and references to Milton and Vergil. It might be best, in fact, to consider the work as designed to be an epic. Naturally the epic writer seeks not only to record but also to transform his material. Mather's epic intentions declare themselves from the first sentence of the general introduction. His real subject is not so much facts as wonders. "I WRITE the Wonders of the CHRISTIAN RELIGION, flying from the Depravations [depraved conditions] of Europe, to the American Strand." The epic qualities of

the work explain in part Mather's style, which has been much discussed and not often appreciated. Mather's sentences are long and frequently filled with quotations in Latin and Greek. Mather could not really resist such flourishes in a work so grandly conceived. Such choice flowers, he admitted, were "almost unavoidably putting themselves into the Authors Hand." Yet he also described his as "a Simple, Submiss, Humble Style" The contradictions in Mather's own descriptions of his style suggest that he was trying to do many things at the same time. His sentences labor to combine lament and encomium, history and prophecy, decline and promise, humility and exultation. "I am sure New-England has a True Church to People it," he could write in book 7, and further on in the same paragraph, "it must after all be confessed, that we have one Enemy more pernicious to us than all the rest, and that is our own Backsliding Heart, which has plunged the whole Country into so wonderful a Degeneracy, that I have sometimes been Discouraged from Writing the Church-History of the Country " The discrepancies in the record do not vex Mather much. For him they are a proof that Christ's great works in America cannot be wholly fathomable. Sir Henry Vane, briefly a governor of Massachusetts and an adversary of Winthrop, is a puzzling figure for Mather. Without further effort at interpretation he quotes a contemporary criticism of Vane's term as governor and a description of Vane's heroic death. When Mather describes the witchcraft episode in Salem, he remarks on the confessions of witchcraft that were retracted after the episode was over. "And though more than twice Twenty had made such voluntary . . . Confessions, that if they were all Sham, there was therein the greatest Violation made by the Efficacy of the Invisible World, upon the Rules of Understand-

456 I AMERICAN WRITERS ing Humane Affairs, that was ever seen since God made Man upon the Earth, yet they did so recede from their Confessions, that it was very clear, some of them had been hitherto, in a sort of a Preternatural Dream, wherein they had said of them selves, they knew not what themselves" Both confessions and retractions were wonderful. At a time when such a capacity for wonderment was increasingly identified as superstition and credulity, Mather clung to the capacity, because he believed such wonders were the material of all contact between God and man. Cotton Mather is particularly associated with the witchcraft trials in Salem in 1692. For in the midst of the public furor, he wrote a small book entitled The Wonders of the Invisible World, which defends the witchcraft trials and tries to show them to be a fitting stage in New England's history. All those who have been disposed to see him as ridiculous, credulous, and ultimately a menace to civilization have seized on this work as proof. Those who have disliked the Puritans anyway have been happy to agree. Those who have respected the Puritan contribution have often contemptuously dismissed the book and its author. It is certain that The Wonders of the Invisible World was disastrous for Mather's reputation both in his own time and afterward. The episode at Salem has taken on a mythic significance that far exceeds its historical importance at the time. There were scarcely any measurable political, economic, or social consequences of the event for the colony at large. Yet everyone with even a smattering of knowledge of colonial American history has heard of the Salem witchcraft trials. And the meaning of the events there is supposedly also common knowledge. For one thing, it is thought, the whole occurrence was a public turmoil stirred up by the Puritan ministers, who skillfully worked their gullible congregations into a

frenzy as a means of exercising control. According to this view, Cotton Mather had the foremost responsibility for stirring up the community. There was no witchcraft being practiced at Salem, the popular version goes—nothing but a few hysterical and manipulative adolescent girls. Many people assume that the American Puritans were unusual in believing in witchcraft and that such a belief is a sure sign of a twisted mind. So Mather's firm belief in the existence of witches can best be explained by dissecting his lamentable psychological state. This version of the events at Salem is an almost unrecognizable distortion of the facts. That the myth should persist so long, despite the careful efforts of historians and literary scholars, suggests that the myth is an important cultural phenomenon in its own right. The Salem witchcraft episode is a tragedy that has been turned into a morality tale, complete with all the forces of good and evil. The Puritans themselves, who had little taste for tragedy but a vast appetite for stories of good and evil, would not have agreed with the mythic version, but they would understand its form. Witchcraft was in fact practiced in Salem, though probably not much more than a few spells were cast to predict the future. Virtually everyone involved—accusers, accused, and the general public—believed in the existence of witches and witchcraft before anything ever happened. The Bible acknowledged and condemned the existence of witchcraft; so did many learned men of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, some of whom dabbled in it themselves. The tragic victims who went to the gallows protesting their innocence (witches were hanged, not burned, in America) believed in the existence of witchcraft as firmly as everyone else; they would not endanger their immortal souls by admitting to witchcraft and thereby escaping execution. The incident in Salem was only an American

COTTON MATHER / 457 manifestation of a widespread European fascination with spirits and the occult during the Renaissance. One side of that fascination took the form of researches into magic and the occult by such philosophers and scientists as Giordano Bruno and Sir Isaac Newton. (Newton practiced alchemy, speculated on the validity of judicial astrology, and wrote a posthumously published book on the biblical prophecies.) Another side of that fascination appeared in the thousands of executions for witchcraft during the seventeenth century; 160 people were burned to death in Wurzburg in 1629, for example. Against such a background Cotton Mather's belief looks a good deal less bizarre. Individual cases of witchcraft had appeared earlier in the century in Massachusetts, though they were hardly common occurrences. A few people were convicted of witchcraft and executed. The records about the supposed witches suggest them to have been emotionally disturbed; at least some of them probably believed that they were in league with the devil. What made the outbreak at Salem noteworthy was that there seemed to be a complex conspiracy of witches involved. Salem had a history of quarrels and bad feeling. The sense of frustration and malaise that afflicted the whole colony— the revocation of the charter, wars with the Indians, a general feeling of lost purpose—must have been a factor. Sir William Phips ordered a special court to hear the cases in June 1692. The Mathers and other ministers issued advice to the judges to beware of relying on spectral evidence but to proceed vigorously against any possible demonic conspiracy. As the summer advanced, the court found accusations multiplying, and it sent nineteen men and women to the gallows. The public had strongly supported the initial investigations, but by the end of the summer, opinion was shifting. At an informal meeting of the judges and Cotton Mather at Samuel Sewall's house, it was

decided that the younger Mather should publish an account of the court proceedings. The book was hastily written, cobbled together from odd materials that Mather had at hand; it was ready for the press in about three weeks. It was certainly natural for Cotton Mather to write such a defense of the court. Its members were friends of his; he was in a familiar position as an apologist. The court had been convened by Increase Mather's handpicked governor, Phips, who had been on the frontier all summer fighting the Indians and was now insisting that the reasons for the court's existence be defended against possible attacks. Moreover, Cotton Mather had his own personal and ideological reasons for discussing the world of spirits. For others the Salem witches were an urgent problem without any larger metaphysical significance. For Mather the strange behavior of the possessed girls and the reports he had obtained about unnatural events were evidence concerning one of the great philosophical questions of the century. Since Rene Descartes's destruction of the old edifice of Aristotelian physics, one of the great problems had been whether physical events took place through mechanical causes alone or whether spirits were engaged in some way in causation. Descartes's mechanistic philosophy was hardly satisfactory as a description of many physical phenomena; even worse, in the eyes of his critics, it seemed to deny that God and his angels were active in running the world. The view that spirits did not direct phenomena was called, by Mather and others, Sadduceeism, after the early Jewish sectarian movement that denied the existence of spirits and an afterlife. Cotton Mather knew that angels existed, because he had seen one himself. His diary records in Latin the visit of an angel while he was alone and praying fervently in his study. The angel was a dazzlingly bright-winged creature; it promised him that his books would be pub-

458 I AMERICAN lished in Europe as well as America and that he would play a great part in the momentous final events shortly to come. And the angel applied to him the description in Ezekiel of a cedar in Lebanon of great beauty and stature and many branches. His diary also records at various points what he called "Particular Faiths," powerful inward assurances of some good that the Lord would do him or his family. To affirm the existence of active angels meant affirming the existence of active devils as well. One side effect of Mather's more hopeful preaching message was a special emphasis in his sermons on the importance of angels and devils. Where his father was more likely to locate evil in the depths of the human heart, Cotton tended to see evil as something carried by devils, who are external agents. Several years before the Salem events Mather had examined and written about the case of several Boston children, the Goodwins, who had supposedly been bewitched by an old Irish woman, Goodwife Glover. He wrote up the record of his investigation of the whole case in a pamphlet called Memorable Providences (1689). He clearly thought of himself as a careful empirical observer; he notes both the ambiguities in Goody Glover's confession and the uncanny behavior of the Goodwin children. When he wrote to the Salem court reporter, Stephen Sewall, for representative trial transcripts, he appealed for the most convincing cases. "I am willing," he wrote, "that when you write, you should imagine me as obstinate a Sadducee and Witch-advocate as any among us: address mee as one that Believ'd Nothing Reasonable." Mather saw The Wonders of the Invisible World as both a vindication of Massachusetts justice and a further demonstration of the work of spirits in the world. As the letter to Stephen Sewall indicates, he was not testing a hypothesis; he was building a case, and he seems to have been worried about convincing himself as well.

WRITERS

Mather's understanding of the behavior of spirits helped him to explain the sudden outbreak in Massachusetts: The New-Englanders are a People of God settled in those, which were once the Devil's Territories; and it may easily be supposed that the Devil was exceedingly disturbed, when he perceived such a People here accomplishing the Promise of old made unto our Blessed Jesus, That He should have the Utmost parts of the Earth for his Possession. The Salem incident was therefore a counterattack in a cosmic battle. Although Mather warns in the conventional way that witchcraft was a sign of God's wrath for the colony's degeneracy, his greatest emphasis is on the collective solidarity that he hopes this crisis will bring. If only they can all weather this crisis together, "we shall soon Enjoy Halcyon Days with all the Vultures of Hell, Trodden under ^our Feet." He notes the dissatisfactions with the proceedings that some people have shown, and he approves of that spirit of caution just as he approves of the zeal of the prosecutors. The devil's most dangerous work, he says, is in sowing discord among good men: The Embroiling, first, of our Spirits, and then of our Ajfayrs, is evidently, as considerable a Branch of the Hellish Intrigue, which now vexes us, as any one Thing whatever. The Devil has made us like a Troubled Sea; and the Mire and Mud begins now also to heave up apace. As he hurried to prepare the book for publication, Mather added to it various accounts about the detection of witchcraft. He included a sermon that he had delivered two months earlier; on that occasion he had speculated enthusiastically that the witchcraft outbreak was a convincing sign of the imminent end of the world. The Bible indicates that the times just before the end will be particularly difficult; the

COTTON MATHER / 459 sermon compares the predestined history of the world with the lives of the righteous, who often experience trials and despair not long before their last moments. The sermon concludes by conjecturing that on the basis of biblical prophecies as applied to the history of the Reformation it may well be that the end of the world will come in only five years, in 1697. After filling out the book further with materials at hand, Mather added the accounts from several trials that had taken a long time to get to him. The book as a whole is a strange amalgam that shows the haste with which it was assembled. It was popular enough to be reprinted several times in Boston and London and then again in several editions in the mid-nineteenth century. A few days before The Wonders appeared, Increase Mather published a treatise entitled Cases of Conscience Concerning Evil Spirits Personating Men, a critique of the use of spectral evidence to convict witches. The result of Increase's treatise was the collapse of the court at Salem and the eventual freeing of those who were awaiting trial or had already confessed. Once again father and son seemed to be working at cross purposes. The difference between the two books seemed so great that the Mathers found it necessary to publish a denial that Cotton Mather had disagreed with his father. The final result of the whole controversy was that Increase Mather earned the credit for stopping the proceedings at the same time that Cotton Mather seemed to be persisting in the delusion. Cotton did feel the same scruples about spectral evidence that his father did, but he was too absorbed in justifying his friends on the court, and ultimately in justifying New England itself, to acknowledge the problem. Five years later, on the occasion of a public day of fasting and humiliation, Sewall publicly recanted his role in the proceedings. Cotton Mather never recanted officially, but in

his Life of Phips he describes the entire affair as too perplexing for human understanding to resolve perfectly. Sewall bravely acknowledged the evil in his own conduct. Cotton Mather saw the colony as confused by forces too subtle for it. Mather did not have to wait long for the attitudes expressed in The Wonders to receive scathing criticism. In 1700 Robert Calef, a Boston merchant, published in London his More Wonders of the Invisible World, assembled out of his correspondence with Mather, his own descriptions of Mather's practices in diagnosing witchcraft, and textual examinations of Mather's writings on witchcraft. It depicts Mather as compounded of equal parts of gullibility, meddlesomeness, and a secret prurience, which manifested itself in fondling the bodies of possessed women. Opponents of the Mathers probably provided materials for Calef, whose writing suggests both industriousness and venom. Mather knew what Calef was up to before Calef's book went to press, but he limited himself to prayers and ineffectual denunciations. It was hard for him to accept the fact that someone in Boston could be out to get him and even harder for him to accept the possibility that God would permit such a thing to happen. As the century turned, Mather found the Particular Faiths he was receiving increasingly baffling. They promised further important public services for his father. Instead, Increase Mather's adversaries in 1701 maneuvered him out of his post as president of Harvard. Even closer to home, Cotton's wife appeared to be dying. Particular Faiths assured him that she would recover, but her condition over a period of months gradually worsened. Mather tried intense prayers and fasting, but to no avail. The frustration of the Particular Faiths, like the ambiguous ending of the witchcraft trials, left Mather unsure about his relationship to the invisible world. He did not question his faith,

460 I AMERICAN WRITERS but as the eighteenth century began his practice changed subtly, becoming less declarative, more meditative. Before, a typical sermon might have been A Midnight Cry, which is full of exhortations in the first-person plural and calls for a general renewal of the covenant in his congregation and a more vibrant faith. His characteristic later sermon depicted the pious individual, not the saved community. Piety and good deeds became his great emphases over the last thirty years of his life. Piety was the crucial concept in an international movement in the early eighteenth century. Its advocates in Lutheran Germany came to be called Pietists, and Pietism was the great theological issue there during this period. Cotton Mather came in contact with that movement through his reading and correspondence; Auguste Francke of the University of Halle, the leading Pietist theologian of the time, was an important correspondent and influence. The old connection between the American Puritans and their dissenting brethren in England, which had been vital for Increase, was fading for Cotton. His correspondence in the eighteenth century indicates that he detected signs of incipient Deism in the writings of the English dissenters. Moreover, they seemed insufficiently energetic about helping to get his books published. He turned more to the Church of Scotland; in 1710 the University of Glasgow made him a Doctor of Divinity, a title of which he was particularly proud. The greatest intellectual influence, though, came from Pietists at Halle. Piety referred to a spiritual state with certain distinctive features. In many ways akin to Puritanism and springing from the same roots in the Reformation, Pietism preached the essential importance of experiential religion. It concentrated less on matters of dogma or church polity; Lutheran and Puritan Pietists might disagree about the meaning of the Eucharist or the

organization of congregations, but they were united in their concern for the holy life. Pietism pointed to a more passive, accepting attitude toward life. Where an earlier Puritanism had more often stressed virtues of discipline, courage, and resoluteness, Pietism stressed humility, obedience, purity, patience, and a rejection of worldly vanities. This tendency to deny the world had subtle political implications. Outwardly, Mather never contradicted the belief in New England's destiny so strongly expressed in the Magnalia and The Wonders of the Invisible World, but his thought moved away from visions of a special national mission. His diary records his doubts and discouragements with the direction of events in New England; Pietism offered a way around such doubts. Earlier American Puritanism had been especially preoccupied with the conversion experience itself—whether it could be prepared for, its relation to the efficacy of the sacraments, its role as a precondition to church membership. For the first two generations of Puritan thinkers, that first entry of the Holy Spirit into the elect person's heart was crucial; righteousness in thought and action afterward were examined as evidence of whether the experience had been genuine. For Cotton Mather and the Pietists the history of one's spiritual life after this first acceptance was more important; they thought in terms of development, renewal, and ultimately of maturity. Puritans had always honored aged righteousness, but they had speculated less on the stages that would lead to a godly old age. Much of Mather's preaching and writing in his last thirty years was designed to help lead a person through significant and recurrent elements in the pious life, like childbearing, solitary prayer, obedience to parents, instructing children, and setting an example for others. In the words of the subtitle to The Heavenly Conversation, one of his sermons particularly influenced, according to its preface, by Francke and

COTTON MATHER the German Pietists, he was inculcating "the Methods of Conversing With a Glorious CHRIST in Every Step of our Life." Deeds of pure love were Mather's preoccupation. He did not take part in the line of acute religious psychologists in American Puritanism that stretched from Thomas Shepard, Thomas Hooker, and John Cotton to the greatest of them, Jonathan Edwards. Rather, he preached righteous actions, the doing of good. There has been a tendency, therefore, even among some of the most sophisticated Puritan scholars, to see Mather as one for whom good deeds were enough for salvation, as if Mather had somehow bumbled into what any Puritan would consider heresy. Mather knew that actions considered merely as overt behavior did not save anyone; he was speaking of actions that come spontaneously from a good heart. By guiding a person to right behavior, moreover, he hoped to be guiding him to a better heart. The best-known title of one of Mather's most important works expresses his intentions directly—Essays To Do Good. Its longer title, Bonifacius. AN ESS AY Upon the GOOD, that is to be Devised and Designed, BY THOSE Who Desire to Answer the Great END of Life, and to DO GOOD While they Live, reveals Mather's complicated intentions. The great end of life is still to glorify God; Bonifacius proposes to provide certain patterns by which God may be glorified in the world. First published in 1710, it was one of Mather's most popular works. It was revived early in the nineteenth century and went through nineteen editions by 1845. Part of the impetus behind the little book was the endorsement of Benjamin Franklin, who gave it credit for influencing him at an early age. In a letter to Mather's son Samuel in 1784, he wrote that the book "gave me such a turn of thinking, as to have an influence on my conduct through life; for I have always set a greater value on the character of a doer of

/ 461

good, than on any other kind of reputation; and if I have been, as you seem to think, a useful citizen, the public owes the advantage of it to that book." Though it is instructive to see Franklin and Mather thus linked together, there were central differences in what they expected from good deeds. Franklin always believed that good deeds offered authentic satisfaction; he took the sort of pleasure in his benevolent achievements that one can take from one's own possessions. Mather, on the other hand, had insisted that good deeds were an urgent duty that could never be done sufficiently or adequately. Our times of unfruitfulness ought properly to be a source of humility and frustration, to remind us of how little we have really done. To do good, Mather prescribes the spiritual state of Puritanism—a complementary relationship between anxiety and the urge to be up and doing. Both Mather and Franklin favored forming voluntary organizations for benevolent purposes—the prototype of the Kiwanis and the Rotary. Mather advocated societies of young men who would meet weekly, keep a helpful eye on each other, and organize their discussions around useful religious topics, "not the disputable and controversial matters, but the points of practical piety'." Soon after settling in Philadelphia in 1726, Franklin formed such an organization, called the Junto, organized according to rules similar to those Mather recommended except that practical piety had shifted subtly into civic benevolence. Franklin, and after him the other young men in the group, saw much to be done for Philadelphia, and by the time they were through, the city had a lending library, a system of volunteer fire companies, a college, and a modern hospital. Franklin's kind of good deeds transformed Philadelphia. Mather had no program for Boston; he never got any group going in a sustained way, in part because he saw the minister in such a group as

462 I AMERICAN a spiritual coordinator rather than a member. When Mather spoke of specific improvements, he could not be content to see them as goods in themselves: Perhaps almost every Proposal to be now mentioned, may be like a Stone falling on a Pool; Reader, keep thy Mind Calm, and see whether the Effect prove not so! That one Circle (and Service) will produce another, until they Extend, who can tell, how far? and they cannot be reckoned up. Ralph Waldo Emerson would later use the image of the circle as a symbol of spreading influence. Like Mather he had far less relish than Franklin for the concrete and limited good of something like the Franklin stove. In many ways Bonifacius looks forward to modern attitudes toward family and social relationships. In a section on home life Mather warns against making children fear their parents. A child should be hit only for vicious or insubordinate behavior; normal relations with children are to be carried on through elaborate manipulation. He is particularly vehement against the practice of schoolmasters' beating their students, a nearly universal custom that persisted long after Mather's denunciation. Education for him consisted above all in the truths of religion, but he also suggests that parents teach even a child who is to be liberally educated some useful trade or craft. Addressing himself to doctors, he writes cogently about the psychological dimensions of sickness. "I Propound then, Let the Physician with all possible Ingenuity of Conversation, find out, what matter of Anxiety, there may have been upon the Mind of his Patient; what there is, that has made his Life Uneasy to him." As a pastor, Mather thought of himself as a healer of troubled souls. Tolerant and forgiving by nature, he continually emphasizes his own readiness to subordinate doctrinal differences among wellmeaning Protestants.

WRITERS

But some of Mather's own psychological weaknesses emerge in this book as well. He emphasizes repeatedly what had by this time become an obsessive theme in his writing, that the doer of good must expect to be abused in return. Mather's reiteration of this theme amounts to a subtle kind of self-pity, and the degree to which he was abused could seem in a perverse way the measure of his worth. Franklin at the beginning of his Autobiography recommends personal vanity as an incentive for bringing benefits to society as a whole. Mather closes Bonifacius by recommending humility. One should actually seek "to be Despised and Rejected of Men; and Patiently to bear the Contempt, and Malice, and Abuses of an Untoward Generation Tis an Excellent thing to come to Nothing ... Hear it with as much of Satisfaction as they can Hope it. Embrace Exinanitions; Embrace Annihilations" What Mather calls humility seems more like the despair of a man who saw his efforts and personality slighted by the community that he was called to serve. Mather's emphasis on good deeds came as part of his disposition to accommodate with what he saw as the forward evolution of international Protestant thought. There were, to be sure, elements of current thinking of which he was suspicious, including the spreading tendency toward denying the personality of God implied by the Bible and replacing the Old Testament Father and the New Testament Son with an uncharacterized principle of order and benevolence. Writing to the prominent English dissenting minister and hymn writer Isaac Watts, Mather expressed his resistance to that tendency as part of his loyalty to "the uniting of all good men in a syncretism of piety." Wherever possible, Mather sought ways of remaining true to the old tenets of New England theology while taking part in the progressive movements of his time. One way of being both enlightened and or-

COTTON MATHER / 463 thodox was through science. The Puritans in England and America had always been receptive to the investigation of nature. They shared in the traditional view that natural law would corroborate scripture, revealing a God of wisdom and order. Mather's early investigations of the symptomatology of witchcraft, however deluded they may seem to us, were carried on in a spirit of critical experimentation. He had tried to note the evidence of demonic possession as carefully as possible. But witches were not Mather's only scientific interest. From 1712 onward he sent records of various observations of nature that he had made or collected to the Royal Society of London. In return the society named him a fellow in 1713. (He would occasionally identify the author of his shorter works simply as "a Fellow of the Royal Society," another of Mather's fumbling efforts to reveal his identity by concealing it.) The Royal Society did not print the bulk of Mather's extensive contributions. These letters, which Mather called collectively his Curiosa Americana, sometimes make rather strange reading. One entire letter is devoted to various cures he has heard of that have come to the afflicted by way of dreams, another proof of the efficacy of the invisible world. He concentrated on the wonderful and bizarre at a time when the best work in science was concerned with the explanation of regularities like the known movements of the moon and planets. The letters reveal him to be more a poet by disposition than a scientist; the impetus behind his scientific observations, as with much else, was his sense of wonder. Mather's interest in science led him also to write The Christian Philosopher (1721), which developed the parallels between experimental science and Christian theology. Mather was quite up to date in his awareness of contemporary science; he accepted Newtonian physics, and his explanation of it was the first exploration of its implications by an American. There

is no trace of anxiety in his tone as he expands on the lessons of piety that can be derived from natural creation. Our own perspective in time would suggest that Mather's confidence was unwisely placed. As science has continued to take hold of natural phenomena, God has been a hypothesis increasingly less required. Mather, though, felt with some cause that it was he who had broken with the past by affirming the religious relevance of natural science. He could look back with approval at the overthrow of Aristotelian physics, the complexities of which he pronounced unintelligible. Scholastic philosophy, moreover, was tainted by the continued endorsement of the Church of Rome. The physics of Descartes was no more amenable to religion, since it claimed to find for every natural phenomenon a material cause. Newton, by comparison, not only explained the physical world better, his explanation was based on a mysterious nonmaterial cause—gravity. "Gravity is an Effect insolvable by any philosophical Hypothesis; it must be religiously resolv'd into the immediate Will of our most wise CREATOR, who, by appointing this Law, throughout the material World, keeps all Bodies in their proper Places and Stations, which without it would soon fall to pieces, and be utterly destroy'd." The Christian Philosopher-, as its name suggests, was intended to serve both religion and natural science (or philosophy). The religion that it propagated would be free from doctrinal disputes. "Behold, a Religion, which will be found without Controversy; a Religion, which will challenge all possible Regards from the High, as well as the Low, among the People; I will resume the Term, a PHILOSOPHICAL RELIGION: And yet how Evangelicair The essays in the book proceed from light, the stars, and the planets to natural phenomena like rain, hail, gravity, and magnetism, and end with the animals and man—a traditional scholastic sequence of presentation. Mather relies heavily on his own library, the best in New England, to

464 I AMERICAN provide him with material. Preoccupied as always with curious and instructive facts, he did not fully recognize the extent to which a revolution in theory had taken place in natural science. But as he describes the progress of understanding the rainbow, he applauds Newton as "the Perpetual Dictator of the learned World." The essays typically begin by presenting a synopsis of the present state of knowledge on a subject and end with an extended praise of God. Mather's tone is buoyant and enthusiastic; he is free of the bitterness about his critics that shows up so regularly in his late works. Coming at last to man, he devotes a long essay to the human anatomy. His impulse is to see everything that God has created serve some purpose. Even male teats are functional, he asserts, and he cites a report from Denmark that they can provide milk if needed. The reader of The Christian Philosopher waits in vain for what would seem the inevitable Puritan corollary to this praise of the body's functioning—that man's inner state is nonetheless in disarray. But if Mather's natural philosophy is evangelical, it does not lead to an Augustinian restlessness with the soul's inadequacies. This was the eighteenth century, and Mather was happy to show that he could share its confident grasp of creation. His interest in science and his impulse to do good led Mather in 1721 to one of'his greatest and most controversial achievements. He had seen epidemics of smallpox pass periodically through Boston, each leaving its toll of disfigurement and death. During the epidemic of 1721 Mather took steps to implement a procedure of inoculation, a controlled infection, that he had seen described in the Transactions of the Royal Society. Together with Zabdiel Boylston, a Boston physician, he began to encourage people to try the procedure. The public was outraged; it appeared as if Mather wanted to spread the disease deliberately. He was attacked in James Franklin's

WRITERS

New-England Courant, and someone even threw a handmade grenade into his bedroom window, which failed to explode when it landed. Even the fact that Mather had cited the practice as employed in Africa was held against him. The best-trained physician in Boston, Dr. William Douglass, denounced Mather's procedure as a crackpot scheme. In fact, Mather's theoretical knowledge of medicine was extraordinary for an American. His treatise on medicine, The Angel of Bethesda (written in 1722), finally published 250 years after it was written, shows him to have been the first significant figure in colonial medicine. Throughout the epidemic Mather tended the sick himself, even dressing their sores for them. Few people were better prepared than he to deal with abuse. After this shaky start, the technique became established; even his old enemy Dr. Douglass adopted it a few years later. It was a risky procedure—later in the century Jonathan Edwards died of a smallpox inoculation—but it was the best protection against smallpox until Dr. Edward Jenner discovered the cowpox vaccination in 1796. That episode offered one of the few satisfactions of Mather's later life. Throughout the first decade of the eighteenth century he was involved in a bitter feud with the governor, Joseph Dudley. Mather had relished the role of spokesman and spiritual adviser that he had played for Phips. Dudley had long been connected with the merchant class that was moving to deny the ministers their former role as the supervisory conscience of the theocracy. Mather was forced into a frustrated and often angry opposition— not a comfortable role for a man who liked to be forgiving and enjoyed advising prominent men. Gradually his view of the state was changing; in Bonifacius he found no important role for the magistrate in doing good beyond setting a pious example and avoiding corruption. In his personal life Mather suffered repeated

COTTON MATHER / 465 anguish. Of his fifteen children, only two survived him. After the death of his first wife, Abigail Phillips, whom he had married in 1686, Mather married a second time, in 1703 to Mrs. Elizabeth Clark Hubbard. She died ten years later, and in the same month five of his children died. In his diary Mather admitted that he found his house more tranquil without the bustle of small children. After a two-year courtship he married Lydia Lee, who seems to have aroused his greatest amorous interest. But she turned out to be subject to paranoid frenzies. She would rummage through his "Reserved Memorials" to steal or blot them. Her violent outbreaks, which would alternate with passionate reconciliations, led Mather to fear for his children's health and safety. Mather's oldest son Increase showed no signs of continuing the family line. He quarreled, got into debt, did not go to Harvard, and was even accused of siring a prostitute's child. Mather was an affectionate if manipulative father; his son's behavior left him helpless with sorrow and confusion. In 1724, just when Lydia's violent behavior had reached a new peak, word came that young Increase had been lost at sea. Old Increase had died the year before, leaving his son no money but several dependent relatives to look after. The last ten years of his life brought financial troubles that Mather was ill-equipped to handle. At one point he barely avoided bankruptcy. His diary of these years is a sad record of helpless floundering, with hints even of suicide. Nevertheless, he continued to preach and write. Mather had always been closely attached to Harvard College, though his love for the school seemed to him increasingly unrequited after his father was forced out of the presidency in 1701. (He was also concerned about the new college that had been established in Connecticut and wrote to a wealthy London merchant, Elihu Yale, to persuade him to endow the school.) In

1724 a new president of Harvard had to be chosen; despite Mather's preeminent standing as the only American with any reputation in the international community of letters, the position was offered in turn to two inferior and less controversial men, Joseph Sewall and Benjamin Colman. Frustrated that he could not affect education in New England directly, he put down his thoughts in writing. His last important book, Manuductio ad Ministerium, a handbook describing the proper education for a minister, appeared in 1726. Nearly thirty years had passed since he had completed the Magnolia, and his goals had shifted emphasis. The earlier Mather had stressed American spiritual achievements; the later Mather emphasized an ecumenical spirit of piety that sought to embrace Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Anglicans, and Lutherans in England, Scotland, and Germany. Mather had addressed a general audience before; and the boisterous display of erudition then, the wealth of quotations in Latin and Greek that he laid before his reader, were an attempt to equal in style the grandeur of his subject. In the Manuductio Mather addresses students for the ministry. His tone is that of an old man addressing a son who has chosen the ministry; his own son Samuel, who would eventually succeed him as minister at the Second Church, had been at Harvard not long before. The clarion note of affirmation in the Magnolia had been a symptom of the desperation that Mather really felt about the American church's decline. Now he sounded more intimate and comfortable; he no longer needed to raise his voice to be heard. The Manuductio describes the education suitable for a minister—the mental attitude, the indispensable reading, the personal habits to be acquired. "In the FIRST Place, My Son, I advise you to consider yourself as a Dying Person, and one that must shortly put off this Earthly Tabernacle" Mather instructs in the

466 I AMERICAN first paragraph. That attitude of disregard for the things of this world eliminates the possibility of leisure in which subjects might be studied in themselves. In that spirit Mather examines first the program of study for a liberal education and then the necessary texts. Elements of the traditional seventeenth-century Harvard education are mixed with new influences. On one hand he endorses Johann Heinrich Alsted's encyclopedic collection of late medieval and Renaissance lore; on the other hand he recommends Pierre Bayle's Historical and Critical Dictionary, a classic of the early Enlightenment. Natural philosophy gets an enthusiastic description, with a summary of its progress from Aristotle and the Scholastics to the time of Newton. The Manuductio is not just a compromise between old education and new. Mather intends it as a model education for a kind of minister different from either the dated Harvard product or the new latitudinarian Anglicans, whose preaching seemed to him un-Christian. One significant change in the curriculum is a greatly reduced role for logic. Mather's disdain for logic is emphatic; he sees it as little more than hairsplitting. Nor does he allow much time for metaphysics and ethics. The small part assigned these subjects is symptomatic of a striking shift away from the preoccupation with intellectual rigor characteristic of the first Puritans. The study of logic is of no real use in perfecting a person's capacity to reason, Mather asserts. "The Power and Process of Reason is Natural to the Soul of Man; And those Masters of Reason, who argue the most Rationally, and make the most Rational Researches into the true State of Things, and who take the most Reasonable Measures for their Conduct, and who in all things arrive to the most notable Discoveries, I pray, what sort of Logicians are they?" The minds Mather would train will trust in their own natural reason and their own pious

WRITERS

goodwill, not in their capacity for disciplined analysis. For one so steeped in scholarship himself, Mather does not dwell lovingly on the delights of learning. He provides a considerable list of books for his student son, but they are to be used, not enjoyed for their own sake. For many books Mather suggests only a cursory reading. Even in the case of Saint Augustine, whom Mather cites so frequently and favorably, he cannot endorse Cornelis Jansen's instructions to read all his works ten times through. The Manuductio is just as much about rules of health and practical conduct as it is about studies. Mather is not concerned with a body of learning but with a certain kind of consciousness. Studies are important only as a means to achieving and preserving that consciousness. Among the studies Mather considers is poetry. Although he admits that some are incapable of responding to poetry, he would not wish his student son to be unpoetical. He expresses a guarded approval of Homer and Vergil. Despite serious moral defects in both, the reader can also find moral virtues, as well as "abundance of Rare Antiquities" Writing poetry can be a relaxation and an aid to good style, but it must not engross the student's attention. "Be not so set upon Poetry, as to be always poring on the Passionate and Measured Pages. Let not what should be Sauce rather than Food for you, Engross all your Application. Beware of a Boundless and Sickly Appetite, for the Reading of the Poems, which now the Rickety Nation swarms withal." Much literature is without value; in fact much of it serves diabolical ends, including most of the modern plays and fictions. The subject of poetry leads Mather to the question of style, which he discusses in an extensive passage. Literary style and the standards of taste in style had long been concerns of Mather's. He describes the style he prefers as

COTTON MATHER / 467 one aiming at "Vigour sensible in every Sentence" with ample use of allusion. "The Writer pretends not unto Reading, yet he could not have writ as he does if he had not Read very much in his Time; and his Composures are not only a Cloth of Gold, but also stuck with as many Jewels, as the Gown of a Russian Embassador." But such a style is no longer respected, Mather observes. Instead a standard of false simplicity has elbowed the old ornateness out of its way. Mather fervently denounces the style of his times, which he saw as no real standard at all but rather a transient fashion dictatorially imposed by insubstantial wits. The freedom to write in one's own way was lost. "After all, Every Man will have his own Style, which will distinguish him as much as his Gate [gait]." Mather does not propose to replace one standard with another, but to let everyone write in his own way. The freedom of style that Mather hoped for was no longer available in the age of Joseph Addison, Alexander Pope, and Jonathan Swift. In the seventeenth century a multitude of varied and individual prose styles had flourished; Francis Bacon, Robert Burton, John Milton, Izaak Walton, and Sir Thomas Browne had all walked with their own gait. Mather was the last of those distinctive voices. The new style was exemplified in Addison's Spectator, the model that Benjamin Franklin used when he taught himself to write. It was a public style, the style of a man in society, a style that deliberately avoided the expression of powerful feeling. Above all, it was the style of a universal consensus; it could not be used by someone with an urgent and idiosyncratic insight. It is no wonder that Mather recoiled from it. He felt himself all his life to have been a voice crying in the American wilderness; he saw the defense of his own style as a defense of his countrymen's freedom of expression.

Mather took his style with him to the grave. When he died, on February 13, 1728, there were no disciples to take his place. The tradition he had spent so much effort at shoring up seemed to have expired as well. His most prominent contemporaries, whose names are known only to scholars today, were eager to fall into the gait of the eighteenth century; and a tradition of bloodless piety, against which Edwards, Emerson, and T. S. Eliot would in their turn react, took hold in the Boston pulpits. Yet, despite the great disparity between his hopes and achievements, Mather was not a failure. He managed to keep American Puritanism alive and intellectually active at a time when it might have retreated into a sterile provincialism. If he was the originator of little, he was the perpetuator of much, and his peculiarities have been impressed on the image of Puritanism. The Magnalia, with its gigantic storehouse of anecdote, has served as a collective self-portrait of Puritan America. The long-standing popular association between the Puritans and the Salem witchcraft proceedings can be traced to Mather's defense of the court in The Wonders of the Invisible World. The so-called Puritan work ethic, that loathsome national neurosis which is always just a half-generation behind us (though we, of course, have freed ourselves from it), raised its hideous head early in Mather's Essays To Do Good. That book also served as the first inspiration for the American tradition of organized benevolence. Mather did not create the alliance between Puritanism and empirical science, but he energetically perpetuated it at a point where science seemed increasingly to offer illustrations for Deists; overt conflict between science and religion was postponed for 150 years. And by persisting in his own style despite the authority of English Augustan standards for prose, Mather was establishing a first essential precedent for the idiosyncratic modes of discourse that have

468 I AMERICAN distinguished American intellectual life. Americans before him had already started thinking in peculiar ways of their own; hereafter they would also tend to sound different as well. That American writers have walked with their own gait, even sometimes marching to a different drummer, is so in part because Mather insisted on doing so himself. In its witness to a dying tradition, Cotton Mather's career anticipated a situation common among subsequent American writers. Much of our best writing has come from those who believed that history was burying the culture that had formed them. In "The Custom House," the essay that introduces The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne testifies to his condition as a survivor from an older Salem; the sense of identity he has acquired from that connection is so insistent that it must be acknowledged before he can release the story to his readers. Life on the Mississippi had changed utterly by the time Mark Twain wrote about it, but he returned to it again and again. For Henry Adams almost all of his education was an explanation of why his own family past had unsuited him for the present. Speaking for his author, F. Scott Fitzgerald's Nick Carroway closes the life of Gatsby by talking about what his Midwest had been like, a place where families and social status and moral values were settled. Even William Faulkner, who offers a most ambiguous picture of the older South, writes during a time he believes to be dominated by Snopeses. These writers do not become sturdy defiers of change, in the model of the European conservative, and they do not see the past as timeless and unchanging. Nor are they nostalgic; the past they represent is still too alive for them to embrace its bygone quaintness. Though he belongs in this tradition, Cotton Mather would not have admitted that Puritanism was a dying tradition, any more than he

WRITERS

could have conceded that God had withdrawn from the active governance of the world. He always insisted on seeing the passionate godliness of the first Puritan settlers as somehow present and recoverable. As an ongoing international movement that was continuing the Reformation, however, Puritanism was beyond Mather's powers to rescue. It would require the toughminded intellectual rigor of Jonathan Edwards to transform the old creed into a sinewy and resilient ideology, but that effort meant the deliberate abandonment of that international consensus which Mather had believed in so much. Mather was always less concerned with theoretical cogency than with pious behavior and the doing of good. What survived him was not an ideology but a set of cultural reflexes. If Mather failed as a prophet, he succeeded as a literary figure. He found Puritanism a collection of quirky provincial traits; out of the variety of personalities who peopled New England in the seventeenth century he fashioned in the Magnalia a monolithic collective identity. That identity has refused to disappear. The last American Puritan has always just died out; for 250 years we have been announcing that we have finally left our Puritan past behind. Cotton Mather can claim a good deal of credit for the tenacious survival of Puritanism in America.

Selected Bibliography WORKS OF COTTON MATHER A complete listing and description of Cotton Mather's 468 separate works can be found in Thomas J. Holmes's bibliography. The following works are available in editions published since the eighteenth century.

COTTON MATHER / 469 The Wonders of the Invisible World (1692). In The Witchcraft Delusion in New England, edited by Samuel G. Drake. 3 vols. Roxbury, Mass.: W. E. Woodward, 1866. Reprinted New York: Burt Franklin, 1970. Magnalia Christi Americana, or The Ecclesiastical History of New England (1702). Edited with an introduction by Thomas Robbins. 2 vols. Hartford: Silas Andrus, 1853. Reprinted New York: Russell & Russell, 1967. Magnalia Christi Americana, books 1 and 2, edited by Kenneth B. Murdock. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977. Bonifacius, An Essay upon the Good (1710). Edited with an introduction by David Levin. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966. The Christian Philosopher: A Collection of the Best Discoveries in Nature, with Religious Improvements (1721). Gainesville, Fla.: Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, 1968. (Contains an introduction by Josephine K. Piercy.) The Angel of Bethesda (written 1722). Edited by Gordon W. Jones. Barre, Mass.: American Antiquarian Society and Barre Publishers, 1972. Manuductio ad Ministerium: Directions for a Candidate of the Ministry (1726). New York: Columbia University Press (Facsimile Text Society), 1938. Reprinted New York: AMS Press, 1978. Diary of Cotton Mather, edited by Worthington C. Ford. 2 vols. Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society Collections, 7th. ser., vol. VII (1911-1912). Reprinted New York: Ungar, 1957. The Diary of Cotton Mather D. D., F. R. S.for the Year 1712, edited by William R. Manierre. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1964. Selected Letters of Cotton Mather, edited by Kenneth Silverman. Baton Rouge: University of Louisiana Press, 1971. Paterna: The Autobiography of Cotton Mather, edited by Ronald A. Bosco. Delmar, N. Y.: Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, 1976.

BIBLIOGRAPHIES Holmes, Thomas J. Cotton Mather: A Bibliography of His Works. 3 vols. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1940. Reprinted Newton, Mass.: Crofton Publishing, 1974.

Nolan, Charles J. "Cotton Mather: An Essay in Bibliography." Resources for American Literary Study, 8:3-23 (Spring 1978).

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL STUDIES Beall, Otho T., Jr., and Richard H. Shyrock. Cotton Mather: First Significant Figure in American Medicine. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1954. Benz, Ernest. "Ecumenical Relations Between Boston Puritanism and German Pietism: Cotton Mather and August Hermann Francke." Harvard Theological Review, 54:159-93 (1961). Bercovitch, Sacvan. The American Jeremiad. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978. . "Cotton Mather." In Major Writers of Early American Literature, edited by Everett Emerson. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1972. Pp. 93-150. -. "New England Epic: Cotton Mather's Magnalia Christi Americana." Journal of English Literary History, 33:337-50 (1966). -. The Puritan Origins of the American Self. New Havei>: Yale University Press, 1975. Breitweiser, Mitchell Robert. "Cotton Mather's Crazed Wife." Glyph, 5:88-113 (1979). Calef, Robert. More Wonders of the Invisible World. In The Witchcraft Delusion in New England, edited by Samuel G. Drake. 3 vols. Roxbury, Mass.: W. E. Woodward, 1866. Reprinted New York: Burt Franklin, 1970. Elliott, Emory. Power and the Pulpit in Puritan New England. Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1975. Hansen, Chadwick. Witchcraft at Salem. New York: George Braziller, 1969. Levin, David. Cotton Mather: The Young Life of the Lord's Remembrancer, 1663-1703. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978. . "The Hazing of Cotton Mather: The Creation of a Biographical Personality." In In Defense of Historical Literature: Essays on American History, Autobiography, Drama, and Fiction. New York: Hill & Wang, 1967. Pp. 34-57. Levy, Babette. Cotton Mather. Boston: Twayne, 1979.

470 I AMERICAN Lowance, Mason I., Jr. "Cotton Mather's Magnalia and the Metaphors of Biblical History." In Typology and Early American Literature, edited by Sacvan Bercovitch. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1972. Pp. 139-62. Mather, Samuel. The Life of the Very Reverend and Learned Cotton Mather. Boston: Samuel Gerrish, 1729. Middlekauff, Robert. The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971. Miller, Perry. The New England Mind: From Colony to Province. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953. Porter, Katherine Anne. Collected Essays and Occasional Writings. New York: Delacorte, 1970. Pp. 313-51.

WRITERS

Stoeffler, F. Ernest. The Rise of Evangelical Pietism. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1971. Van Cromphout, Gustaaf. "Cotton Mather: The Puritan Historian as Renaissance Humanist." American Literature, 49:327-37 (1977). Warren, Austin. "Dr. Cotton Mather's Magnalia." In Connections. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1970. Pp. 24-44. Wendell, Barrett. Cotton Mather: the Puritan Priest. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1891. Reprinted with an introduction by Alan Heimert, New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1963.

—ORMOND SEAVEY

Lewis Mumford 1895-

"W* h the whole world of ideas in ruins [in

self with, is undoubtedly one of the factors that was to lead Mumford in early maturity to be unable to define either his own identity or the direction of his life. And it was also to lead him to seek after and eventually to reject substitute fathers like Patrick Geddes or older substitute brothers like Van Wyck Brooks. It may even have unconsciously stimulated in him a preference for the generation immediately preceding his father's, the generation that he was to write about so glowingly in The Golden Day (1926) and Herman Melville (1929). Mumford knew this older "ideal" generation intimately in the person of his grandfather, a former headwaiter at Delmonico's and a gentle, upright man who had left Germany after 1848 in order to escape conscription. To this rather unassuming figure Mumford was to attribute, in his "Self-Portrait" of 1936, what "little real education" he had received as a boy, chiefly as a result of taking "walks around the city" with him. This grandfather, indeed, is the protagonist of Mumford's account of his childhood in the December 22, 1934, issue of the New Yorker, in which his mother is drawn far less distinctly and favorably. It is the grandfather who takes Mumford out into the real world, who introduces him to John L. Sullivan, to exotic saloons, exciting racetracks, and noisy German beer gardens, as well as to the wonders of

ivi5j, it was plain that the day of the wreckers and excavators was over: the time had come for the architect, the plan, the organized corps of workers. Who was capable of directing those forces in America? That was a question which bore directly both upon literature and upon social life." From "Prelude to the Present" (1931) Lewis Charles Mumford was born in Flushing, Long Island, New York, on October 19, 1895, the only child of Lewis Charles Mumford, a lawyer, and Elvina Conradina Baron Mumford. Of the lower-middle class into which he was born Mumford was later to write that he, along with Karl Marx, did not think much of it; but nevertheless its inevitably unstable mixture of poverty and gentility was to leave a mark on his later development, if only by impelling him to revolt against it. More important than his class origins, however, seem to have been the immediate circumstances of his family. In the various accounts of his childhood and early youth—autobiographical, semiautobiographical, or semifictionalized—there is never any mention of a father. The omission is striking and significant. The absence of a father, of someone to model himself on or contrast him-

471

472 I AMERICAN the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the American Museum of Natural History. Old Grandfather Graessel is a real person, not just a figment of nostalgia or social preconceptions; and yet it is difficult to escape the impression that Mumford is puffing him up at the expense of other, less responsive figures. Poor as the Mumfords were, they were able to afford a nanny. Many years later Mumford was to confide in Joel Spingarn that as a direct result of having had a governess as a child, his ego had become so inflated that he had assumed the entire world was subject to his whims. Be this as it may, and whatever the cause, it must soon be clear to any serious student of Mumford's work that modesty was and is not his strong point. Despite social and economic problems, Mumford's childhood was not unhappy. Though often lonely, he did not hide behind a wall of books; he often succeeded in making friends, and as a star pupil he also gained a security in school that he lacked at home. His years at Stuyvesant High School were especially rich and rewarding in this respect. In his novella, "The Little Testament of Bernard Martin, Aet. 30" (1928), which, like James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)—to which it is so clearly indebted—is thinly fictionalized autobiography, Mumford describes his time at Stuyvesant as consisting of hours that "do not crawl: the hours are not empty: the clock says neither tick nor tock. The moments become monuments: each moment shelters a memory." Here Mumford first tasted the sweets of success and admiration as a prospective electrical engineer, as a cheerleader, as class president, and as a member of the drama society founded and advised by an enterprising teacher of English, Thomas Bates. Bates had introduced the young Mumford to the plays of George Bernard Shaw, and thereby, as a self-consciously Shavian letter of January 23, 1914, testifies, revolutionized his

WRITERS

life. Mumford not only read Shaw but he went a step further; he "studied his ideas. Monstrous! In one year I was changed from a weak-kneed conservative (with no philosophy and hardly any opinions) to a rather wild young man with a brick in my right hand and a red flag in my buttonhole." At about this time too Mumford discovered Samuel Butler and H. G. Wells and soon managed to transform himself into a thoroughly up-to-date young man. In fact, his first nonschool publication was a newspaper article (1914) written in response to an open invitation to take issue with Shaw. Publicly, Mumford was beginning to show unmistakable signs of future success; privately, there were setbacks. To begin with, he was sickly: at sixteen he contracted malaria; and soon thereafter he was diagnosed as having tuberculosis, a disease for which he had to be treated until he was nearly twenty. Possibly even more disturbing to a sensitive young adolescent passing through a difficult puberty was the sense of his own physical ugliness. As he was to note in one of the published fragments of his autobiography, he felt himself at this time to be "an altogether unattractive creature, even to myself," who withdrew into an inner world of fantasy in which all his failures were miraculously compensated. This phase was to pass with his teens, but, as the adult Mumford is careful to point out, "the scars that accompanied this growth remain: the sense of being physically unattractive to girls, with its self-protective aloofness and simulated disdain, in order to avoid the possibility of rejection." Not that the adolescent was pathologically shy. The list of his girl friends begins at age eleven and quickly lengthens. At fifteen Mumford fell in love, an experience he took seriously enough a full fifty years later to devote a chapter to the girl, Beryl Morse, in his autobiography. Looking backward, he was even inclined to think that "his almost daily letters to her during

LEWIS MUMFORD / 473 the first stage of our friendship did as much as anything else, perhaps, to turn my mind away from technology to literature...." By 1912, when Mumford graduated from high school, he no longer wanted to be an engineer. Now he hoped for a career as a reporter; he started off at the bottom as copyboy for the New York Evening Telegram and ended up a few months later in the same position. More lasting was his commitment to furthering his education at City College, where he attended night classes from 1912 until 1914, taking a variety of subjects but expecting eventually to specialize in philosophy. As in high school, Mumford throve in an environment of admired and admiring father figures who dispensed rewards more quickly and generously than customary among journalists. In the account of his adolescence published in the New Yorker on December 4, 1937, Mumford depicts his classes and teachers in almost heroic terms. "Our discussions were battles," he writes, "and though we often lived to change sides, there was nothing tentative or hesitating in our espousals." One figure especially, that of his English professor, Earle Palmer, emerges as superhuman—"a frail but ageless figure, half pixie, half demon... .My Harvard friends have overfilled me with tales about their famous Copey, but none of them has ever made me feel the least regretful that I missed the histrionic Harvard professor. One touch of Palmer's ruthless sincerity was at least half a college education." The most crucial event of Mumford's education, however, took place in a biology class, where in 1914 he encountered the work of Sir Patrick Geddes, the Scottish sociologist and city planner. Geddes—the "Jovian father" or "master," as Mumford would henceforth refer to him—was to leave a deep and lasting imprint on this young student, to the point even of providing a model for the kind of life he was to lead. Of Mumford's debt to Geddes' thought

and of his difficult relations with him as a man, more will be said later; for the moment it is enough to point out that Geddes inspired Mumford to carry on where his walks with his grandfather had left off; that is, to undertake a systematic "regional survey" of New York City as a total—and not merely as a literary—organism. As a result, Mumford was to note as early as 1919 in his journal that his "present interest in life is the exploration and documentation of cities. I am as much interested in the mechanism of man's cultural ascent as Darwin was in the mechanism of his biological descent." The budding cultural historian had already struck root, deep in fertile Geddesian soil. The outbreak of World War I in Europe did not at first have much of an effect on Mumford, though later—especially in his correspondence with Brooks and in the "Prologue to Our Time" (1962, 1974)—he was to see the pre-1914 world as the proverbial Edwardian garden bathed in sunlight, and the post-1914 world as a twilight gradually deepening into night. In actual practice, Mumford after 1914 did very little differently until he was drafted into the navy in 1918. He continued to play tennis, indulge in intellectual pastimes, take random notes, run after girls, plan a novel in 1917 called "The Soldier's Testament"—the word "testament" runs ominously through many of Mumford's creative efforts—and take on odd jobs for brief periods: in 1916 as an investigator for the Joint Dress and Waist Board in New York City and in 1917 as a laboratory helper at the Bureau of Standards Laboratory in Pittsburgh. In the navy Mumford trained at Newport as a radio operator, carrying, as he was later to remember, "Plato or Emerson in my sailor's blouse." His sympathies, to judge by "The Little Testament," seem at this time to have been on the side of Germany, the country he had been planning to visit in 1914. "If this was a good war," so Bernard swears, "we'd be fight-

474 I AMERICAN WRITERS ing the Limies." For a time Mumford was stationed in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but he never saw action; indeed, as he was later to recall in a letter to his future wife, Sophia Wittenberg, his time in the navy was singularly peaceful, even on a personal level. For the first time since puberty he was free of sexual urges. After being discharged in late 1919, Mumford drifted into literary work of various sorts, chiefly as a reviewer for the Dial and later as its associate editor. From this moment might be said to date the beginning of the first phase— the literary phase—of Mumford's career. To be sure, Mumford had already been writing plays, stories, and even novels for at least three years, but he had had scant success getting any of these pieces produced or published. His job at the Dial was the first sign of literary appreciation, however modest. Not that even here Mumford's career moved directly forward. There was another sidestep before he settled down to write the series of literary and cultural studies of America—what he was to call his American Gallery. This step was to take him to London. It was, of course, a step that many members of Mumford's generation were taking at this very time. The postwar American intellectual in Europe is a cliche of the period. But with Mumford the motive was different. He was not turning his back on America but heeding the call of his master, Geddes. In London he lived at LePlay House, became acting editor of the Sociological Review, and won the friendship of Victor Branford, Geddes' associate; but he was not to meet the master himself, with whom he had corresponded since 1915. And he was to grow increasingly aware that Britain, sociology, and perhaps even Geddes himself were not finally preferable to America. In 1920, after only six months abroad, Mumford returned to New York, rejecting appeals to stay on or to join Geddes as his assistant in Palestine or Bombay.

Mumford did not reach this decision on entirely intellectual grounds. The underlying reason for his return was a reason of the heart, a reason named Sophia Wittenberg. Over twentyfive years later, in Green Memories (1947), Mumford was to remember, in a vivid portrait, how he first met this "young goddess" at the Dial in 1919. It was to this quite non-Geddesidn being that he confessed in a letter of September 1920 that he had postponed "Geddes's offer until we at least had had the chance to mate," and that by doing so he was preferring "that which most vitally mattered." If this seems an awkward declaration of love, it is nonetheless characteristic of Mumford the theoretical, inexperienced, clumsy, and devoted lover. The picture he draws of himself in "The Little Testament" is even more awkward and embarrassing. The heroine of this novella, Eunice, is not simply Sophia Wittenberg, but a composite of various women in Mumford's life; even so, there is enough of Sophia Wittenberg in her to suggest that Mumford's ineptness nearly destroyed the marriage before it had a chance to get established. In the novella, the crisis is stated—and resolved—in melodramatic terms: the triumphant male rejects the suppliant female, only to yield manfully to her in the end. The bits and pieces of Mumford's published correspondence with his wife during these years, along with occasional journal entries, suggest that the real story was neither quite so simple nor so satisfying to his ego. How low the marriage had sunk, as well as part of the reason why it had sunk so low, emerges from a "random note" jotted down almost two years after his marriage. "On the whole," he writes, summing up his impressions of the marriage, "it has permitted me to do more work than I had ever been able to do before; so that, by marriage, I have gained a little and lost nothing, in the final balance." Stability came to the marriage only with the

LEWIS MUMFORD / 475 birth of their first child, named—in honor of the master—Geddes. It was occasions like this that brought out the poet in Mumford, ever a very occasional inhabitant of his soul. The poem he wrote "To Sophy, Expectant" on Christmas Day, 1924, concludes with a stanza that communicates wonderfully Mumford's warm feeling for the family, for a love that includes procreation as well as recreation: "In stalk and flower was delight: Yet more, my love, they are to me Now that the ripening seed will fall To make love's happy Trinity." During the 1920's Mumford was to make a name for himself as a journalist, critic, and cultural historian, especially of the American scene. Under the leadership of Van Wyck Brooks, he joined in trying to reclaim what was best in the American cultural heritage, both literary and architectural. Though it is probably too much to say that Mumford and his friends succeeded in this task, they certainly did attract new attention to hitherto neglected aspects of the American past. This is especially true of Sticks and Stones (1924) and The Brown Decades (1931), which deal with the nonliterary arts—mostly architecture—in a way and at a level of critical sophistication that had not been experienced in America before. Even so, Mumford's best books of this period are The Story of Utopias (1922) and that powerful piece of lyrical criticism on New England themes, The Golden Day (1926). Neither, however, was as commercially successful as his psychocritical biography, Herman Melville (1929), which was a book-club selection and which still exercises an influence on Melville studies today. While Mumford was establishing himself as a critic and cultural historian, he was becoming reluctantly but increasingly aware of his comparative failure as an artist. It was a failure to which he was never to be reconciled. Even very

late in life he would put in claims to be taken seriously creatively as well as critically, as in the 1975 publication of "The Builders of the Bridge," a long, rambling "epic" play that deals with the building of the Brooklyn Bridge. Mumford had originally written this play half a century earlier, between 1925 and 1927; and it had been preceded by another, equally long play, still unpublished, called "Sumach and Goldenrod: An American Idyll," covering the years 1859-1864. In a note attached to "The Builders of the Bridge" Mumford remarks that the fault of the play was that it had too many characters, something he believed may have been caused by his reading Tolstoy at the time. The play, however, is anything but Tolstoyan; the echoes are rather of Ibsen (especially The Master Builder) and of Eugene O'Neill. But it is inferior Ibsen and O'Neill, full of talk, but very dry talk, lacking in emotional intensity or drama. The best parts are really the detailed and impressionistic stage directions, in the manner of O'Neill and Shaw, something that suggests that Mumford's creative talent lay in the direction of descriptive rather than dramatic writing. Certainly his specifically architectural writings, such as the "The Sky Line" column (1931-1963) in the New Yorker, reveal great skill in descriptive writing, as do the frequent purple passages that highlight all of his work. The evocations in Green Memories of Dutchess County, his summer home from about 1926 and his permanent home since the mid-1930's, are among the best things he ever wrote. Mumford abandoned "The Builders of the Bridge," as he wrote in 1975, at the promptings of his "literary conscience," though it is perhaps characteristic of the vagaries of that conscience that only -four years later, in My Works and Days, he was to remark that he had no doubts "as to its suitability for production on film." And although he stopped writing plays in the 1920's and—with one exception—was never to

476AMERICVCAMWRITERS attempt any creative work on such an ambitious scale again, he wrote confidently to Babette Deutsch in August 1930 that he was perhaps "at last ready to write novels and plays: and I can't pretend that I have ever been before." The exception was "Victor," a remarkable and remarkably curious attempt to write a novel in verse, a novel on which Mumford stopped working in 1939 and of which only two fragments have appeared. The very fact that Mumford should even have conceived such a project—especially after the damning things he had said in Herman Melville about the formal inappropriateness of Clarel—is extraordinarily puzzling. It may be, as the strong traces of his reading of T. S. Eliot indicate, that Mumford was trying to do for the novel what Eliot had done in the 1930's for the verse drama. But a more likely explanation is that Mumford may have been determined to stack the cards against himself in advance, as if he were trying to deflect anticipated criticism away from himself and toward an archaic form. Be this as it may, probably the fairest overall estimate of Mumford the creative artist comes from Mumford himself, in a letter to Brooks, after a part of "Victor" had appeared in the New Yorker "There is a buried poet and playwright beneath the visible monuments of my life, whose rotting bones have perhaps made the grass greener." Certainly, if that artist manque had not been an essential ingredient of Mumford's make-up, the two great series of cultural histories, The Renewal of Life and The Myth of the Machine— on which his future reputation will undoubtedly rest—would not have been the powerful and moving documents they are. In extenuation of Mumford's failure as an artist, it should also be stated that he never devoted his full energies to success. Art was merely one of several fields that he was, as it were, cultivating simultaneously. If the results in one of these fields proved disappointing, there

was still hope for a rich harvest in the others. So, as we have seen, during the 1920's and early 1930's, Mumford spent at least as much time preparing himself to be a critic as he did trying to be an artist—and not merely a critic of literature but of society and of things in general. In 1923 he helped found—and until 1933 actively participated in—the Regional Planning Association of America, which met frequently and informally to discuss what was wrong with American architects and urban planning. Besides Mumford, this small group of about twenty included such people as Clarence S. Stein, Henry Wright (the Victor of "Victor"), Stuart Chase, Benton MacKaye, and Catherine Bauer. Mumford benefited a great deal from these meetings and discussions, both personally, as with Catherine Bauer, whose lover he was later to become, and publicly, as in his editing of the famous 1925 regional planning issue of Survey Graphic. This group presented a kind of counterweight to Mumford's membership in what might be called either the "American Caravan" group— after the anthology they published between 1927 and 1936—or the "Troutbeck" groupafter Joel Spingarn's country house. This group (or groups), including others such as Van Wyck Brooks, Ernest Boyd, Paul Rosenfeld, and Alfred Kreymborg, was as "literary" as the regional planning group was "socioarchitectural." Indeed, under Spingarn's tutelage, Mumford spent a year reading through the great aestheticians, only to conclude that his time had been wasted. Even so, in 1924 Mumford published a dialogue, "Aesthetics," in which the critical positions of Spingarn and Brooks are pitted against each other in a way that makes them clearer and more persuasive than is the case even in their own writings. It may indeed have been Mumford's success in representing this kind of intellectual conflict that led him to believe he possessed a gift for genuinely dramatic

LEWIS MUMFORD / 477 dialogue. If so, he would have done well to examine more carefully the ambiguous praise of Brooks's letter of February 1925, in which Mumford's "happy touch" for dialogue is compared, not with someone like Shaw, but with Lowes Dickinson. In 1925 and 1929, Mumford traveled to Europe for several months, both times to Geneva. There, at the instigation of Brooks and the invitation of Alfred Zimmern, he lectured to a variegated collection of young people from all over Europe; and out of the first set of these lectures, he fashioned a year later The Golden Day. From Zimmern, another father figure, he derived his enormous admiration for the achievements of the Greek city-state, a lasting admiration throughout Mumford's major work. Geneva, and especially the Calvinist traditions of the city, also left an impression, helping to confirm his theoretical preference for regional culture and government. And, of course, Geneva was the home of that archregionalist and advocate of the city-state, Jean Jacques Rousseau, whom Mumford praised many years later as the man whose style he admired above all others. Thus the Geneva of John Calvin and Rousseau, fused with that of Zimmern and the League of Nations, became a kind of incarnation of all that Mumford hoped for in a modern urban and regional community. The end of the 1920's represents a clear break in Mumford's life. With the publication of his biography of Melville in 1929, he reached the peak of his fame as a literary critic; and for the first time he had pushed himself to the limits of his capacity as a writer. Writing about Melville became, as he himself gradually grew aware, a way of writing indirectly about his own situation; and gazing into the depths of Melville's despair, he felt as if he were probing and, as he wrote to Brooks, shaking the foundations of his own being. What had happened to Melville, however, Mumford was determined would

not happen to himself: he would not let his despair damage or destroy his vitality; he would not be content to travel the longest and the dreariest journey to the very end. He would not be bound, as he believed Melville had been tragically bound, by the sexual mores or social conventions of his day. He would break free of those bounds; he would take a lover. He did. He took Catherine Bauer, who, as he observes naively and melodramatically in My Works and Days, "played the part of Hilda Wangel in Ibsen's play: the voice of the younger generation [Mumford was all of thirty-five at the time], bidding the Master Builder to quit building modest, commonplace houses and to erect instead an audacious tower, even if, when he had reached the top, he might fall to his death." The affair lasted for about four years: she was the first of "three young women, besides Sophia," who "successively played active but different parts in my maturation." From her, he learned to break "through some of the limitations in my own character and experience, and . . . release energies needed for the work I was at last ready to do." Or, as he remarks elsewhere, in connection with his weekly art column in the New Yorker from 1932 to 1937, this experience "played an essential part in my emotional education which complemented my experience in love." As in the case of his earlier marital postmortem, there is in these comments a rather unfortunate sense of Mumford's using other people in order to further his work or his "education." Certainly anyone who can conclude, after devoting himself to an intense study of Melville's life, that Melville's chief problem was sexual repression and that the cure would have been for him to take a mistress seems on balance rather simplistic. And someone who can go beyond this kind of analysis to actually use it as a justification—or rationalization—for starting an affair himself seems worse than simplistic,

478 I AMERICAN seems, in fact, slightly monstrous. To be sure, the monster may really be the octogenarian Mumford providing an explanation for a Mumford fifty years younger, an explanation which that more youthful and spontaneous person might have rejected out of hand. Perhaps—but then again perhaps not. It is difficult to escape the impression that Mumford belongs to that category of egotist who sees life as a vast classroom, with himself as the prize pupil. One is reminded of W. H. Auden's choice of Goethe— incidentally, one of Mumford's heroes—to represent this type. Between Goethe and his Roman mistress there can never, Auden says, be any real communication, for "between those who mean by life a / Bildungsroman and those to whom living / Means to-be-visible-now, there yawns a gulf / Embraces cannot bridge." It is only fitting that a man for whom loving another person was an educational experience should have begun to find his sustenance and employment increasingly within the walls of the academy. Mumford's Guernsey Center-Moore Foundation lectures at Dartmouth in 1929— later to become The Brown Decades—were only the beginning of a long series of university employments, which have included visiting professorships (of up to five years) at Dartmouth, Columbia, Stanford, University of Pennsylvania, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of California at Berkeley, Wesleyan, and Harvard. He has received honorary doctorates from the University of Edinburgh in 1965 and from the University of Rome in 1967. He was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1932, 1938, and 1956 and has been awarded numerous honors and medals from academic or related organizations. Between 1935 and 1937 he was a member of the Board of Higher Education in New York City. A dissertation has even been written, with Mumford's active cooperation, on his work as an educator. All of these academic positions and honors

WRITERS

are, of course, to some extent inevitable external trappings of the successful modern American writer—or of the modern American writer "in residence"—which virtually amounts to the same thing. But with Mumford the connection is particularly intimate and particularly ironic. For he is proud that he never finished his B.A. In his books and correspondence, he repeatedly treats the university as an institution inimical to what he sees as the real values in life. In The Brown Decades, he praises himself while praising Frederick Law Olmsted for not finishing a degree at Yale: "This combination of wide travelling, shrewd observation, intelligent reading, and practical farming formed Olmsted's education: it was plainly a far more substantial discipline than the courses he had taken intermittently at Yale,..." In the second volume of The Myth of the Machine, he attacks "most of our larger academic institutions" for being "as thoroughly automated as a steel-rolling mill or a telephone system." This is all very well for an independent thinker to say; and it is no doubt arguable that Mumford's attacks are fully justified. But is Mumford independent? He has actively sought and accepted associations with the very universities he denounces. This is as if Henry David Thoreau had written "Civil Disobedience" while serving as Concord police chief. There is something fundamentally amiss about a man who says one thing and does another. This criticism of Mumford would not be worth making if it did not touch an aspect very basic to his work: that is, that this work is, on the one hand, the most learned and massive attack mounted against the institutions of modern life in America, and, on the other hand, a product of those very institutions. With the 1930's and the coming of fame, with the withdrawal to rural Amenia, New York, with his espousal of family life—they had another child, Alison, in 1935—with the peren-

LEWIS MUMFORD / 479 nial writing and giving of lectures and the visits as professor, with the work on and the publication of The Renewal of Life series, Mumford's career becomes chiefly a recital of honors and book titles. With one notable exception: World War II. Mumford was to become one of the earliest and most vociferous American intellectuals to break with his pacifist-socialist principles and to advocate an active policy of preparation for war. His resounding "Call to Arms," published in the New Republic in May 1938, produced an initial reaction ranging from incredulity to scorn, but with the Munich crisis and the clear evidence of Hitler's expansionist aims, Mumford was perceived in hindsight to have been right. As a result, when a year later he published Men Must Act, a more fully argued version of the "Call to Arms," it was favorably reviewed, even in the pages of the New Republic. Mumford's change of political direction at this time, though more sudden and severe than that of most of his contemporaries, is symptomatic of a larger change in the political climate of America. Up to this time Mumford had been, politically speaking, a fairly typical American literary intellectual: attacking warmongers, especially American warmongers; sympathizing with the Soviet Union; denouncing the injustices of the Versailles Treaty; praising Germany (before 1933) as the most progressive of all capitalist societies; and ascribing the Great Depression to inherent faults in the entrepreneurial system. As early as 1930, he had put forward his notion of "basic communism" in an essay entitled "What I Believe," a notion that was to gain greater currency when he developed it in Technics and Civilization (1934). In April 1932 he sent Brooks a draft of a "Manifesto" that represented an "effort to formulate a non-doctrinaire view of Communism, drawn up by Waldo Frank, Edmund Wilson" and himself. The manifesto was never pub-

lished, suggesting that Mumford had his doubts about it; and indeed, as he wrote to Brooks, he distrusted the Communists but was "sympathetic to their tactics " But of one thing he was sure; he was no patsy liberal. "I have never been a Liberal," he proclaimed in "What I Believe," "nor do I subscribe to the notion that justice and liberty are best achieved in homeopathic doses." The change of mind Mumford underwent about Germany, about Versailles, and—after the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact—about the Soviet Union bears some of the earmarks of a religious experience. A new moral and even stridently moralistic tone enters his writing at this time, as is evident even from the titles of his books, Men Must Act (1939) and Faith for Living (1940). In the first book, Americans are warned to beware of British hypocrites. They have sold the Czechoslovakians down the river and will not hesitate to do the same to the United States. Hence no arms are to be sold either to the British or to their allies, the French. Moreover, the Soviets are really the original fascists. Mussolini and Hitler are merely the pupils of Lenin and Stalin. Americans will have to be prepared to go it alone. Only a free people armed can resist the onslaught. Hence Mumford went out, as he recalls in Green Memories, to buy a .30-30 hunting rifle, anticipating that he might have to use it in a guerrilla war against the German conquerors. In Faith for Living Mumford treats the same subject somewhat more sedately. He reverts to a moral position, ultimately derived from Ralph Waldo Emerson, that he had first enunciated in "What I Believe," namely that "evil and good are phases in the process of educative growth; and who shall say which is the better teacher?" This hardly sounds like propaganda against fascism, since, if taken literally, it could be read to mean that following, say, the evil "teacher" Hitler might be just as "educative" as following

480 I AMERICAN the good teacher Churchill. But, of course, this is not a doctrine to be taken literally. It is merely an inflated and potentially highly misleading version of the parable of the prodigal son: namely, that an uncloistered or repentant virtue is preferable to a cloistered and untested one. There are other misleading and even downright disturbing elements in the "philosophy" of Faith for Living. As Sidney Hook points out in his essay "Metaphysics, War, and the Intellectuals" (1940), there is a basic contradiction in Mumford's argument. On the one hand, there is his ... advocacy of compulsory enrollment in labor battalions, at least for one year's service, of every girl and boy in the country; his belief that the family must be cultivated as the nuclear cell of the healthy society, that it must be attached to the soil and homestead, that divorce is too easy and the birth-rate too low;... that women have neglected the household arts, that they have drained themselves of passionate sexuality by doing men's work, relying too much upon machines and not enough upon their own resourcefulness.... Yet, on the other hand, there is the problem that none of these proposals follows from Mumford's basic tenets or from his "religious faith." And there is the even greater problem that, in a work supposedly written to combat fascism, the answers Mumford puts forward "are compatible with metaphysical doctrines which he abominates, since almost every one of his proposals is part of the totalitarian creed." In the final analysis, as Hook says, there is something frightening about "a metaphysical passion, which blinds us to the little we know, even as it lashes us for not knowing everything." Hook was not alone in commenting on the contradictory nature of Faith for Living. In a

WRITERS

long essay, "The Faith of Lewis Mumford" (1940, 1945), James T. Farrell suggests that the basic source of these contradictions lies in Mumford's adherence to a tradition of radical conservatism, a tradition based on an organic conception of society and that derives, in Mumford's case, from two nineteenth-century French reactionary political writers, Joseph Marie DeMaistre and Louis Gabriel DeBonald, via Patrick Geddes and Victor Branford. As a consequence Mumford is led to idealize the Middle Ages and to interpret history sentimentally. "He makes arbitrary judgments of good and bad," Farrell writes, "using the 'organic' as a criterion of evaluation." Moreover, he substitutes the "functional conception of society" for the "class conception": The assumption that society is an organism removes the hypothesis of economic determinism from its central position as a primary premise in the analysis of history and of social problems. Instead of looking on society as a structure organized in terms of productive relationships and economic interests, you see society as a whole. As a consequence, "his descriptions of, and assertions about, fascism contradict one another and are wholly confusing. He who confuses us concerning this question only helps to disarm us for the real struggle that we must make against this very real menace." Confused and even self-contradictory though Mumford's metaphysical passion may have been, it was sincere. It permeated his whole life during this period; and it probably gave him the strength to withstand the traumatic shock of his beloved son's death in battle in the fall of 1944. This was undoubtedly the darkest moment in Mumford's life. He coped with it in perhaps the only way he knew how: he wrote about it. And the work that came out of this suffering, Green Memories, is—in terms of its depiction of per-

LEWEIISAMUNOIIOOIP sonality and its intense sense of place—the most moving and powerful book Mumford ever wrote. Ironically, it is of all his books the one that has attracted least attention. There was also another, if far lesser, crisis caused by the war. Because of Van Wyck Brooks's support for the award to Charles Beard of a medal by the National Institute of Arts and Letters, Mumford nearly severed a friendship of a quarter-century's standing. Although he thought well of Beard personally— and indeed had been inspired by Beard at Dartmouth to start work on what was later to become The Renewal of Life—Mumford considered Beard's later historical work the epitome of what was wrong with America's attitude toward the outside world. "When I examine Beard's doctrine and his influence," he wrote Brooks in February 1945, "I think that he probably contributed more than any other single writer to the cynicism and defeatism which was so characteristic of our young people in the thirties. ..." Mumford's opposition to the award led him to resign from the institute in 1949, counting it a greater honor to stay out than to remain inside. And it led him, too, to speak openly to Brooks for the first and only time in their lifelong exchange of letters. The fault with Brooks's work, Mumford told him in December 1947, was that it was superficial: "the tragic choices and the tragic decisions in the lives of our great writers, all those elements that caused them to be despised and rejected by their own countrymen, not only in their own lifetimes but long after, have somehow escaped you...." Mumford's attack, along with the implication that his attitude in the Beard affair had revealed the same reluctance to face the darker side of life, hurt Brooks deeply. The friendship nevertheless survived, and the letters once again resumed their accustomed litany of books published and books planned. But even so, some-

thing was gone. Mumford now knew that, despite Brooks's invariably lavish praise, he was really alone. He was to remain alone; and the sense of that aloneness pervades the letters—and occasionally the books—of Mumford's later years. Again and again, there are complaints that no one reads him anymore, that no one even reviews him anymore, that he has lost all influence over the younger generation. As the honors and medals accumulate—including an honorary knighthood of the British Empire in 1975— as the number of dissertations grows, as he sees himself become the grand old man of regional and urban planning, he becomes increasingly dissatisfied and insecure. To overcome that insecurity, to reassure himself that he still matters, he published his letters to and from Brooks (1970) and to and from Frederic Osborn (1971). But was he right to do so? "The letters [to Brooks], when I finally saw them in Xerox," he writes Osborn in August 1969, "turned out to be disappointing; so that I am not sure that my reputation will be brightened by their publication." He has the same doubts about the Osborn letters when Osborn suggests that his publisher is interested in bringing them out; but though he voices these doubts, he goes ahead with publication anyway. In the 1970's Mumford also published three miscellaneous collections of his work: Interpretations and Forecasts: 1922-1972 (1973); Findings and Keepings: Analects for an Autobiography (1975); and My Works and Days: A Personal Chronicle (1979). All of these books contain interesting material, ranging from neglected essays to poems, from random notes on random subjects to excerpts from his autobiography, from self-revealing (or self-advertising) prefatory notes to letters to old friends and sections of his old books. They are all, in one way or another, substitutes for the autobiography

482 I AMERICAN that he refuses to publish during his own lifetime. They are interesting but interesting primarily to those who already have an interest in Mumford. They are really the kind of books that ought to have been edited by someone else, preferably posthumously. As it is, they tend— like the Osborn and Brooks letters—to diminish Mumford's stature rather than increase it. The continual insertion and assertion of Mumford's ego make him seem more of a querulous old man than a great cultural historian and author of The Renewal of Life series and The Myth of the Machine. The republication, and in some cases the re-republication, of essays and letters inevitably grows tiresome and irritating. One is finally left with the impression that the aim of the whole enterprise is not to gain new currency for Mumford's ideas, but to keep his name in the public eye at all costs. When the dust has cleared, the Mumford of this last retrospective phase will be mercifully forgotten, except for his autobiography. It will be the three preceding phases of his life that will matter: the opening period devoted to the criticism and revaluation of American literature, architecture, and culture; the middle period concerned with tracing the roots of the modern urban and technological crisis in the West; and the third period, more embittered and less hopeful than the second, dealing with the whole of human history and with what Mumford sees as the human compulsion to become progressively (or degressively) more inhuman. Of these three phases, the second and third are those in which Mumford has done his most ambitious and probably his most lasting work; but from a strictly literary point of view it is principally for the books of the years 19221931 that he is today remembered. It was a time during which Mumford had identified himself with Van Wyck Brooks's grandiose quest to recover for America a "usable past," as Brooks put it in his famous 1918 essay. In the

WRITERS

introduction to the Brooks letters, Mumford recalls that "we became fellow workers in the task of reclaiming our American literary heritage, too long neglected, or apologetically depreciated," so that "between 1921 and 1931, partly under his [Brooks's] influence, I made it [this task of reclamation] my main concern." There were others too who followed Brooks's example—notably Waldo Frank, Paul Rosenfeld, and Alfred Kreymborg—and eventually the recovery of the past was to lead to a more direct attempt to salvage the present, specifically in the publication of the five volumes of The American Caravan; A Yearbook of American Literature (1927-1936), of which Mumford was one of the founding editors. Fundamentally this effort can be interpreted as an attempt to establish a balance against the increasing influence of the so-called lost generation, especially Eliot and Hemingway. The American Caravan, despite its unfortunate title (both chic and "sheik"), was resolutely American, expecting to discover new and typically American oases of hope. It consisted, as Mumford summarized its aims in 1931, of "a handful of writers who were in the act of achieving a coherent philosophical position, and who were not committed to caging experience in some narrow cell, from whose confines they could count the rest of the world well and happily lost." As may be apparent from even this sketchy survey, the search for a usable past was ultimately also a search for a usable future. Mumford understood this very early on. In a remarkable essay, entitled "The Collapse of Tomorrow" (1921), he argued that ... what we call the future is in a sense always an illusion, and the greatest disillusion that Europe possibly suffers from is the loss of something that never existed outside the minds of those who moulded their activities in terms of it—the loss of a tomorrow. . . . Civilization is

LEWIS MUMFORD / 483 the magic instrument by which men live in a world of time that has three dimensions: the past, the present, and the future. When neither security of life nor continuity of works is maintained, civilization must necessarily collapse. It is this profound sense of the interconnectedness of the past with the future that helps to explain why Mumford devoted himself, as he did, almost simultaneously to a study of Utopian idealism in The Story of Utopias (1922) and to the specifically American past in the series of books that make up his American Gallery. What he was looking for was an ideal past—or the idea of an ideal future, which really amounted to the same thing—which we as Americans could connect ourselves with, both emotionally and intellectually, and thereby give purpose to our lives and direction to our society. In the preface to the 1962 edition of The Story of Utopias, Mumford maintained that he had never been a Utopian himself. "More than once," he wrote, people have suggested to me that I should present my own Utopia; and by that fact they betray that they do not in the least understand the nature of my work. One of the titles of a chapter in my book Faith for Living is: "Life is Better than Utopia," and that of another chapter in a later book is: "Regression to Utopia." Both these brief statements imply, if they do not fully express, my deepest convictions. Mumford is right about people who ask such questions not really understanding his work; but he is right for the wrong reason. For either he himself does not quite appreciate the significance of his work—especially of his early work—or else he is not being quite ingenuous. For he is unquestionably a Utopian idealist whose work, from its very beginnings, is based on very definite assumptions as to how man should live, both individually and communally.

Look, for instance, at these two, quite different "brief statements" from Sticks and Stones and judge if they are not Utopian: "The just design, the careful execution, the fine style that brings all uses into harmony [in the New England community] . . . was the outcome of a common spirit, nourished by men who had divided the land fairly and who shared adversity and good fortune together"; and, a little further on, "would it be an exaggeration to say that there has never been a more complete and intelligent partnership between the earth and man than existed, for a little while, in the old New England village?" The title—and much of the substance—of Mumford's third book, The Golden Day, is Utopian; the very idea that there was once a "golden" time is a fundamental characteristic of the Utopian cast of mind. Mumford's survey of Utopias in The Story of Utopias—fascinating exercise in intellectual history though it is—is not the work of a mere historian impartially seeking to classify and etiologize. Behind The Story of Utopias is another, more personal story: the story of a Utopian hoping to show his readers the way to paradise. Every Utopian is of course also an antiutopian. The ideal of the good place implies the reality of the bad place. Every heaven must have its hell. Hence the golden day is matched by the gilded age, or is followed by the brown decades; hence fifth-century B.C. Athens—the ideal of The Condition of Man (1944) and Art and Technics (1952)—is followed by Rome and preceded by Egypt; hence the ideal—also Thomas Carlyle's ideal and a frequently cited ideal in Mumford's work from The Golden Day to The Myth of the Machine—of the "medieval synthesis" is broken up by the Renaissance and the Reformation; hence the integrated world of Dante—as in the essay "Dante as a Contemporary" (Findings and Keepings)—yields to the disintegrating, analytic world of Descartes.

484 I AMERICAN Mumford's idea of the "idolum," as first put forward in The Story of Utopias, is important in this respect. Though actually the word means little more than the more commonly used Weltanschauung—and for that reason, no doubt, has failed to gain currency—"idolum" does suggest that Utopia is not a state but rather a state of mind. "Whilst it holds together," Mumford writes, "this world of ideas—this idolum— is almost as sound, almost as real, almost as inescapable as the bricks of our houses or the asphalt beneath our feet." It is this concept of idolum that permits Mumford to do something unique in the criticism of Utopian literature, namely to place fictions such as Plato's Republic or Thomas More's Utopia on the same level as realities such as the cities and country houses of the industrial revolution. Mumford was able to do this because ultimately for him the idea always shapes the reality, not the other way around. Consequently Coketown or Bleak House, and their real-life equivalents in Victorian England, are just as much the products of human imagination as are the philosopher king and H. G. Wells's samurai. This basically Hegelian position, first enunciated in The Story of Utopias, was to remain the philosophical basis for all of Mumford's subsequent work, and, in fact, to provide the justification for that work. The primary task of the reformer is not, as Marx and his followers believed—after turning Hegel on his head—to change the class structure and to seize control of the means of production: to alter, in other words, the material conditions of man's existence. The primary task of the reformer is rather to change people's minds about what the aims of a society are and what constitutes the good life. This is why Mumford can conclude his survey of Utopias, real and imaginary, by saying that "since the first step towards eutopia is the reconstruction of our idola, the foundations for eutopia can be laid, wherever we are,

WRITERS

without further ado." This is why we need a usable past, a confirmation that there once existed an idolum that supported the good life, so that we can, by reconstructing this idolum and adapting it to changed social and technological conditions, live the good life again. This is also why all of Mumford's books end with exhortations—even sermons—to change our ways and, to use his favorite word, to "renew" ourselves. These expressions of hope are so frequent and always so much of a piece that they sometimes strike the reader as a set of cliches to be used, and reused, as convenient uplift at the end of his books; but to believe this would be a mistake. The hope that man's way of thinking can be changed is fundamental to Mumford's whole endeavor. It is what makes him write. Not surprisingly, Mumford's conception of the course of human history—even, in his later work, of the course of universal history—is idealistic and Hegelian. This is stated as early as The Golden Day, where we are told that ... the mission of creative thought is to gather into it all the living sources of its day, all that is vital in the practical life, all that is intelligible in science, all that is relevant in the social heritage and, recasting these things into new forms and symbols, to react upon the blind drift of convention and habit and routine. Life flourishes only in this alternating rhythm of dream and deed: when one appears without the other, we can look forward to a shrinkage, a lapse, a devitalization. History, as for Hegel, is the progressive realization of the spirit, though, again as in Hegel, it is not a simple, straightforward process. "Every formative idea," Mumford writes in The Condition of Man, in the act of prolonging its existence, tends to kill the original living spirit that brought it forth. And yet, without undergoing this trans-

LEEWIIASIDIMIMUMOMNK formation and extension, the idea would have remained inoperative and self-enclosed. In this perpetual tension between the life-forming impulses within the self, which are the source of creative social developments, and the fulfillment of the idea in life and practice, in the processes of community, lies the very kernel of history. This is also why Mumford evolves, in The Conduct of Life (1951), the apparently paradoxical notion of God not being the prime mover but the final end of universal history. "The universe does not issue out of God," he writes, in conformity with his fiat: it is rather God who in the long processes of time emerges from the universe, as the far-off event of creation and the ultimate realization of the person toward which creation seems to move. God exists, not at the beginning, but at the end History is the movement toward the perfection of mankind, a movement that will never end but that, like the calculus, will forever be approaching its end. It is this Hegelian conception of the nature of history that makes of Mumford a "vitalist" rather than a "mechanist." Mumford's vitalism, to be sure, also has other roots—in Geddes, in Samuel Butler, in Carlyle, Ruskin, and the other great Victorians—but it is ultimately founded on Hegel. It is only this vitalist position, according to Mumford, that can account for the progressive development of a complex physical and chemical universe out of an original mass consisting only of hydrogen atoms. One of his favorite demonstrations of the truth of the vitalist view is Hans Driesch's argument that "no one ever succeeded in building a house by throwing stones at random at the site: at the end of a century one would still have only a pile of stones." It is this perception that allows Mumford to see Darwin's theory of natural se-

lection not as the deathblow to religious faith but, on the contrary, as the most convincing proof of man's divine progress. Darwin had revealed "that the creative process was not over but was constantly going on, reaching back into a cosmic evolution.... the mode of evolution was neither random nor pre-determined, yet some basic tendency towards self-organization, unrecognizable until billions of years had passed, increasingly gave direction to the process." Although Mumford did not fully develop this philosophical position until the final volumes of The Renewal of Life series, it already existed in embryo in The Story of Utopias. In that work, too, Mumford broached another concept fundamental to his outlook on life, something he called "utopian thinking" or, in another context, "simultaneous thinking." In his later preface to The Story of Utopias, Mumford explains what he means by this kind of thinking and why he found it so attractive: . . . the classic Utopian works had all treated society as a whole, and had, in imagination at least, done justice to the interaction of work, people, and place, and to the interrelationship of functions and institutions and human purposes. Our own society—indeed this ranks as the characteristic vice of all "higher" civilizations—had divided life into compartments: . . . Utopian thinking, as I came to regard it, then, was the opposite of one-sidedness, partisanship, partiality, provinciality, specialism. In a 1931 letter to Catherine Bauer, Mumford elaborates on this kind of integrated vision: Perhaps one ought to call it contrapuntal or even better symphonic thinking. One ought to coin a word which would describe its opposition to linear thinking: our present day notion of coordination ... is that of keeping linear thinking in parallel rows at the same rate of movement,

486 I AMERICAN whereas simultaneous thinking involves reciprocal and [timely] modifications of the whole. As Mumford acknowledges in this letter, he owed this concept to Patrick Geddes; and he makes the same acknowledgment in the preface to The Story of Utopias. "Thanks to the example set by my earliest master, Patrick Geddes," he writes, "this belief in balance and wholeness was already deeply implanted in me when I wrote the present book. I had renounced the rewards, if not the toil, of the specialist, and had consciously embarked on my career as a 'generalise' ..." Geddes himself owed much of his "simultaneous thinking" to the German idealist tradition, to, for example, Friedrich Schlegel's notion of "symphilosophy" and his (failed) attempt to integrate all the arts and sciences into a single whole. Even so, it was Geddes' determined effort, in both private and public life, to make this integration work that impressed Mumford most deeply; it was this that made him Mumford's "master." Geddes is today a forgotten literary figure. In America he is mentioned chiefly in discussions of his influence on Mumford; and there are not many such discussions. Part of the reason for this neglect is that Geddes appears to have been, according to Mumford, an "oral teacher like Socrates." Another part of the reason is, as Mumford does not point out, that he refused to play the part of Plato to Geddes' Socrates. He would agree to be his disciple, but he would not be his amanuensis; he would not, in fact, even be his biographer. Mumford's relationship with Geddes was complex and difficult, and a full appreciation of it will have to await the publication of their correspondence. Pending that event, one can tentatively say that it bears all the earmarks of a father-son conflict. Geddes himself clearly came to consider Mumford a substitute for the

WRITERS

son he had lost in World War I. In the memoir of Geddes that Mumford published in Encounter in September 1966—really an excerpt from his autobiography—Mumford quotes Geddes as saying to him in 1923, the first time they met: "'You are the image of my poor dead lad,' he said to me with tears welling in his eyes, 'and almost the same age he was when he was killed in France.'" Mumford was flattered, but he would have none of it, at least not then and certainly not so overtly. Later on, after Geddes had removed his powerful—and even overwhelming—personality from Mumford's presence, and after Geddes had stopped the oral torrent of monologue and resumed the calmer written stream, Mumford was able to reflect on what it was that connected and separated the two men. The admiration remained; his "sense of Patrick Geddes' greatness survived the whole summer I spent in his company." But there also remained the consciousness that if he wished to retain his independence and if he was to do what a true disciple of Geddes would do, he would have to refuse any collaboration. He would even have to betray, as he noted in 1935—three years after Geddes' death—the master. But if Mumford could not be the son Geddes wanted him to be, he could try to make up for the loss in other ways. When in 1925 Mumford's son was born, he named him almost inevitably, Geddes; so that, as it were, Geddes lost a son but gained a grandson. And in his books Mumford went repeatedly out of his way to state his debt to Geddes, sometimes in terms that strike one as excessive, almost as if Mumford were trying to make good for some earlier sin of omission. So, for example, in The Condition of Man, Geddes is transformed into the very type of Mumford's ideal man; he is the "one figure whose life-interests fully represent the forces I have been describing." And in the introduction to Philip Boardman's biography of

LEWIS MUMFORD / 487 Geddes (1944), Mumford delivers what is almost a paean to a superhuman Geddes who had lived a life that fused the urban and the rural, manual work and concentrated thinking, empirical surveys and profound philosophical reflection, action and contemplation. Perhaps the final and greatest compliment Mumford paid to Geddes is that he succeeded, even if only partially, where Geddes failed: he brought the message of an integrated life and an integrated community to a vast and often sympathetic public. All of Mumford's more ambitious books are characterized by the Utopian or simultaneous thinking that he ascribed to Geddes. This is true of The Story of Utopias, as it is of the whole of the American Gallery. There is not the space here to examine each picture in this gallery in detail, but they can be briefly surveyed and characterized. Sticks and Stones (1924), Mumford's second book, is, despite its breezy title, a serious social history of the United States, focusing on the growth of community life and of cities. It begins by establishing the New England town as the ideal against which the subsequent course of American history is to be measured. The ideal is partly justified by identifying the New England town with the last dying embers of the medieval order. Also, unlike New York or most other towns in the United States, the foundation of Puritan New England was primarily religious, not commercial. Hence "material good formed the basis, but not the end, of their life." Like Plato's republic, these communities of simple, white, clean, honestly crafted clapboard houses deliberately limited their size, so as to ensure the possibility of significant contact among the inhabitants. With the breakup of the New England community in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there came the triumph of the pioneer, who functions here as the archetype of modern

man: eager to exploit the land—to "loot" it— and then move on to other lands and more loot. The pioneer, unlike the Puritan, is rootless and ruthless; and when he moves into the city he becomes the entrepreneur, another looter who divides up the land into "rectangular blocks" which he can "sell by the front foot and gamble with as easily as if he were playing cards...." He lives, according to Mumford, not the good life but the goods life. With the new gridiron cities, with their blood-and-iron ethic, come the slums and the skyscrapers: both of which are equally anticommunal and antihuman. The skyscraper especially becomes for Mumford the symbol of the senseless, cancerous growth of the megalopolis. As he points out, the skyscraper, wedged as it is among other skyscrapers, cannot even be seen as a whole, except in photographs; "these obdurate, overwhelming masses," he writes, "take away from the little people who walk in their shadows any semblance of dignity as human beings." They, along with our sewers, tell the real story of our civilization. They are as ugly and menacing as the old New England town was beautiful. This is not to say that the industrial age is all bad. When extraordinary individuals—heroes like Henry Hobson Richardson or John and Washington Roebling—pit their wills against the gilded age of the pioneers and the entrepreneurs, then the results can be admirable and enduring. "The building of the Brooklyn Bridge," for example, "showed how well industrialism could handle its problems when its purposes were not limited by the necessity for sloppy workmanship and quick turnover. The story of its building is a tribute to both science and humanity." But except for the great bridge and a handful of rather atypical buildings, the industrial age was an architectural wasteland. Sticks and Stones is a lively and challenging book, still well worth reading today. This is so,

488 I AMERICAN even though it tends, like most of Mumford's work, to overstate its case, to make larger claims than the evidence it adduces can support. What about the ideal New England town, for example? Was it quite so ideal in comparison with the secular towns that succeeded and replaced it? Did the Puritan towns limit their size for humane reasons of social intercourse, or was their main objective to keep close tabs on each other? Was not the old New England town, as Nathaniel Hawthorne and others have charged, a little more like hell than like heaven? Was it not, like the ideal Platonic republic, something of a prison? These questions are not answered in Sticks and Stones nor even directly dealt with. Significantly, there is no detailed discussion of any particular New England town; and there is no attempt to trace the supposedly good life of any particular New England family. Instead, there are lyrical descriptions of the New England landscape and the white colonial houses. These can be moving, but they are not persuasive. In this respect, the unacknowledged model for Sticks and Stones—Thomas Carlyle's Past and Present (1843)—is more effective. Abbot Samson and Cedric the Saxon, though idealized, are at least specific individuals with whom we can identify and whose reality we can at least imagine; and for this reason we are more inclined to accept, even with reservations, Carlyle's medieval synthesis than we are Mumford's Puritan synthesis. Mumford's next book, The Golden Day (1926), goes back further than its predecessor in search of the origins of the American idolum. The American is now seen primarily as a displaced European, or, as the epigrammatic opening sentence of the book puts it, "the settlement of America had its origins in the unsettlement of Europe." The Puritans are no longer the ideal town-planners of Sticks and Stones. In

WRITERS

fact, Protestantism is now blamed for the condition of modern American man and even of Western man in general. It was Protestantism that demolished the Catholic medieval synthesis; and the Protestant, when he moved to America, became the pioneer. "Protestantism, science, invention, political democracy," Mumford writes, all of these institutions denied the old values.... Thus in America the new order of Europe came quickly into being. If the 19th century found us more raw and crude, it was not because we had settled in a new territory; it was rather because our minds were not buoyed up by all those memorials of a great past that floated over the surface of Europe. The American was thus a stripped European; and the colonization of America can with justice be called the dispersion of Europe.... Amid this morass of Protestant pioneers, however, there was an oasis of cultivated men. Again the place is New England, but the time is different. "In New England," Mumford explains, but does not explain why, "the inherited medieval civilization had become a shell; but, drying up, it left behind a sweet acrid aroma, and for a brief day it had a more intense existence of the spirit." This was the golden day of American culture, lasting from 1830 to 1860. It was a day that "nourished men, as no other has done in America before or since." It was the day of Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Hawthorne, and Melville—the so-called golden five; and "we who think and write to-day are either continuing [their] first exploration, or we are disheartened, and relapse into stale formula, or console ourselves with empty gestures of frivolity." These outstanding men, because they had lived at a time when the old medieval order had not yet entirely vanished and the new industrial system had not yet wholly triumphed, were able

LEWIS MUMFORD / 489 to integrate life and thought with a modicum of success. The golden day ends with the outbreak of the Civil War and the victory of the pioneer; but the fact that there had once been such a day proves that a similar day may dawn again, a great consolation for those who, like Mumford, continue to dwell in darkness. The Golden Day is a brilliant book. Brooks told Mumford that he did not think that "there is another mind in the country with such a grasp over so many different elements and aspects of American life. You have beaten us all hollow." George Santayana complained to him in a letter that Mumford had misunderstood him completely, but that nevertheless The Golden Day was "the best book about America, if not the best American book, that I have ever read." The critical press in general joined in a chorus of praise: "enormously stimulating" (Survey)', "no more thought-provoking analysis has ever been made of the progress of American culture" (Yale Review); "incessantly provocative" (Saturday Review); "written with distinction" (Journal of Philosophy); "brilliant and fascinating" (American Historical Review). The book was brilliant and it is still brilliant. But its dazzle is of the sort that sometimes serves to illuminate more the author's personality and prejudices than the nature of his subject. As in Mumford's earlier books—for that matter, in his later books as well—there is a sharp division between heroes and villains; and there is an insistence on making a partial truth do the work of a whole truth, or an epigram the work of pedestrian fact. His incessantly provocative treatment of Edgar Allan Poe is symptomatic. Poe, Mumford maintains, is "the literary equivalent of the industrialist and the pioneer." Poe's fantastic stories "have their sources in a starved and limited humanity. . . . Terror and cruelty dominated Poe's mind; and terror and

cruelty leave a scar on almost every tale and anecdote about pioneer life." James Fenimore Cooper had dreamed about the pioneer; Poe, in realizing the dream, had turned it into nightmare. And "there is scarcely a page of reliable testimony about pioneer life which does not hint at this nightmare." This is brilliant, but it is hardly just. Poe as pioneer? The suggestion is almost ludicrous. Poe is just as much the inheritor of the romantic movement and of the glorification of the Middle Ages as are Mumford's fabulous golden five. Poe's nightmares are imported from Germany, not from the Wild West. Mumford himself is a product and continuer of this very same tradition. And what about Mumford's "reliable" evidence? Are we really to believe that all those pages of pioneer life that do not deal with the supposed "nightmare" are, by that very reason, not reliable? This is to establish an unreliable criterion of reliability. Herman Melville (1929) is the climax of Mumford's work as a literary critic. It originated in an offer by George Doran in July 1927 to publish a 35,000-word biography of Melville, but within a year the book had increased by nearly three times. In the end it was to become the first of Mumford's "big" books. It stands in the Brooks tradition of psychobiography, making considerable use of the literary productions of Melville as a means to understanding the man. Consequently it is always the personality of the author that is in the forefront of Mumford's book, not the works. But despite this emphasis there is much that is valuable, in a strictly literary sense, especially the chapter on Moby Dick. Aside from the influence of Brooks, part of the psychologizing of the book can be explained by Mumford's need to correct the long-standing misinterpretation of Melville as a misanthropic madman. In this task he succeeded admirably.

490 I AMERICAN He showed convincingly that Melville, though plunged into a state of deep despair immediately after publishing Moby Dick and Pierre, was never mad. If anything, it was his society that was mad. As in The Golden Day, the importance of Melville is accounted for in terms of his having come to maturity in a period of transition, at a moment when the old culture was nearly in dissolution, when the embers flared up briefly and gloriously before going out altogether. New York City, Melville's birthplace, along with the New England states, was between 1820 and 1860 "in many respects in the same situation as Attica between the birth of Socrates and the death of Plato." The young Melville was an American Athenian, with all the poise, aplomb, and confidence of the Athenians. "I have called this quality youth," Mumford writes about the young traveller to the South Seas; "but it is what the Athenians called virtue; and as soon as we depart from it we are hoary with sin, and there is no health in us." Unfortunately this young New York Athenian's development was hampered by the very non-Athenian morality of the Victorian age. It kept him from going straight and true; it warped and stunted him, and forced his growth—for growth was inevitable—into directions away from the light. Instead of adopting a sane attitude toward women, Melville insisted on setting them up on pedestals. When he married Elizabeth Shaw, he discovered to his dismay that it is difficult to live with a woman on a pedestal. "Some day he will learn," Mumford concludes patronizingly, "that women, like whales, are objects of natural history " Melville is nonetheless a great writer; he and Whitman are the greatest American writers. Moby Dick "is one of the supreme poetic moments of the English language"; in the nineteenth century, only Dostoevsky rivals him in religious and emotional profundity. To think of

WRITERS

him as a mere writer of romances is to mistake him completely; he is a poet and philosopher. Like Dante, he "clothed his thoughts in poetic vision." It is only in this context that one can properly appreciate Moby Dick. It is a poetic epic, not a novel, even though it appears to be written in prose. The last chapter especially rises to unprecedented heights: it achieves integration at a level and at an intensity that is overwhelming. "One must go to a Beethoven," Mumford remarks, "or a Wagner for an exhibition of similar powers: one will not find it among the works of literature." The whale itself, according to Mumford, is a symbol of the force of destruction, both within and outside man, which it has been the duty of Western culture, from the Greeks to the present, to combat. But not to destroy, for it cannot be destroyed: to destroy destruction is to become subject to the force of destruction oneself. This is Ahab's tragic mistake. It is like trying to annihilate the second law of thermodynamics: success would mean stopping the whole process of the universe. Man's aim should not be to seek power, for ultimately power is always identical with destruction; man's aim, in fighting destruction, should be to achieve himself, to grow ever more human. This is the significance of the hunting of the whale; it is the hunt itself that is the end, not the whale; for "without such a purpose, life is neither bearable nor significant...." Melville was never to reach the heights or probe the depths of Moby Dick again. Thereafter his life went steadily downhill, both privately and publicly. But since the peak he had scaled had been so lofty, even his slopes were higher than those of most of his contemporaries. This is true even, as it were, of the foothills, so that it is in no way inappropriate for Mumford to devote a considerable amount of attention to Melville's poetry, and especially to ClareL

AEEWIADSIKMUNOURSAPAD,194 Mumford recognizes that Clarel is an artistic failure, but it is a remarkable failure, greater than others' successes. In its covert allusions to an unconsummated love affair in Italy, Clarel also provides a key to Melville's failure to grow beyond Moby Dick. He lacked—because his society lacked—the courage to go beyond the constraining sexual mores, and as a consequence he dammed up the sources of his creativity. Herman Melville, like its predecessor, was loudly acclaimed by the critics, though for the first time there were rumblings from the academic world that all was not well. Stanley Williams pointed out in the Yale Review that Mumford had committed a serious blunder in his analysis of Melville's friendship with Hawthorne, by suggesting that Hawthorne's story, "Ethan Brand," depicted Melville himself. This was obviously impossible, since "Ethan Brand" had been published a year before Moby Dick. In American Literature, A. H. Starke also complained that Mumford had misrepresented completely the nature of Melville and Hawthorne's parting, an event that had been described accurately in earlier studies of Melville and Hawthorne. This misrepresentation led Starke "to suspect that he [Mumford] uses his material with the freedom of a dramatist and not with the exactness of a biographer." And in a later issue of American Literature, Robert Forsythe confirms Starke's suspicions by showing in detail how Mumford had repeatedly distorted the plot of Pierre. These are disturbing criticisms; and they clearly disturbed Mumford. He never published a book of literary criticism—or a biography— again. This is a pity, for while there are undoubtedly errors of fact in Herman Melville, the interpretation of Melville's career and of most of his work is not seriously affected by these errors. Subsequent critics might question and even dismiss much of that interpretation,

especially the eccentric analysis of Melville's sexual life, and they might argue, with justice, that Mumford fails to give due artistic credit to Billy Budd; but even so Herman Melville is a book that has helped to shape those very critics' understanding of Melville. It may be too much of a young man's book, too full of enthusiasm, too careless of the facts; but it is certainly anything but what Archibald MacLeish called it, "dull." It is an extraordinary achievement and a classic of Melville criticism. In The Brown Decades (1931), Mumford goes over some of the same ground he had covered earlier in Sticks and Stones and The Golden Day, but here he tries to make up—in the words of his later preface—for "a failure to do justice to the creative forces in America after the Civil War." The Brown Decades is primarily devoted to architecture, though some attention is also paid to painters like Winslow Homer and Albert Pinkham Ryder, and there is even an occasional comment about a literary figure like Walt Whitman or Emily Dickinson. Despite the titular admission that the decades following the Civil War were neither golden, as the decade^ preceding had been, nor even white, as during the period of the flowering of New England, the brown decades were nevertheless productive and important. "It is time," Mumford proclaims, "that we ceased to be dominated by the negative aspects of the Brown Decades." There were great forces and men at work in this period. There was Frederick Law Olmsted, the architect of New York's Central Park; there were John and Washington Roebling, who built the Brooklyn Bridge, which has now become for Mumford "perhaps the most completely satisfying structure of any kind that had appeared in America"; there was Henry Hobson Richardson, a mighty figure "who almost single-handed created out of a confusion which was virtually worse than a mere void the beginnings of a new architec-

492 I AMERICAN ture"; there was Louis Sullivan, "the Whitman of American architecture"; and there was—and is—Frank Lloyd Wright, the climax of the brown decades as well as their conclusion: with Wright modern architecture is finally born, and there is again gold on the horizon. The Brown Decades is an original and valuable book. It sheds light on a period and on aspects of American culture that were still shrouded in darkness when it appeared. If it did not receive the critical accolades that some of Mumford's earlier books had garnered, the press still treated it with respect; and over the years it has continued to exercise an influence, as Mumford notes, even greater than Sticks and Stones. It is certainly not, as Mumford claims in The Culture of Cities (1938), "exasperatingly superficial." No superficial book could have established Mumford, as this book did, as one of the foremost American critics of architecture. Some reviewers might complain, to be sure, that there were too many disagreements between subjects and predicates for their liking. Mumford always wrote quickly and much—perhaps too quickly and too much. But he also wrote well. This, for example, is how he sums up and justifies the whole outlook of the post-Civil War generation: "One might as well expect a high sense of tragedy in an undertaker, as heroism in the generation that follows a war: meeting death is one thing, and disposing of the remains is another." This is just the sort of insight that hit home to a generation that was itself postwar. This is all very good. Yet it is disturbing that in The Brown Decades Mumford had written a book in which the late nineteenth century had been given a valuation utterly different from the one he had ascribed to it in The Story of Utopias and in The Golden Day. At first this period is treated as wholly Cimmerian, a blight of slums and country-house hypocrisy; next it turns out to be not quite so bleak, though definitely day is darkening into night; and fi-

WRITERS

nally, in The Brown Decades, it has become almost pleasant and promising: it is brown and not black, brown as in rows of comfortable brownstone houses or even as in brown, plowed, and fertile fields. What to make of this inconsistency? Maybe nothing, for after all a man, especially an Emersonian man, has a right to change his mind. But after too many changes, it is hard to put one's faith in him. Perhaps the most perceptive appreciation of The Brown Decades was published only years later. It came in a letter of October 1931 from Brooks. "What bowled me over all the time I was reading," he wrote, "was the thought that all these sketches and ideas are properly fragments of the great book that has to be written and that nobody in the world but Lewis will ever be able to write. I mean, The History of American Culture, in six volumes, on the scale of Gibbon's Rome, also written in the grand style and from a point of view that is absolutely and everlastingly central"' In his reply, Mumford admitted that Brooks was right in suspecting that The Brown Decades was merely a byproduct of a far greater and mightier work. He had been planning such a work for at least two years; and he had communicated these plans to Joel Spingarn: "I plan to do something larger, more terrible, than the ordinary novel or play, and one must use a good part of one's life in the mere absorption of nourishment before one is ready for such a task." At about the same time, in April 1929, he wrote delphically in "Dante as a Contemporary" (Findings and Keepings) that while another Divine Comedy was not to be expected, still . . . the audacious effort itself is a challenge. The poet who would resolve our chaos will be as deliberate as Dante. He will not order experience by turning away from and renouncing it, as our academic humanists advise; but, confronting it, dominating it, he will convert it with

LEWIS MUMFORD / 493 implacable will into the materials of art. To achieve this, even decently to fail at this, he will have to be a poet, but such a poet that men will mistake him equally for a scientist, a technician, a philosopher, a statesman. Or even, one might add, for a "generalist." Ironically for a work conceived on such vague, if massive, lines, Mumford gave it the working title of "Form." By the end of 1930 this book was completed and Mumford sent it to Alfred Harcourt, his publisher. Harcourt sent it back, with the suggestion that Mumford "do a more thorough job; and the four volumes of the 'Renewal of Life' series followed." They followed—but slowly; the last volume did not appear until 1951. In 1932, Mumford spent the summer in Europe gathering materials for the book; and in the winter and spring of the following year, he was already busy writing. "The book has taken charge of me," he wrote Brooks in March 1933, "and it drives me to work harder than anything I had ever attempted before." By June the book had burgeoned into three books which, Mumford said, "all my life has been a preparation for writing...." His avowed aim now was to fire a "grand broadside at the mechanists and the mammonists from within their citadel, by one who knows how to use their own weapons for exactly what they are worth...." The first broadside was Technics and Civilization (1934). Like all the volumes in the series, and like the two volumes of The Myth of the Machine, it is an enormously intriguing and challenging book. But, as such, it is impossible to do justice to it in the brief space available here. Only the outlines of Mumford's achievement can be suggested. Technics and Civilization traces the development and sociocultural impact of machinery from the Middle Ages to the present. The first and in many ways the most important machine

is the clock—a point Mumford had already made in The Golden Day. It was a machine that arose out of the needs of the medieval monasteries to regularize their prayers and their work. Initially religious, the time machine and the time sense soon became primarily secular: a vehicle to achieve profit rather than increased communion with God. Quantity and quantification replaced quality and spontaneity; now only numbers counted, or only those who counted the numbers. Thus came to an end the eotechnic age (1000-1750), an age based chiefly on water and wood. Now a new age dawned, the paleotechnic age (ca. 1700-1870), founded on coal and iron. Its leaders were the capitalists, energetic city dwellers who asserted their independence from the Church and even, less consciously, from God. They were primarily Protestants; and it was they who finally destroyed the medieval synthesis. Symbolically, the quantifiers went underground, seeking their riches out of sight of God: "Mine: blast: dump: crush: extract: exhaust—there was indeed something devilish and sinister about the whole business. Life flourishes finally in an environment of the living." Armies and war were also profitable for the quantifiers, especially since "an army is a body of pure consumers." The carboniferous capitalists disemboweled the insides of the earth and infested its surface with the plagues of slums and factories. Finally, with the perfection of the hydraulic turbine in 1832, came the neotechnic phase; now the inventor and, to a lesser degree, the entrepreneur were replaced by the scientist and the manager. Twentieth-century man is still at the beginning of this new phase, a phase in which the machine will finally be integrated into life, and in which the dominant machine values will at last be made subject to the values of life. The danger here is that this process may be impeded by the carboniferous capitalists on

494 I AMERICAN the one hand, and by the irrational and romantic primitivists on the other. Mumford warns that there is no turning back to an eotechnic paradise; the only way to integration is to move forward into harmonious neotechnicality. And, while the year is 1934, with economic depression at home and fascists rampant abroad, there is hope: "One can now say definitely, as one could not fifty years ago, that there is a fresh gathering of forces on the side of life." Although generally sympathetic to this vision of neotechnic bliss, Auden was not entirely convinced, as one can see from the following stanza from his "Letter to Lord Byron" (1936): We're entering now the Neotechnic Phase Thanks to the Grid and all those new alloys; That is, at least, what Lewis Mumford says. A world of Aertex underwear for boys, Huge plate-glass windows, walls absorbing noise, Where the smoke nuisance is utterly abated And all the furniture is chromium-plated. There were others who were even less sold on the glitter of neotechnicality. Writing in the American Review, John Gould Fletcher mocked a Utopia in which . . . the grime of our factories will vanish, thanks to electric power-houses, where everybody will live in garden villages, read the works of Mr. Frank Lloyd Wright and Mr. Waldo Frank and others of Mr. Mumford's friends, practice eugenic sex, ... and subscribe to something Mr. Mumford calls "basic communism." Even Frank complained in the Saturday Review that Mumford had fallen prey to the pragmatist wiles of John Dewey. And Stuart Chase greeted with delight in Books "the most lucid and persuasive exposition of the promise of technics in human terms that it has been my good fortune to read. Mr. Mumford not only accepts the ma-

WRITERS

chine, he glories in it." Certainly, to judge by the reviews, if Mumford had hoped to infiltrate and destroy the citadel of the enemy, he had failed dismally. To all appearances, he had become one of the enemy himself. The next volume in the series, The Culture of Cities (1938), considers the development of the city as being, along with language, "man's greatest work of art." Here again we are presented with the integrated medieval city, living in social harmony and filially linked with its rural surroundings. Again this city is destroyed by rapacious capitalists. With the rise of centralized power in the fourteenth century came the baroque city, a forced and unnatural growth, artificially beautiful and without any living connection to the land. With all its faults, however, the baroque city is still preferable to its successor, the creation of the carboniferous capitalists: Coketown, the city of the dreadful night. Adapting Patrick Geddes' scheme of the evolution of cities, Mumford identifies six stages: eopolis, the village community; polis, an association of such villages; metropolis, one city emerging as dominant over a group of villages; megalopolis, the beginning of urban elephantiasis; tyrannopolis, the parasitic slum city; and necropolis, the collapse of organized city life. Unlike biological evolution, however, urban evolution, according to Mumford, does not inevitably pass through all of these stages, nor is any one of these stages inevitable. The city is always capable of self-regeneration or renewal. As must be clear from this scheme, the ideal city is the metropolis. The examples that Mumford cites are "Platonic Athens: Dantean Florence: Shakespearean London: Emersonian Boston." The characteristics of such cities include "long distance trading ... large-scale development of library and university as storehouse and powerhouse of ideas." In the twentieth century virtually no such cities exist; but they are com-

LEWIS MUMFORD / 495 ing into existence: they are the garden cities, conceived by Ebenezer Howard in 1898 and first built in Letchworth, England, soon thereafter. They are the proof that "the cycle of the machine is now coming to an end" and that "throughout the world, a consensus is gradually being established among men of good will and effective competence." The Culture of Cities was the most successful and is still the best-known of The Renewal of Life series. Not surprisingly, it was to this subject and to this book that Mumford returned more than twenty years later in The City in History (1961), for which he was to win the National Book Award. And after the war he was proud to Jearn that members of the Polish underground had studied The Culture of Cities as a handbook for reconstructing their ruined urban centers. He had reason to be proud; it is a remarkable achievement and was immediately recognized as such. Some readers might complain that it was too long; some, like Howard Mumford Jones, that it was too learned; others, like Malcolm Cowley, that it used too much fancy Greek terminology; but most would have gone along at least partway with Alistair Cooke's verdict that it was the masterpiece of "the most remarkable social critic of our time." The Condition of Man (1944) diverges from its two predecessors by focusing on man's inner world, rather than on the external technological or social circumstances of his existence. Like The Story of Utopias, it sees the "idolum" as the primary condition of man. It also conceives of Athenian culture as the closest approximation to the ideal, because this culture integrated man, society, and nature; and "out of an organic society arises an equally organic sense of the person." The chief fault of Greek culture, however, was that it failed to take sexuality seriously and, consequently, to take women seriously. This failing contributed to, but did not necessarily cause, the downfall of Greece,

which came suddenly and unexpectedly—a fate that, according to Mumford, may lie in store for our own culture. The Roman idolum, which destroyed the Greek, represented discipline rather than spontaneity. The Romans—to use Oswald Spengler's terminology, which Mumford does not use but by which he is clearly influenced—were civilized, not cultured. Their very success, since it was external and material, was their failure. As Rome expanded, the inner supporting framework gradually decayed, until the inevitable moment came when, as William Butler Yeats put it in "The Second Coming," "the centre cannot hold" and things simply fell apart. But before Rome fell, the outlines of a new and great building were visible within it: the Apostolic Church. From among the ruins of Rome there arose the new, Christian idolum, which, like its Greek ancestor, was based on individual rather than collective man, on the values of the spirit rather than those of the flesh, on culture rather than civilization. "The great empires of the ancient world," Mumford maintains, "Babylonia, Persia, Macedonia, Rome, had tried to build a universal state on the basis of power and law alone: Jesus tried to found a wider community on the basis of love and grace." This Christian idolum, though often perverted and even contradicted in practice, informed and inspired the Western world until the mid-fourteenth century. The immediate cause of the collapse of the Christian synthesis was the Black Plague, which "marks a line between two ages: on one side, unity, and on the other disintegration." From then on it was downhill all the way, as capitalism and Protestantism combined to reestablish the values of discipline and material success over those of love and sacrifice. From Martin Luther one road leads downward to Kant and Hegel, and then precipitously—and

496 / AMERICAN inevitably—to Hitler. Another, less horrific but ultimately equally cataclysmic road leads downward from Hans Fugger and Galileo to a scientific hell dominated by the mechanistic Caliban of science, a hell in which there is no room for either the divine (Ariel) or the human (Prospero). These are the modern hells of primitivism or technological capitalism, and neither the romantics nor the Marxists will ever be able to lead us out of it. There is no easy escape, no ready ascent to heaven. The only way out is a way that appears to lead partly backward but really goes forward, a way that passes through garden cities, through a revived sense of family life and children, through a decentralization of all aspects of life. The movement must be away from mechanical organization and toward organic community. As a number of reviewers realized, The Condition of Man is a religious book. To Daniel Bell in the Atlantic Monthly it seemed a paradoxically secular religion, and to Ordway Tead in the Saturday Review the "acknowledgement of religion as critical and powerful seem[ed] somehow timid and restrained," but to the New Yorker reviewer it was a downright revivalist "celebration of basic Christian values" which "has some of the strident fervor of a reformed sinner turned missionary. ..." By now Mumford had definitely become what Van Wyck Brooks was later to call him in The Writer in America (1953), "a prophet" of the line of Emerson, Thoreau, Ruskin, Morris, and Patrick Geddes. As such—sadly but fittingly—he came to be heeded less and less in his own country. The Condition of Man was originally intended to be the last installment of The Renewal of Life series, as Mumford himself acknowledges in the opening pages of the book. But he soon came to realize that he had not said all he wished to say on the subject, that he needed at least another volume to deliver his message of renewal to the world. Hence he set

WRITERS

to work on his overtly Emersonian "prophetic" book, The Conduct of Life (1951), which was to become the finally final volume in the series. It is by far the most subjective and moralistic book in the tetralogy, almost as if Mumford felt that his earlier mammoth surveys had obscured his essential meaning by their very size. Ironically, The Conduct of Life also turned out to be a massively learned book. The central idea behind The Conduct of Life is that life should be conducted in a way that will improve its quality and only secondarily its quantity. This may seem truistic, but then Mumford is not afraid here—as he had been earlier in his American Gallery—to seem truistic. His revision of Nietzsche is almost trite: "Reverse Nietzsche. Not Be Hard\ but Be tender and sensitive*" This sounds very much like watered-down Christianity, but, oddly, enough, The Conduct of Life does not carry on the revaluation of Christianity begun by its predecessor. Indeed Mumford here attacks Arnold Toynbee specifically for suggesting that Christianity can be the vehicle for saving our civilization. Instead Mumford puts forward a curiously anarchistic view—or philosophy, as he calls it—that maintains that life is essentially unsystematic and that therefore the conduct of life must be equally unsystematic. This view, explicitly derived from Emerson but owing at least as much to Samuel Butler, contends that "no organism, no society, no personality, can be reduced to a system or be effectually governed by a system." Unlike Butler, however, the ideal unsystematic man is not a hedonist like Townely in The Way of All Flesh but rather the "balanced man," of whom the closest modern approximation is, according to Mumford, Albert Schweitzer. Just how such an ideal—essentially one of Christian self-sacrifice—can be reconciled with an unsystematic affirmation of life Mumford does not explain. But, in any case, the renewal of life will

LEWIS MUMFORD / 497 come with the acceptance of the ideally balanced man and with the consequent multiplication of such men, who will be rooted in region and family but will also be receptive to the larger flow of life and ideas beyond their immediate environs. If Mumford's aim in The Conduct of Life was to change the conduct of modern life, it must be admitted that he failed. Life has continued to muddle along unsystematically, but this lack of system has not been visibly conducive to an affirmation of life. As Reinhold Niebuhr pointed out in the New York Herald Tribune, there was "little in past history to warrant the hope that the course of history can be changed as simply as he supposes, or by actions as unconcerted as he suggests." And Lionel Trilling, writing in the New Yorker, objected to Mumford's insistence that "we cannot possibly save civilized society unless we become perfect men and acquire every good quality men can possibly have." What Mumford wants, Trilling continued, is not a civilized society but the City of God. Mumford's sense that The Renewal of Life series did not succeed in renewing life and that, on the contrary, life was everywhere deteriorating rather than improving, led him to another massive effort to marshal the cultural history— and now even the prehistory—of the world in order to prove that renewal was the only alternative to extinction. The first volume of The Myth of the Machine, subtitled Technics and Human Development (1967), consciously echoes the first volume of The Renewal of Life series, Technics and Civilization. Once again, Mumford goes over the spectacular but often tragic history of man's mechanical progeny. But unlike the earlier study, the machine is now defined much more broadly to include man's greatest mechanical inventions: language and society. The real significance of the myth of the ma-

chine is that the machine is a myth—indeed, the greatest of all myths. The machine is, in other words, an "idolum." Language is an idolum; society is an idolum. They are the human means of conceiving of and coming to terms with external reality. As such, they are absolutely fundamental and necessary to human life and human development. But absolutely fundamental too is the realization that they are only part of that life and development. What Mumford, however, refuses to recognize clearly in The Myth of the Machine is that the machine myth that generated language and large-scale society is also responsible for the perversions of language and society: for propaganda and for war. The god may be ex machina but so is the devil. Instead, Mumford looks for the culprit elsewhere, maintaining, for instance, that primitive human society was almost paradisiacally innocent and that "millenia passed before man would take the life of his own kind in cold blood." This seems naive, though perhaps not so naive as his assertion that cruelty originates with the transition from a hunting to a farming economy. "When the hunter goes after big game," Mumford writes, he often risks his life to get the food: but the cultivator and his descendants risk nothing but their humanity. This killing in cold blood, this suppressing of pity toward creatures man had hitherto fed and protected, even cherished and loved, remains the ugly face of domestication, along with human sacrifice. If Mumford were really to take seriously what he says here, he would have to abandon entirely his doctrine of a return to the small garden city and to a revitalization of rural values. The machines of language and society are fundamentally good. These C/r-machines turn bad only when they grow big, when they become megamachines. This happened for the first time, according to Mumford, in Egypt,

498 I AMERICAN with the creation of the idolum of kingship. Kingship brings with it the megamachines of bureaucracy and army, both organized to construct and to destroy massive material abstractions such as pyramids or, in our day, space rockets. Inevitably, megamachine societies, like Egyptian society or our own "kingly" society, are self-destructive; after they destroy themselves it becomes possible for smaller and more human societies to establish themselves on their ruins. This is what happened after the fall of Rome. During the Middle Ages, social and technical machines were small and consequently life values superseded machine values. This balance might have lasted indefinitely, since "a genuine polytechnics was in the making" at this time; but the reappearance of the centralized megamachine during the Renaissance destroyed this medieval harmony. The second volume of The Myth of the Machine, subtitled The Pentagon of Power (1970), traces in detail the reconstruction of the Egyptian megamachine since the Renaissance, culminating in the modern social megamachines of the United States and the Soviet Union. In doing so, Mumford goes over much of the same ground covered in The Condition of Man: what might be called the great tradition of scientific quantification, from Copernicus to Buckminster Fuller. This is the idolum on which the modern military-scientific priesthood is based. Its power is always associated with death, with mummies in Egypt or mummies in Red Square. Its motto is Ahab's: "All my means and methods are sane; my purpose is mad." This time, however, Ahab is armed with hydrogen bombs. Opposed to pentagonal power and geometric quantification is a vague program of reform that is virtually identical with that of late Victorians like William Morris and Samuel Butler. Mumford agrees with Butler that the "central problem of technics" is to create a society in which machines are controlled by men, even if

WRITERS

this means deliberately suppressing new inventions. He agrees with Morris that society must be decentralized and the pentagon of power dismantled; instead man must live in small communities, close to the soil, fostering art and craftsmanship. There is not much new in this program; and for the first time it is put forward without the usual accompaniment of trumpets. The Mumford of The Myth of the Machine, while still hopeful, is a darker Mumford. The end of mankind is in sight: either by atomic selfimmolation or else—in Mumford's view even more horrible—by a self-adaptation to technology that, as in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, will remake humanity in the image of the machine. Mumford's original aim in his two great series had been to penetrate the citadel of the quantifiers and the power worshippers by disguising himself as one of their own. Once inside, he would then blow up their fortress, using their own weapons. This undertaking is like assuming that if one wishes to cure a madman, one must first learn to think like a madman. There is something to be said for such an assumption; but there is also something to be said against it: the madman may succeed in persuading one that it is he who is sane. This is a danger that all of Mumford's work of the middle and late periods continually runs and to which it sometimes succumbs. The accumulation of facts, the recital of theories, the citation of scholars, the compilation of bibliographies all mount up to a vast and imposing pile not unlike a pyramid, within which, deeply hidden, there lies the desiccated mummy of an inspiration. We, as readers, are dazzled, even bewildered by Mumford's mighty literary construction; and we marvel at how easily he moves great masses of intellectual stone and raises them singlehandedly to enormous heights. He is a brilliant literary engineer. But are we renewed? Are we filled with a passionately new faith in life? Do

LEWIS MUMFORD / 499 we feel reborn? Alas, it must be admitted, we do not. A poem by Wordsworth or a sonata by Beethoven renews us more fully and profoundly than do the four long volumes of The Renewal of Life. This is unfortunate. Mumford the great researcher, Mumford the great cultural and intellectual historian—and in these categories Mumford is undoubtedly great—have somehow lost track of Mumford the poet. The poet is there, or at least his remains are. But it is a shadowy presence, never realized in the flesh, never the compelling spirit that will move us as we should be moved. This is why Mumford's great rival and model, Oswald Spengler, will always remain a more powerful and appealing figure than Mumford, for he knows that the truths of the heart cannot be spoken by the brain. That is why it is symptomatic of Mumford's whole outlook that he despises Martin Heidegger and even the existentialists in general. It is symptomatic too that Mumford has no love or appreciation for music: for architects, yes; for painters, yes; for engineers, yes; even for poets, though chiefly for American poets. But as far as the thousands of pages of his books are concerned, music simply does not matter. Why not? Because music is the only art that cannot be visualized, that cannot be translated into words or organized into concepts. What it finally amounts to is that Mumford is a religious man without the religious impulse. In 1930 he wrote to Babette Deutsch that he had spent "thirty happy years without any active commitment to any orthodox religion"; and in the introduction to The Memoirs of Waldo Frank (1973) he confessed that it was only "by wrestling with Frank's passionate metaphysical convictions, which I could never make my own, that I opened the way to another more satisfactory to me—one that, as Emerson had put it, includes the skepticism as well as the faiths of mankind." An answer that mixes doubt with

faith, reason with mysticism, may be satisfying personally, but it will never serve as the basis for a renewal of life. Faith that struggles with doubt, as in the great mystics or in a poet like Gerard Manley Hopkins, may do so; but never a doubting faith. The doubting St. Thomas is the least of the apostles, though he may be a necessary one. That is why the four books of The Renewal of Life cannot be the gospels for our time; they are at best only vast and learned sketches of the modern gospels that still remain to be written.

Selected Bibliography WORKS OF LEWIS MUMFORD The Story of Utopias. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1922. Sticks and Stones, A Study of American Architecture and Civilization. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1924. The Golden Day, A Study in American Experience and Culture. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1926. The American Caravan; A Yearbook of American Literature, edited by Lewis Mumford, Van Wyck Brooks, Alfred Kreymborg, and Paul Ronsefeld. New York: Macauley, 1927-1936. Herman Melville. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1929. The Brown Decades, A Study of the Arts in America, 1865-1895. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1931. Technics and Civilization. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1934. Volume 1 of The Renewal of Life series. The Culture of Cities. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1938. Volume 2 of The Renewal of Life series. Men Must Act. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1939. Faith for Living. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1940. The South in Architecture. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1941.

500aememriczod writerswritersdff The Condition of Man. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1944. Volume 3 of The Renewal of Life series. City Development, Studies in Disintegration and Renewal. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1945. Values for Survival; Essays, Addresses, and Letters on Politics and Education. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1946. Green Memories, The Story of Geddes Mumford. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1947. The Conduct of Life. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951. Volume 4 of The Renewal of Life series. Art and Technics. New York: Columbia University Press, 1952. In the Name of Sanity. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1954. The Human Prospect, edited by Harry T. Moore and Karl W. Deutsch. Boston: Beacon Press, 1955. From the Ground Up: Observations on Contemporary Architecture, Housing, Highway Building, and Civic Design. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1956. The Transformations of Man. New York: Harper, 1956. The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1961. The Highway and the City. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1963. The Myth of the Machine: Volume 1. Technics and Human Development. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1967. The Urban Prospect. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1968. The Myth of the Machine: Volume 2. The Pentagon of Power. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970. The Van Wyck Brooks-Lewis Mumford Letters: The Record of a Literary Friendship, 1921-1963, edited by Robert E. Spiller. New York: Dutton, 1970. The Letters of Lews Mumford and Frederic J. Osborn, A Transatlantic Dialogue, 1938-70, edited by Michael R. Hughes. Bath: Adams & Dart, 1971; New York: Praeger, 1972. Interpretations and Forecasts, 1922-1972: Studies in Literature, History, Biography, Technics, and Contemporary Society. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973. Findings and Keepings: Analects for an Autobiog-

raphy. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975. My Works and Days: A Personal Chronicle. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Elmer S. Newman. Lewis Mumford: A Bibliography, 1914-1970. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL STUDIES Abercrombie, Neil. "Mumford, Mailer and Machines: Staking a Claim for Man." Unpublished dissertation. University of Hawaii, 1974. Ashton, Dore. "Lewis Mumford." Boston University Journal 23:3-7 (1975). Boardman, Philip. Patrick Geddes. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944. Brooks, Van Wyck. "Lewis Mumford: American Prophet." Harpers, 204:6-7, 46-53 (June 1952). . The Writer in America. New York: Dutton, 1953. . Days of the Phoenix. New York: Dutton, 1957. . From the Shadow of the Mountain. New York: Dutton, 1961. Conrad, David R. Education for TransformationImplications of Lewis Mumford's Ecohumanism. Palm Springs, Calif.: ETC Publications, 1976. Cowley, Malcolm. —And I Worked at the Writer's Trade. New York: Viking, 1978. Dow, Eddy Weber. "Lewis Mumford's First Phase: A Study of His Work as a Critic of the Arts in America." Unpublished dissertation. University of Pennsylvania, 1965. . "Van Wyck Brooks and Lewis Mumford: A Confluence in the Twenties'." American Literature, 45:407-22 (November 1973). . "Lewis Mumford's Passage to India: From the First to the Later Phase." South Atlantic Quarterly, 76:31-43 (Winter 1977). Edwards, Paul E., Jr. "Lewis Mumford's Search for Values." Unpublished dissertation. American University, 1970.

LEWIS MUMFORD / 501 Farrell, James T. The League of Frightened Philistines, and Other Papers. New York: Vanguard, 1945. Pp. 106-31. Ford, Reginald Eugene, III. "Lewis Mumford: A Rhetoric of Liberal Optimism." Unpublished dissertation. University of California, Berkeley, 1976. Glicksberg, Charles I. "Lewis Mumford and the Organic Synthesis." Sewanee Review, 45:55-73 (Jan.-Mar. 1937). Hook, Sidney. "Metaphysics, War, and the Intellectuals." Menorah Journal 28:326-37 (Oct.-Dec. 1940). Kazin, Alfred. On Native Grounds. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1942. Lewis, Thomas S. W. '"O Thou Steeled Cognizance': The Brooklyn Bridge, Lewis Mumford and Hart Crane." Hart Crane Newsletter, 1:17-26 (1977). Martin, Dennis M. "Modern American Literary Nationalism." Unpublished dissertation. University of California, Los Angeles, 1973.

Matthiesson, Francis O. American Renaissance. New York: Oxford University Press, 1941. Mumford, Lewis. "An Appraisal of Lewis Mumford's Technics and Civilization' (1934)." Daedalus, 88:527-36 (Summer 1959). Novak, Frank George, Jr. "Lewis Mumford as a Critic of American Culture." Unpublished dissertation. University of Tennessee, 1975. Salmagundi, no. 49 (Summer 1980). Special Lewis Mumford issue. Contains essays by Joseph Duffey and Thomas S. W. Lewis. Wasserstrom, William. The Legacy of Van Wyck Brooks: A Study of Maladies and Motives. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1971. West, Thomas Reed. Flesh of Steel: Literature and the Machine in American Culture. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1967. White, Morton, and Lucia White. The Intellectual Versus the City. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press & MIT Press, 1962. —PETER FIRCHOW

Joyce Carol Oates 1938-

I

port, New York, a small town on the Erie Canal. Her education in a one-room schoolhouse and the fact that she was not exposed to very many books as a child did not prevent her from composing stories while she was still very young. These handwritten stories with covers she designed herself became more sophisticated in appearance when, at twelve, she learned how to type. Writing seems always to have formed a part of Oates's life, though her first story to be published, "In the Old World," did not appear until 1959, when she was a student at Syracuse University. It won the college fiction prize offered by Mademoiselle magazine, and her writing has been winning prizes ever since: the National Book Award (in 1970, for them), a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Rosenthal Foundation Award of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. So frequently did she win the O. Henry Prize Awards that a special award was created for her, for continuing achievement. Were she to write no more, her reputation would already be secured. After receiving the B.A. from Syracuse in 1960, graduating as class valedictorian, Oates attended the University of Wisconsin, where she obtained an M.A. in 1961. It was there that she met and married Raymond J. Smith; and while the Smiths were in Beaumont, Texas, the

T may seem odd that a writer whose work is so often associated with the violent, the grotesque, and the bizarre should have been strongly influenced early in her life and in her subsequent writings by Henry David Thoreau's Walden, yet both aggression and contemplative withdrawal have a place in the writings of Joyce Carol Oates. These two tendencies do not antagonize, but complement, each other: the physical violence that has offended so many readers and critics always has its counterpart in the mental or spiritual realm; and a oneness with nature, though it is only seldom portrayed explicitly, is always just beneath the surface as at least a partial solution to the disruption and fragmentation of modern life. Oates insists, even in the bleakest moments of her writing, that there is a connection among all living things, and that the false boundaries erected by individual egos can trick us into thinking we can function in a vacuum, indifferent to the larger whole. The disturbing aspects of her writing often make a reader uncomfortable because they emphasize the hidden life that seethes in a more primitive core of our being. In this respect she is akin to D. H. Lawrence, Joseph Conrad, and even Fedor Dostoevsky, as well as to the school of American naturalism in which she is so frequently placed. Oates was born on June 16, 1938, in Lock-

503

2504americamwroiters following year, Gates began work on a Ph.D. at Rice University in Houston. Her studies were interrupted (and never resumed) by a move to the University of Detroit, where she taught English until 1967. From 1967 to 1978 she and her husband taught at the University of Windsor in Ontario, where they jointly founded The Windsor Review. In 1978 Gates became a member of the Creative Writing Program at Princeton University. As a critic as well as a fiction writer she has made valuable contributions to literature and literary scholarship. She has written on tragedy and comedy, visionary writers, and individual authors ranging from William Shakespeare to Norman Mailer. Oates's first published volume, a collection of short stories titled By the North Gate (1963), was followed by her first novel, With Shuddering Fall (1964). Together these two works establish many of the themes that were to be of major concern in her later work. The setting of the novel, and of most of the stories, is Eden County, Oates's fictional rural landscape loosely based on the Erie County in which she grew up. As with William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County, or Margaret Laurence's town of Manawaka, certain inhabitants and locales of Eden County turn up in different works, though sometimes they are inconsistent or out of character with previous descriptions. For instance, Oates's first published story, "In the Old World," collected in By the North Gate, has as its central character a young man, Swan Waipole, who tries to expiate his maiming of the eye of a black youth. Swan is a major figure in Oates's second novel, A Garden of Earthly Delights^ where he has the last name Revere (Waipole had been his mother's maiden name). The incident recounted in the short story does not figure in the novel, but is consistent with Swan's character even though the works were pub-

lished seven years apart. The two works in no way depend on one another for meaning, but such overlapping of character and incident was to become a significant characteristic in Oates's later writing, in which stories and characters often serve as glosses on each other. Oates's first two novels are, by her own admission, nineteenth-century in structure, by which she means that the life portrayed is complete and full of innumerable details. Her love of detailed descriptions carries into the later novels as well, creating a sense in the reader of being reminded of a person or place previously known. In Oates's most successful writing the thoughts and emotions of a character are transmitted with such force that there is a merging of consciousness between character and reader, so that the sensitive reader becomes aware of a greater life force in which he or she participates. This awareness is not always pleasant, nor is it meant to be: "A happy book," Gates maintains, "is like a happy person—there's nothing to be done to it or for it." One of the characters in the collection The Hungry Ghosts voices a similar sentiment when, as a poet whose wells of inspiration have run dry, he turns to plagiarism because he cannot write poems about being happy. Joy exists only indirectly in most of Oates's work. Oates's first novel, With Shuddering Fall, establishes many of the directions and themes that were to continue to be important to her and to her later work. It was conceived of as a religious work with a theme of obedience and love that transcend any concept of good or evil. It is set in the northwest hills of Eden County, and the landscape leaps into life as Gates describes its farms, their people, and the bareness of their lives. Eden County is not a paradise, and in fact often appears to be quite hellish to its inhabitants. Its name evokes not an innocent world,

JOYCE CAROL GATES / 505 but a reminder of what we have lost and the resulting spiritual poverty of our lives. One focus for this contrast is Karen Herz, a young girl who is susceptible to religious experience and fascinated with the workings of destiny. Returning from Sunday Mass, she retreats to her room to kneel and feel the excitement of "the secret ecstasy of these prayers, their burning, breathless power." When her father reads from the family Bible the story of Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his son as an act of obedience, Karen meditates on the "strange dignity" of fulfilling one's destiny that way, "forever bound by the inhuman plot of a story manipulated by God Himself!" The importance of this idea to Karen becomes the driving energy of the novel. When her father is severely beaten by Shar, a race-car driver who grew up on a nearby farm, he instructs Karen to kill Shar, and not to come home until she has done so. Thus Karen, like Abraham, sets out to fulfill her destiny in a manner that seems to remove from her actions any questions of moral good or evil, and places them solely in a context of obedience to her father's command. As Karen runs after, and then off with, Shar, he becomes increasingly drawn to her and finds himself more vulnerable than he dares to admit. In the summer races he begins to feel "a queer little force" that lures him "in to the center, to death," in a totally irrational way. Shar functions on an intuitive level. He knows that "for auto racers death came not through surrender to the center, but through surrender to the outside—to centrifugal force, a sudden careening off the track." Though he leaves Karen to escape this force she wields on him, he is ultimately drawn back to her by that same force, and acknowledges to himself that they are hopelessly entangled, never to be free of each other. Karen kills him by rejecting him

totally when he most wants her to be with him always. Her silence when he asks what he is supposed to do provides an answer they both understand: in the Fourth of July race his car smashes into the outer wall of the track, killing him in an act of surrender to an inexplicable force. Karen, too, has surrendered to an outside force, and fulfilled her father's command, yet she still needs to be purged of her actions. She spends the fall in a mental hospital; and even when she returns home, it is three days before her father will see her. Yet the novel ends with a moment of reconciliation as the Herz family attends Sunday Mass together. The purple vestments of penance and the plea of the Kyrie bind Karen to her father in the ritual of sacrifice, and the service ends with benediction, after which Karen and her father once more affirm their love for one another. Shar's sacrifice, though apparently senseless, partakes of this moment in a way that seems more real than the ritualized actions of the Herz family. The structure of the novel parallels Karen's spiritual journey. Its three sections are named after the seasons of spring, summer, and fall. "Spring" appropriately ends as Karen runs off with Shar, marking the end of her youth, her innocence, and her conventional life with her family. "Summer" is the time of the seething emotional encounter between Karen and Shar, and culminates in the death of Shar, subsequent riots in the streets, and Karen's collapse. It is in the "Fall" that her physical and spiritual recoveries take place, yet she will never regain the relative innocence of her previous existence. The title of the novel indicates whose sacrifice is the greater. It derives from the last line of a poem by George Meredith that questions why one should fall "with shuddering" into the breast of death, since both death and life are gifts of the same spirit of nature. Shar embraces

506 I AMERICAN death as the inevitable solution to his love for Karen, while Karen embraces what she imagines to be her necessary destiny in an act of obedience that appears sterile next to Shar's sacrifice. Oates's concern with the power of redemptive love is at work here, though it does not reach its fullest statement until the later novel Do with Me What You Will It is less interesting in this first novel because ultimately we find we do not care very much what happens to Karen. She is interesting and curious, but does not engage our sympathies. This may be partly because neither she nor Shar is entirely credible: they sometimes appear to be exaggerations or surreal figures who are allegories rather than flesh and blood. Yet both triumph in their own way: Shar through death, and Karen by surviving the battering of her body, her mind, and her spirit. Yet her obedience to her father's command does not mean she will necessarily obtain any reward. Gates once stated that in working herself out of her religious phase in this novel, she tried to show that having faith may often leave someone nowhere after all. Karen is home at the novel's end, but she has acted on the basis of the faith of her family while she remains outside of it: "They could not but love her, who had strengthened their faith in the vague beliefs they mouthed and heard mouthed to them in the ceremony of the Mass." Her own faith has been twisted by the experiences of that summer: the death of Shar, her miscarriage, and her mental breakdown. When she finally returns home, the land that shaped her seems unreal and a betrayal to her. She is forced to the realization that "No ground is holy, no land divine, but that we make it so by an exhausting, a deadly straining of our hearts." With Shuddering Fall is important to an understanding of much of Oates's later work. It announces the important themes of homecoming and return to one's origins, and the essential

WRITERS

need for compassion. Her characters do not necessarily show compassion to one another, but it is invariably present in Gates herself and in her attitude to those who populate her novels. There is no condemnation, and often a quiet admiration, for those who, however unlovable they may appear, manage to survive. This in itself is seen to be a triumph. From this first novel it can also be discerned that Oates's concern is not for those who are "happy," though a number of her later characters do appear to be relatively content with their lot. But neither is her concern solely for the tragic or the grotesque for their own sakes. Like Flannery O'Connor, on whom she has written several illuminating essays, Gates uses the grotesque to accomplish something that reaches far beyond mere shock. O'Connor uses it to reach the holy, the divine element that permeates our daily lives. Gates uses it u, reach through to the natural world and to illumine it in such a way that we are able to see ourselves as we really are, however unflattering such a view may turn out to be. Another major concept that the first novel introduces is the impact of ancestry and upbringing on a character. Both heredity and environment play crucial roles in the formation of Oates's characters. While modern psychology has revealed that such influences are critical in determining personality, they are rarely portrayed in fiction, and even more rarely are they portrayed with the accuracy and believability Gates provides. One can never be certain, and in fact it would most likely be incorrect to assume, that the character who greets us in the first chapter of one of Oates's novels is going to remain in the spotlight for very long. More likely, that character will be the ancestor of one who will come to occupy the major role in the novel. Characters are never given to us out of context, out of their families and the environment in which their growth occurred.

JOYCE CAROL OATES / 507 This is one advantage that Oates's novels have over her short stories, where the form demands compression and generally presents us with only a short span in a character's life. In the novels Gates indulges her preoccupation with sources and formative incidents. One of the clearest memories of Karen's childhood is an event that occurred when she was three years old. Running through the grass, she was scooped into the air by Shar and handed over to her father. The incident is alluded to on several occasions by those who were involved in it, and especially by Karen on the day of Shar's death. She has a dream of running home to her father to announce that everything has been finished, and in her dream becomes once again the small child lifted up by Shar and, after a moment's fear, given over to her father's arms. With Shar's death she begins her journey home, and in this sense Shar has for the second time returned her to her father. The effects of ancestry are even more clearly seen in Oates's second novel, A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967). There are three parts to the novel, each belonging to and named for one of the men who is crucial in the formation of the character of Clara Walpole. Not surprisingly, these are her father, her lover, and her son. For in terms of Clara's affections, the man she eventually marries has no stature at all compared with them. For Clara it is a marriage of convenience, enabling her to provide a home for her son. The novel begins on the day of Clara's birth, and the activity and life of the migrant workers among whom she will grow up are seen through the eyes of her father, Carleton. Through him we see once again the theme of returning home: Carleton is preoccupied with "going back" to Kentucky. He tries to keep the memory of home alive, for the memory is equivalent to the reality for him; and if he loses it, he fears, he will never be able to get home again. Yet he secretly

knows he will not return, as do the other workers who also talk about giving up their migratory lives. Nevertheless, Carleton always carries within him a graphic image of freedom, imagining it as a horse running alongside the pickers' bus, keeping time with it while completely independent of it. This is also the way he fantasizes himself: "free, able to glide along inches above the ground, easily outdistancing this old bus. A young Carleton, running along, letting his arms swing—." Clara/inherits her father's spirit, for she too balks at their bridled life. There is no temporary solace to be found in religion, as there was for Karen. Clara's one visit to a local church leaves her unable to fathom why God should be watching her when there are surely other people who are more interesting to look at. Certain that God will never bother with her, she feels relieved when she literally runs away from the service. On that same day Clara meets Lowry, attracted to him because his blond hair reminds her of her father. In his face she thinks she can see the presence of the God of whom the minister had spoken, present as a force like that of hunger. This hunger drives her after Lowry, with whom she runs off that same night. Unlike Karen's running after Shar, Clara's action is one that liberates rather than binds her. She feels as if she has been carried away by a great cooling breeze that has finally caught up with her. Karen's act was one of obedience; Clara's is one of defiance. Her father tries to follow her to reclaim her. Carleton's brief journey after Clara ultimately is also his journey to freedom. He suffers a breakdown,, and in his confusion imagines he sees his people patiently waiting for him to come home. Entering a church to await his death, he does not die, but lingers for another two months in a strange hospital bed as his mind empties and cleanses itself of memory and desire. It is a purgatorial state we are not al-

508 I AMERICAN WRITERS lowed to enter, for Gates carries us along with Clara into her new life. Yet much of Oates's writing partakes of just such a purgatory, in which people are kept waiting and suffering but are ultimately certain that they will triumph. The vision of paradise is postponed rather than denied as her characters move through the natural world, hungry and yearning to be full. In fact, such hunger becomes a major image of Oates's later fiction as the affluent stuff themselves with food yet are unsatisfied. The concept appears as early as the story "First Views of the Enemy" (1964), which ends with a mother and her son glutting themselves as a way of holding on to their possessions and shutting out the disturbing image of the less fortunate Mexican children encountered earlier that day. But for Lowry and Clara security is not so easy to obtain. When they finally achieve a physical union, it is beside the Eden River, from which Clara has just emerged. This Eden has its resident serpent in the form of the bloodsucker, attached to Clara's foot, that leads directly to Clara's first sexual encounter. But it is not a fall from innocence, for Gates seems to be concerned chiefly with the ironies of the situation and the way in which Clara's eyes become opened, so that she can now calculate coldly how she will take control of her life. This is very different from the previous novel's concern with working out one's destiny and fulfilling the duties of obedience. Clara, unlike Karen, brings all the "accidents" of her life into control. Pregnant by Lowry, who will not yield to marriage and a family, she keeps her pregnancy a secret from him and chooses Curt Revere, a wealthy businessman, to care for her by feigning love for him and leading him to believe the child she bears is his. Such deliberate planning is done out of her wish to provide her son with all the trappings of a secure life, that

which she never had but believes is necessary for genuine freedom. So great is her desire that even when Lowry returns years later, willing to take Clara and her son with him, she refuses, solely because of the future she fears for her son. This son, though, seems quite able to look out for himself. He is called Swan because swans look cold and hard, and are fearless and potentially dangerous. In the end, what Clara has denied him proves more significant than what she has been able to provide for him. Swan's rebellion against the falseness of his position is kindled into life when he and Clara move into the Revere home. Lowry had predicted that the boy would grow up to kill things, and his sense of Swan was accurate. In a hunting adventure one of Revere's sons is accidentally shot in Swan's presence. The event jolts Swan, who had moments earlier been disgusted with the shooting of a chicken hawk, but now feels that there is within himself a bird fluttering about, desperately trying to get out. Like his grandfather Carleton's visions of liberation, Swan's, too, represent a struggle to rid himself of his uneasiness and his limitations. Gates warns against over-allegorizing Swan or, by extension, any of her characters. Swan tells his girl friend that he does not want "to be a character in a story, in a book. I don't want to be like someone in a movie. I don't want to be born and die and have everyone watching— reading along. Everything decided ahead of time—." But of course he is a character in a book, and everyone is watching his birth and his death. Implied here is the belief that in literature, as in life, although everything is not predestined irrevocably, there is a sense in which, like Karen in the earlier novel, we have a destiny to fulfill. This destiny involves our ability to mesh with the natural rhythms of the universe, to accept

JOYCE CAROL GATES / 509 death as well as life, and not to fall with shuddering into the mysteries of life. Just as Eden County and the Eden River surround episodes that are far from paradisiacal, so the "garden" of the novel's title is akin to the Garden of Earthly Delights painted by Hieronymus Bosch, a garden in which, even in its prelapsarian state, cats catch mice and animals devour each other as part of the natural cycle of life. Swan acts out the destructive aspect of the destiny foreseen by Lowry in the murder-suicide in which he shoots first Revere and then himself. Clara, who has witnessed the horror, passes her remaining days in a nursing home, passively watching violent television shows. She is in the same situation as her father was for the last months of his life, unable to care for herself and suffering the sudden loss of a child who has gone his own way. From such correspondences it seems that for Gates the sins of the fathers are frequently visited upon the children, not distinguishing between personalities but transcending them. Just as we cannot escape our childhood, so we perpetuate the forces of that childhood onto the next generation of children. Eventually the cycle will be exploded and result in destruction, but that destruction will often herald a new and higher consciousness. Such a concept is at work in Oates's third novel, Expensive People (1968), the narrative of a young man that culminates in his shooting of his mother. The self-conscious first-person narration includes comments on the creative process as well as addresses to the reader and attempts at analyzing the motives and actions of characters. Richard Everett's parents are filtered to us through his eyes with an uncannily adult understanding of their character and behavior. Although the work is obviously not condoning murder, it is attempting to lay bare many of the pretenses and falsities of an affluent society.

Gates does not deal with the rural poor, as in her two previous novels: her concern here is with those who live in luxury amid beautiful things. The influence of this environment is felt just as strongly as that of the world of migrant workers or "white trash," and it is just as pernicious in its ability to destroy. Richard's mother, Nada (shortened from Natashya), is sumptuously elegant but inhabits a world in which moral values are as foreign as her name. It is no accident that the name she uses means "nothing," and all pretensions are dissipated with finality when Richard discovers at her funeral that her original name had been the less exotic Nancy. The aura of Nada had been fabricated to conceal a common woman who is an ironic version of the American dream of the self-made success. She has achieved wealth and status, but at the expense of family and moral values. Richard's response to his surroundings is understandably one of distrust: he often believes he is not living with his true parents but with "cruel step-parents," that his true ancestors would be "foreign and exotic and not quite speaking my language," but that he would be able to "tame" them into closeness with him. The novel is unique to Oates's work in several ways: we remain in the world of the child-adolescent, who is not followed into maturity and parenthood. Richard's narration suggests that at the end of his memoir he will terminate his life. It is also Oates's only novel that deals so self-consciously with its own literary techniques and tries to assess itself as it progresses. For instance, there is a section entitled "How to Write a Memoir Like This," and shortly afterward a section that purports to be reviews of Expensive People that appeared in, among other places, Time magazine, the New York Times Book Review, and New Republic. A story supposedly written by Nada is one that Gates herself had

510 I AMERICAN previously published in the Quarterly Review of Literature, but in the novel it is followed by a critique. Some of these techniques are in the same tradition as James Joyce's "Oxen of the Sun" chapter of Ulysses, experimenting with different prose styles and voices. But here the connection is between the events of the novel and how the objective viewer will judge those events; it is not solely an artistic preoccupation with language. The merging of the real and fictive worlds extends into Oates's poetry as well as her prose. One poem, "From the Dark Side of the Earth," contains the striking instance of the persona of the poem casually addressing the person to whom he is speaking as "Joyce." Generally the poetry is more transparent than the prose in revealing Oates's own attitudes and emotions. But the ability to synthesize living persons and turn them into characters helps to make Oates's fiction plausible and energetic. She does this especially well in her collection of stories All the Good People I've Left Behind, and in her academic satires The Hungry Ghosts. In Expensive People it is obvious that Gates found the firstperson narrative an exciting voice to use. The events of the novel merge with an awareness of the work in progress. Fact and fiction blend in the novel itself, for it is from one of Nada's notebook entries that Richard gets the idea to become a sniper. The entry contains an idea for a short novel, The Sniper, about a young man who leads two lives, one public and the other secret. He frightens people by becoming a sniper but initially does not hurt anyone. After several shooting episodes he finally kills someone, and Nada's entry is uncertain as to whether the young man should know he has planned this all along or not. Richard, too, knows, and yet does not know, that his destiny is sketched out before him when he discovers the notebook. He is aware that his heart "began

WRITERS

to pound as if it knew something already that I myself did not know." Once again we are given a character who must fulfill his destiny. The notebook entry outlines Richard's future: he buys a gun, goes out on three sniping missions without harming anyone, and on the fourth commits murder by killing his beloved Nada when she is about to desert her family. In these first three novels each of the dominant male characters searches for freedom from the limitations of his existence. Shar finds his liberation only through death. Carleton seeks to return home; Lowry is restlessly on the move; Swan and Richard both attempt to cope with their romantic feelings toward their mothers by killing either their mother or their "rival." Another parallel development in these novels lies in the quest to fulfill one's destiny. Karen never takes charge of her life, but pours her energies into obedience to her father's command. She is the least interesting of Oates's female protagonists, largely because she is absorbed by her sense of duty and never emerges as an independent being. Clara, in contrast, takes control of her life the day she organizes Swan's and her future, and the rest of her actions are devoted to bringing that future into the present. She achieves her goal at a price, for Swan is denied the freedom Clara so eagerly sought for herself. Richard comes into his own the first night he goes out as a sniper. He tells us that he slept well that night, for he had at last "discovered" himself. What he fails to realize is that he has not really discovered himself at all, but has merely assumed the role of a potential character in one of his mother's stories. Nada thus creates her son twice, by physically bringing him into the world and providing him with his new self-image and status as a childmurderer. Thus, after Richard pulls the trigger to kill Nada, he tells us that he did not "come alive" as he had done previously; rather, "the

JOYCE CAROL GATES / 511 world cracked in pieces around me." He has not discovered his true self after all, but only destroyed what he loved. These first three novels, then, while obviousl quite different from one another in their surface details, have an underlying unity and are often considered a trilogy. In each is a basic concern with how character reflects one's background and becomes one's future or destiny. Although all of Oates's characters have freedom of choice, they submit to what seems to them a predetermined or unavoidable course of action. At the conclusion of the third novel, Richard seriously doubts the consolation of his free will. He is left stuffing himself with bananas, cookies, bread, candy, lettuce, sauces, and jams, "carried along on the wave of a most prodigious hunger." He is seeking an answer to the emptiness inside him and wants to stuff it into silence once and for all. If he does intend to commit suicide, as he has indicated he would throughout his memoir, it will most likely be done by gorging himself, as a relative of Nada's had supposedly done. The final image of fatness stuffing itself to satiate its spiritual hunger tells us as much about Richard as he has told us about himself in his entire narrative. He has shunned descriptions of lovely spring days because writers are better equipped to write of the inferno and purgatory than of paradise. Oates's novels do the same, avoiding the bliss of Eden and focusing on the sufferings of the world. Whether or not paradise is to be gained through such suffering is beyond her concern. In her writing there is, by her own admission, "only the natural world," a distinction that sets her apart from writers such as Flannery O'Connor, with whom she is often compared and whose stories are permeated with a constant awareness of the supernatural. Gates argues that the problem of living in this world is sufficient concern for a writer, without havin

to bring in "an extra dimension." The infernal and purgatorial aspects of life provide her writing with all it needs; paradise is left for the contemplations of others. Richard's hunger is symptomatic of a spiritually depleted society. Fatness is an illness for Gates, and Richard is only the first in a string of characters who are or become fat as a manifestation of their inner poverty. The most grotesque of these is the Pedersen family in Wonderland, whose family dinners have been likened to the Mad Hatter's tea party. But preceding this novel was Oates's novel them (1969), which won the National Book Award in 1970. It expands the implications of "fatness" at a critical point in the life of its main female character, Maureen Wendall. When Maureen undergoes a mental breakdown, she withdraws into silence and sweets, becoming grotesquely obese, sullen, dirty, and drab. In contrast, her recovery is marked by a revulsion for food and a regaining of her former, thinner body. Like Lewis Carroll's Alice in her dream world, Maureen expands and shrinks as a physical reflection of her psychological state. But this is only one aspect of them, and not the most important one. In them Gates is once again concerned in part with the effects of literature on life and the question of which is more "real." It purports to be a work of historical fiction based on the life of a student Gates taught at the University of Detroit, though Gates has since indicated that Maureen is not a "real" person and that her letters are also a fiction. Maureen's questioning is therefore a self-accusation of Gates and what she represents. One of the letters asks, "Why did you think that book about Madame Bovary was so important? All those books? Why did you tell us they were more important than life? They are not more important than my life." These questions demand to be answered by both

572 / AMERICAN WRITERS the readers and the writers of fiction. Maureen asks, "You write books. What do you know? ... Oh, we women know things you don't know, you teachers, you readers and writers of books...." But the existence of them would seem to be proof that Maureen is wrong at least about certain writers of books. Gates is able to use the lives of unintellectual people as the material for her fiction and to give their actions meaning and significance on a more universal level. We can learn from their mistakes and can achieve through their emotions and experiences a growth that we might not otherwise undergo in our own lives. In writing them, Gates indicates that she is concerned with this role and responsibility of the artist in handling the "real" world so that we can see its most awful potentialities and, by seeing and understanding them, can learn how to deal with them. Although the central characters in them suffer and often appear to be leading lives of quiet desperation, Gates has pointed out that the crucial thing about their lives is that they all survive. And not just by muddling through: they manage to obtain what to them are major achievements, even though to outsiders the characters seem to be social failures. Gates quite rightly has called attention to the essential cheerfulness of these characters, a happiness that is retained amid viciousness, pettiness, even criminal acts. There is a self-sufficiency to them, a cool-headed independence, and thus freedom from middle-class values. In their humble ways they achieve the realization of the American dream that Nada had only parodied: they forge their destinies completely on their own, and create for themselves a lif that is, for them at least, a success, attained solely through their own contrivances. They are willing to make enormous sacrifices to reach their goals, which, however petty they may seem to us, are magnificent triumphs for them.

This in part explains the apparent grotesqueness of much of Oates's work. What is distorted may often be restored by being seen through corrective lenses. The shocking effect is aimed at making us sit up and take notice of something that has become perverted in our accepted daily lives. Gates is aware that she is addressing a society that has accepted violence as a way of life. By portraying abhorrent actions in vivid detail, she tries to reawaken in us a sense of horror at what is really at stake. This is mostly true of Wonderland and The Assassins, but her other novels also contain a good dose of destruction that can be used to reconstruct a kind of victory. In them the narrative begins with Loretta Botsford's lover being shot to death by her brother Brock. Loretta marries the policeman who helped her move the body and protected her brother, and these two apparent losers become the parents of the two main characters of the novel, Jules and Maureen Wendall. There is a strong suspicion that Jules was fathered by Loretta's lover, but whether he was or not, his life is branded from its very conception with violence and unlucky love. Yet Jules is clever and calculating. Like Clara, Lowry, or Swan, he is an adult even while he is young. As a child his sister Maureen sees him as a magician, able to create things in the air. Jules is able to "create" his life by knowing what he wants and overcoming any obstacles to obtaining it. He pursues Nadine, the girl of his dreams, who comes from a wealthy family well beyond Jules's social reach. He very nearly gets her, for she runs away with him, but deserts him when he falls ill with the flu. When they meet again and try to be lovers, Nadine is unable to reach a climax, and shortly thereafter shoots Jules—though not fatally. Jules's spirit, temporarily lost, is rekindled when he becomes an activist in the Detroit race riots of 1967, and learns that "the old Jules had not truly died but

JOYCE CAROL OATES / 513 had only been slumbering." In the end, after fatally shooting a policeman, he bids good-bye to Maureen, heads west to a new life, and thus triumphs in his overcoming of destiny, heredity, and environment. Jules is the furthest remove possible from Karen Herz. He sees no limitations imposed on him by familial obligations or class structures. He fulfills no destiny but, rather, creates his own life, a magician in the most practical aspects of living. Maureen tries to do the same thing. Like Jules, she thinks of herself as spirit struggling to break free from the burdens of the flesh. Like Carleton in A Garden of Earthly Delights, she often imagines her real self detaching itself from the body that is engaged in mundane activities. Carleton had seen this other self as a wild horse outdistancing the bus in which he rode. Maureen feels it as "the terrible pressure of water wanting to burst free." She yearns to join that other self, her real self, which is able to free itself and escape, and even turns to look back at her. The struggle between body and spirit is of course not new in literature, but Gates has a fine talent for presenting it in a way that keeps her writing very much in the realm of the natural world, and she resists lengthy indulgence in metaphysical speculations or theories. There is in her writing no glaring dichotomy between the body and the spirit. Both are aspects of a unified whole, and function together. When a character's body becomes grotesque, obese, or maimed, it has a direct counterpart in the soul. Like Dorian Gray's portrait, much of the physical violence in Oates's stories is actually a graphic picture of what is happening to a person's inner being. In Oates's art, though, there is always the awareness that even realistic fiction is not the same as lived experiences. In an epigraph to one of her critical essays, Gates cites Paul Klee's statement that "Art does not reproduce what

we see. It makes us see." This is an answer to Maureen's infuriation with the world of literature that she reveals in her letters to Gates as teacher. On the one hand, Maureen can read the novels of Jane Austen and feel excited to know that in comparison with her own life, the world of these novels seems more real. The events of her life seem less convincing and permanent to her than what she has discovered in her reading. But when she accuses Gates of just writing books and not knowing anything about life, she cannot know that she is a character in one of those books, thereby making her life both more and less real at the same time. Just as the play-within-the-play of sixteenthcentury drama has been revived in much modern drama, so Gates has extended the concept to literature, so that in a Joycean sense them is a book containing the makings of the book called them. Gates is, indirectly, a character in her own novel. When Maureen "wakes up" from her bout of depression, breakdown, and obesity, she writes to Gates precisely because she senses that they are alike in many ways. Thus her angry letters are also an externalization of the dilemma that any sensitive writer must face. The closing section of them is titled "Come, My Soul, That Hath Long Languished " The title exposes the languishing hunger that has been both Maureen's and Jules's all along, the desire to escape the confines and limitations of the body and to satisfy the soul's longing to be free and unencumbered. Later characters of Oates's are actually able to accomplish this, but Maureen must express the yearning by stuffing herself with sweets. At the conclusion of the book, she has succeeded in winning the love of her married professor, marrying, becoming pregnant, and repudiating her past and her family. When Jules visits to bid her good-bye as he prepares to go west, she announces that she does not intend to see "them," any of her fam-

514 I AMERICAN ily, any more. Yet because of her new status as a married woman about to become a mother, Jules indicates that she has in fact become one of "them." Once again a character finds she cannot escape what she is. Attempts to repudiate or ignore one's family or childhood will only cause those influences to surface elsewhere in someone's life. Yet them is also a novel of triumph, of two people who triumph in their limited ways over circumstances that had weighted them down, and of the triumph of the spirit over the flesh in achieving its will despite the obstacles along the way. Wonderland (1971) extends these concepts, but is in some ways less successful than them. Some of its characters are so extreme that they become oppressive; one ceases to care what becomes of them. The novel is best read as a surrealistic account in the manner of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, from which its title is taken. Exaggerations, abrupt transitions, and questions of identity abound. Carroll's work had a profound effect on Gates when she was very young, and many of its qualities find their way into her writing. Gates herself has cited what are for her the most significant aspects of Alice's stories: that the child within us will triumph, that we will all eventually find salvation, that the complexities of life must be recognized in perspective for what they are, and that we are all participants in the game of life. It is not especially easy to recognize all these points in Wonderland, which remains a dark novel and does little to suggest any final "triumph." Gates rewrote the ending two years after its publication, in an attempt to change the negative feeling of the conclusion; but the revision, slightly more optimistic, still does not alter the tone of all that precedes it. Jesse Vogel had as a child escaped the murder-suicide of his family by his father and been

WRITERS

adopted by Dr. Karl Pedersen, whose unusual family of obese geniuses nearly stifles Jesse. Like Carleton and Maureen, Jesse likes horses when he is a child, but not because they are a symbol of freedom. The attraction is drawn from their being big, heavy animals that are "like life that had run down into pure flesh, enormous muscular mounds of flesh, perfectly obedient and indifferent." Wonderland likewise weights down the spirit by the encumbrance of a suffocating body. Attempts at transcendence are aborted, unfulfilled, or led astray by drugs and violence. The hunger of the spirit is sharply etched in the overstuffing of the body. Jesse joins both Richard Everett and Maureen Wendall when he experiences a ravenous hunger in the center of his body. It leads him to the home of Dr. Pedersen, where bodies are stuffed with food as spirits go unnourished. Ironically, it is Dr. Pedersen who advocates the doctrine that the spirit is stronger than the body, even as his daughter Hilda moves from cheerful prettiness to become "a beetle-browed girl with a woman's body shapeless as a tub." Jesse is able to free himself from the oppressiveness of the Pedersen household only when he is disowned for helping Mrs. Pedersen run away. She is dragged back, unable to escape, but Jesse finds himself free. But the homes he has escaped are a part of him. Even when he is in medical school, he feels he is "in disguise" as a normal young man. Food is now unbearable to him, much as Maureen finds herself repulsed by it once she is "cured." When Jesse sees a fat man, he cannot help staring in disgust and thinking that fat people are sick. Even later, as a doctor, Jesse "hated fat people. Hated crazy people," finding such fat a "spiritual obscenity." Jesse's changes of his name accompany his inner growth: he is born Jesse Harte but abandons the name to become a Pedersen. Jesse's "heart," his core and his ancestral roots, are removed from him and

JOYCE CAROL OATES / 515 sublimated. When he can no longer be a son to Pedersen, he adopts his grandfather's name, Vogel. The word means "bird," and marks Jesse's attempt to restore the spirit that has been suffocating within him. Jesse, like Maureen, tries to assume a normal life and repudiate his background. But once again the sins of the fathers seem to be visited on the children. When his daughter Shelley runs away from home, trying to free herself of her father, Jesse goes after her. Gates revised this ending to underline the return home and the ambiguity of Jesse's role as protector or as an angel of death. Jesse's wife Helene has likewise had to free herself from her past life as the daughter of a brilliant surgeon who found his research with cats unsatisfying because of their lack of personality. Only Jesse appears to be locked into his role at the end of the novel. The work is a low point in Oates's career, and she has stated that it "is probably an immoral novel" in its depressing and dark atmosphere. Jesse's emotions often seem to have been recorded from the author's immediate experience, and his ideas about a "story" indicate that this may well have been the case: "He had the idea that what people thought were stories were fragments from shattered wholes, the patterns, the brain waves, of a certain man at a certain time in his life, the record of his controlled and uncontrolled inner life: therefore all writing was autobiography, wasn't it?" If this is true, then Wonderland represents what must have been a difficult and perhaps depressing stage in its author's life. Yet like its predecessors it is concerned with the return home, the completion of a cycle in someone's life, and the acceptance by him of his childhood and the events that formed him. Oates's characters seem trapped by their families as frequently as they seek to escape them. It is perhaps a flaw in Wonderland that it is never

clearly shown how Jesse's early life—the murder of his family and his involvement with the Pedersens—creates the situation that leads his daughter Shelley to run away from home. Jesse escaped the early homes of his life, but does not seem in the end really to have escaped at all. In Oates's sixth novel, Do with Me What You Will (1973), the central character does manage to escape. Elena is perhaps the most liberated and affirmative of Oates's protagonists thus far. She surmounts obstacles with a detachedness often bordering on oblivion. She alone is able, at the end, finally and literally to walk away from the home and situation that were gradually snuffing out her life, and to seize the makings of what she believes will lead to a better life. Until that moment she has been the victim the title of the novel describes, shuttled back and forth by the pushiness of her mother and, later, by the rigidity of her husband. It is through her lover that she begins to loosen these bonds and discover her inner spirit. The narrative is a form of flashback as she and Jack, her lover, survey the incredible string of events that brought them together. And it is no accident that her lover is an antagonist of her husband's, representing all that her husband found demeaning in the legal profession they share. Once again Gates begins her narrative when the main character is still a child. Elena is seven years old when her father "kidnaps" her from a schoolyard in Pittsburgh and drives her to California. Elena, like Jesse, experiences a childhood trauma that colors her character, but the difference is that her kidnapping was an act of love, an attempt to rescue her from the domination of her mother, Ardis. Despite her father's obvious instability, Elena realizes how deeply she loved him: he alone tried to free her rather than to program her life. Ironically, his desire to do so caused him to imprison her physically in their rented room to protect her.

516 I AMERICAN WRITERS Fathers pursue their daughters in Oates's novels, if not literally (as do Carleton and Jesse), then through their mental holds on them (as Herz has on Karen, and Jesse on Shelley). Their pursuits represent the internal pull of family, which frequently has done its lasting work long before the character realizes he or she is firmly locked in its grip. This pull is not represented as being either good or ill in itself. It is shown as one of the facts of life, often responsible for later griefs and troubles, but also credited with stimulating personal awareness and eventual liberation. Elena is also pursued by her mother, a vague presence throughout the novel who is metamorphosed into different names and personalities but is always in the background of Elena's life. When she is undergoing a mental crisis, Elena's first instinct is to telephone Ardis—now called Marya—and say that she wants to come home for a while. But the connection is broken and her call is not returned for a month. Looking back on the incident, Elena recalls that "Staying alive is not so complicated as dialing a telephone number." This might be the theme for much of Oates's fiction: the fact of existence is something always with and around us, but it is the details of daily routine that mire us and complicate our lives so that we lose an awareness of the larger world we inhabit. Nagging in the background is the constant sense that there is a grander scale on which life is balanced; but this perspective is forever being overshadowed, seen through a glass darkly, making its presence felt in moments of mental crisis or breakdown or in times of recollection, when past is assumed into present and a unity is perceived. Such moments are never sustained indefinitely; they may cease with a person's "cure" or rehabilitation into society and the resumption of a functional life. This is what happens to Maureen Wendall and,

to a lesser degree, to Jesse Vogel. It occurs too for Karen Herz, while Clara Revere remains in a never-never land of mental vacuity. Richard Everett shatters his world when he kills Nada, whose name ("nothing") indicates the emptiness of the social world he resists. It is only in Do with Me What You Will that Gates first has a character break away in an act of faith and step out into uncertainty, accompanied only by love and by the pain that she has suffered and that has taught her. Elena's life acts out the book's epigraph, Henry James's statement that "the world as it stands is no illusion, no phantasm, no evil dream of a night; we wake up to it again forever and ever; we can neither forget it nor deny it nor dispense with it." The nightmarish wonderland of the previous novel has been left behind for the waking world Elena discovers. By using the real world, Elena finds herself able to reach out to an acceptance of life's greatest gifts: love, faith, and an awareness of the eternal present. The means by which she does so violate our standards of social propriety. She not only leaves her husband but also causes her lover to abandon his wife and child. She is acting not on precepts or mores but on intuition, the same intuition that had made her, years earlier, leave the schoolyard with a stranger who turned out to be her father. The earlier incident was an obvious act of blind trust, and it was only after yielding to such faith that its purpose was revealed to her. Similarly, Elena's departure with Jack at the end of the novel has to be an act of blind trust between the lovers. The future is withheld from them, just as it is from the reader, who is left not knowing where they go or how they live thereafter, knowing only that they are together, looking back over their lives. Any further knowledge would defeat the significance of Elena's act. She does not know, and she does

JOYCE CAROL OATES / 517 not worry, where her future with Jack will lead. She only knows that she must seize that future in order to attain peace. When the lovers finally meet, they are able to smile at each other, "as if seeing each other for the first time, a look between them of pure kinship, of triumph." In one sense they actually are seeing each other for the first time as they really are, free of encumbrances and able to focus on their bond, their kinship in having escaped their suffocating lives with people who tried to force them into roles they refused. Their escape, then, is indeed a triumph, even though the final admission of the novel is that they are not entirely able to forget everything else. But this, too, is kept under control. Although the past can never be totally eradicated, it can be subordinated to present circumstances and become paler as time passes. The shock of present and past melting together is felt by Elena when she sees a photograph of the child Jack is going to adopt. The particular child fades from her sight and resurfaces as another, perhaps Elena herself, as she becomes aware of the cyclic completion created by the patterns of birth and death, and the possibility of freezing time into an eternal present. The instant recalled by a photograph is an artificial attempt to locate the universe in time, to compress its vastness to a particular small occasion. It is the antithesis of the experience Elena has while visiting Jack's client, Meredith Dawe, in the hospital. A radical whose lectures and beliefs are directed toward "the obliteration of matter," Dawe transmits to Elena a deep, restful peace that she is to remember all her life. Yet at the end he is left an inmate of Michigan State Prison, writing lengthy letters to the judge who sentenced him, the power of his life reduced to the penning of words that go unheeded. Dawe sees the continent as "a despoiled and vandalized Garden of North America,

which begs us to purify it and restore it to its original innocence." Gates has returned to one of her earliest and most durable themes, the corruption of our world and the plea that we open our eyes to what we are destroying. But Dawe's plea is unanswered, and he is reduced to a sense of futility and intimidated into silence. In a similar way his lawyer, Elena's lover, gives himself over to the power of words when he loses Dawe's case. Jack responds by turning on his "Self-Starting Self-Stopping Word Machine," the part of his mind that is programmed to give him orders and make him say the right things. It directs him to a conventionally respectable life while blotting out his emotions and intuitions. His decision to leave with Elena is a negating of that life and an affirmation once again of the freedom of the human spirit. In The Assassins (1975) Gates returns to a bleaker view of the human spirit, as if the ghosts of Wonderland needed further exorcising. The narrative is at times oppressive and dark, but at the same time there are several new aspects introduced into her work. Each of the three sections bears the name of one of the central characters, all members of the Petrie family. Together they narrate three strands of parallel events seen from their own perspective. These events are centered on the apparent assassination of Andrew Petrie. His two brothers, Hugh and Stephen, and his wife, Yvonne, are the three persons who provide a composite view of events for the reader. Because there is no consistent point of view, the plot of the novel becomes less significant than the emotional development of its three central characters. Hugh, a political cartoonist, is given a first-person narrative that enables Gates to record accurately his gradual mental breakdown. His sense of humor never deserts him, even in his attempted murder-suicide, in-

575 / AMERICAN tended to be a protest against "the vulgarity of modern life." His murder "victim" is a brook trout on his plate in a restaurant; in his "suicide" attempt he shoots himself in the head rather than in the mouth, lest his Freudian psychoanalyst misunderstand his action. Hugh's black-comedy sense of humor overcomes him at his brother's funeral, when he collapses trying to restrain his laughter as he imagines himself projecting his ventriloquist's voice into the dead man's coffin. Hugh had thought his idea was a way of transcending the mournful situation and raising it from the level of tragedy to high comedy. The Assassins is by no means a comic novel, but there are indications that Gates sees comedy as a way of facing the unknown and horrible aspects of death and overcoming them. The epigraph from Friedrich Nietzsche reflects this: "Everybody considers dying important; but as yet death is no festival." Nor is death a festival here. It is sudden, bloody, and shocking. Hugh's attempt at suicide fails miserably, leaving him blind and paralyzed. But at the very outset of his narrative, from his hospital bed, he assures us that he still makes jokes, that the comedy of life goes on and will outlive us all. Gates presents characters who are caught in life, unable to explain its quirks of fate yet forced to go on living. In this sense Hugh and Stephen succeed. Yvonne, the widow, does not. She tries to avoid mourning by throwing herself into the outside world and by trying to organize her husband's writings. Men become impotent in her presence, for she suppresses creative forces. She had been dominated by her husband's brilliance, and the lover she takes after his death is bound to her solely because they had both loved Andrew. Stephen, the youngest brother, represents the other side of the artistic personality, and is surely a literary ancestor of Nathanael Vickery

WRITERS

in Oates's Son of the Morning. Touched by God at age twelve, Stephen is able to leave his body; but even when he is "in" his own body, he feels he is only living within his "host," Stephen Petrie. His awareness of being an aspect of God in a human form appears to be a spiritual pride that must be humbled. This is a new type of character for Gates: the prophet who eventually feels God depart from him and is left in a spiritual vacuum, awaiting God's return. Although each of the three central characters is intriguing, the novel as a whole is not entirely satisfactory. The identities of the "assassins" are presented too subtly for the average reader to grasp. Andrew was not really assassinated at all; he committed suicide, disguising his deed as an assassination to assure his reputation and the authority of his writings. Similarly, the graphic account of his widow Yvonne's murder and dismemberment is only a projection of Yvonne's imagination, a symbol of her spiritual death and willingness to join her husband in abandoning life. It is a weakness of the novel that such important events are not clarified for the reader. Unless Gates intended to pose a puzzle that only the most astute and imaginative reader could solve, she has cheated her readers of one of the major insights the novel offers. For each of the four Retries is his or her own assassin, although only one of them, Andrew, actually dies. The mystical Stephen is left at the end a wanderer, deprived of his God and homeless, a spiritual assassination having left him destitute. We are left at the end of the novel with the feeling that things are unfinished; it may be argued that this is one aspect of realistic fiction, but there is still a desire for just a little more help in filling in the blanks. Together, Wonderland and The Assassins plunge into the darker depths of Oates's talent. They were necessary aspects of her development as a writer; but, having served their pur-

JOYCE CAROL OATES / 519 pose—exploring the lowest despair possible, and ultimately surviving it—such aspects are no longer essential in her writing. In Childwold (1976) and Son of the Morning (1978) Oates's talent rises from the depths and soars to new and dizzying heights. The rural landscapes and their inhabitants are vividly depicted. Her descriptive technique, with its richness of line and eye for the small but essential detail, makes one feel merely reminded of a world already known. In Childwold, Gates deals with the concept of the artist who "creates" his beloved. The creator here is Fitz John Kasch, an intellectual with a Harvard Ph.D. whose passion for the adolescent Laney Bartlett leads him to think, "I will transform her: I will invent her." In the tradition of Pygmalion, and later of Vladimir Nabokov's, Humbert Humbert in Lolita (1955), Kasch quite self-consciously uses his intellect to seek a rebirth and a redemption through loving a young girl. His thoughts and his speech quite deliberately echo and paraphrase the many writers and thinkers he has read. Thus he alludes to Walden when he announces that he returned to the scene of his birth "because I wished to live deliberately, to retreat from history, both personal and collective." Yet Thoreau went to Walden not to escape but "to front only the essential facts of life." Kasch is ultimately forced to reduce his life to those essentials as well. He meditates on the name of Laney's family's farm, Childwold, and tries to find in it a formula that will release its enchantment on him. Most of his mentors have been enchanters of one sort or another: Meister Eckhart, Blaise Pascal, William Shakespeare, Jakob Boehme, St. Augustine, Soren Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Rainer Maria Rilke, G. F. W. Hegel, George Santayana, and William Butler Yeats. Paraphrases of their writings are widely scattered among and absorbed into

Kasch's own thoughts, which themselves are preoccupied with the power and utility of words. Oates's recording of his thoughts infuses new life into a term that has become a cliche, the "stream of consciousness" technique. The mind flow she transcribes is not a dull and pedantic connecting of sundry details, but a lively process that awakens new meanings in language and finds poetry in the banal. To cite only one instance from a multitude: thinking of Laney as his "lily of the snowfields," Kasch later transforms the idea into "My Lilith of the fields, the snowfields of Childwold. Unmanner of men. Must let her go: she can't make me other than I am now and must be forever, forevermore, forevermortal...." It is through Kasch's eyes that Laney comes to life for the reader. He is her co-creator with Gates (who has of course created him). The incarnational force of words is the link, the ability to make the word become flesh. Kasch's permutations on the single word "Childwold" make the connection explicit: "In the beginning is the Word. No things but in words, through words!—no-thing, nothing, that is not first breathed." Gates as poet is most clearly seen in this novel, which embodies not only the poet's delight in words but also a sense of awe at their power to create and to destroy. Childwold is also a return to one of the themes of Oates's first novel, the concept of coming home, of undertaking a pilgrimage through this world. Kasch describes himself at the start as a voyager and a pilgrim who returns to the place of his physical birth. The remainder of the novel charts his attempt to achieve his spiritual rebirth. He knows he cannot deny or transcend his ancestry, that he is his ancestors. This is a knowledge that many of Oates's earlier characters lack, and they suffer for that ignorance. (One thinks especially of Clara and

520 / AMERICAN WRITERS Maureen.) Kasch is able to attain a sense of spiritual rapture not through his love for Laney but by loving her mother, Arlene, a figure of abundance, fertility, fullness, and joy. Her life is given over entirely to the creative force: having borne nine children, she is happiest when she is pregnant and mothering. Kasch feels that his pilgrimage has ended when he returns to Arlene. But his ecstatic joy ends suddenly when he has a fight with Arlene's former lover and kills him. It is almost as if Gates were warning her readers that the vision of paradise is too great to bear in this life, and that it is perhaps foolish to overreach human limits to try to perpetuate it. Kasch's final retreat is away from all action, into permanent seclusion. It is a bitter result of his failure fully to integrate the spirit and the flesh. Kasch's soaring intellect is plummeted to earth when his body takes over in the fatal fight. In contrast, Arlene's world is that of nature and the body, yet it is she who acknowledges that "everything worked out as it should.... If only people could know it at the time...." Her earthy approach really is not very different from Kasch's more mystic attempts at understanding life, for both of them accept the "real" world and also the pulse that quickens it, and seek to integrate the two. Arlene has in some ways succeeded at doing so where Kasch has failed, yet with each we sense that the other half of the picture is left out. A number of Oates's earlier short stories deal with a similar situation, in which emotional life is inhibited by intellectualizing or withdrawing from human relationships. One of her bestknown stories, "In the Region of Ice," presents the conflict in Sister Irene, a nun teaching English at a university, when a student demands a relationship that threatens her inner isolation. She rationalizes her refusal to respond at his moment of greatest need, thereby encasing herself in emotional "ice." Similarly, Pau-

line, in "Bodies," is a sculptress who can work only heads; and the central characters in the stories "Stigmata" and "Shame" are, like Sister Irene, apparently religious but also have shut themselves off from emotional warmth and selfless giving. Such people deny the interconnectedness of all living things, accepting their isolation, which is contrary to the natural patterns of the world. Gates has obvious affinities with D. H. Lawrence and also with Walt Whitman, for all three writers embrace the whole of nature as we find it, serpents in the garden and all, and are undogmatic in presenting their view as art. Gates never preaches: through her writing she offers theories of reality. In her essay "The Myth of the Isolated Artist" she writes: "The greatness of a work of art usually blinds us to the fact that it is a hypothetical statement about reality—a kind of massive, joyful experiment done with words, and submitted to one's peers for judgment." This is certainly true of Childwold and also of her subsequent novel, Son of the Morning. In the latter Gates is overtly concerned with religion for the first time since her first novel, although, as previously noted, Stephen in The Assassins seems to have been a forerunner of this novel's protagonist. His descendant here is Nathanael Vickery, a preacher touched by God when he was five who becomes a modern-day prophet, witnessing to thousands until the day he feels God's power withdrawn from him. Nathan is an ambiguous character. The very title of the novel reinforces his ambivalence for it is not God but Lucifer, the fallen angel, who is known as the Son of the Morning. Nathan is overtly a witness for God, but his popularity and following grow until his disciples nearly deify him. Even after his "fall" rumors circulate promising his return. Yet in all the thoughts and prayers of Nathan's that the reader is permitted to overhear, there is a genuine note of

JOYCE CAROL OATES / 521 belief and self-effacement and a total dedication to the will of God. Perhaps the novel's dedication provides a clue to Nathan's situation. This is the first work of Oates's that is not dedicated to a specific person or persons, but to "One Whose absence is palpable as any presence." In asserting the reality of an Other that does not depend on physical proof or knowledge, Oates has us enter a state where faith in anything must, by its very nature, imply an absence of knowledge. In Nathan's final darkened condition he is nevertheless able to assert, "So I wait for You, and will wait the rest of my life." Whether he is in the midst of the mystic's dark night of the soul, or in a permanent state of solitude, is never answered. When he sees a stained glass window, it almost leads him into meditation, but it quickly becomes "merely colored glass again, fitted cleverly together." Transcendence appears to be denied him, yet Nathan continues his "lifetime's habit of addressing [God]," speaking to Him out of the depths as if He were still quite near. It is as if Nathan himself has dedicated this book and then recounted his own spiritual success and demise. At the outset of the novel we learn that his spiritual darkness has already lasted for three years. It is accompanied by his partial physical blindness, a result of a selfblinding that was an attempt to cast out the eye that had offended him by allowing fleshly temptation to enter his body. Yet after this stabbing, Nathan feels he is finally "above sin," thereby inviting a spiritual pride that necessitates a fall. His followers begin to address him as "Master," and he is able to survive physical attacks totally unharmed. But with the sudden awareness of God's withdrawal from him, Nathan senses the loss of all his props, of all that gave his life its meaning. As he "limps" from church to church, seeking what he once knew so intimately, his doubts become more concrete and less emo-

tional. Observing a celebration of the Mass, he thinks: "You were not coaxed down into the priest's magical instruments—You did not enliven the wine, or slip into the stamped-out bits of bread." This is a long way from the responses of Karen Herz to the mystical element of the Mass that inspires and finally pardons her. Oates's concern for the spiritual life has left the realm of ritual and formal dogmas, and entered a condition in which only the self is ultimately able to discover truth, and must be independent of all teachers and masters other than itself. This is a very Eastern concept, one that sees all truth and knowledge as residing within each person and waiting to be called forth through observation and meditation. Such is the final condition of Nathanael Vickery, who is at last stripped of all his beliefs and supports, and left, apparently, bereft of all hope, yet in his darkness is able to assert that he is still waiting and, if need be, will wait for the rest of his life. Son of the Morning is rich in symbolism and allegory, more than any of Oates's previous novels. Oates relies on the easily accessible metaphors of the Christian faith to raise obvious parallels between Nathan's life and the life of Christ. Even the section titles of the novel indicate this: "The Incarnation," "The Witness," "Last Things," and "The Sepulcher." These parallels are not meant to discredit the validity of Christ's earthly life but, rather, to use that life as a convenient vehicle for an extended metaphor, the tenor of which is the individual's own spiritual state of mind over its broadest range of experience. For at both ends of Nathan's religious progress there is one constant: at the height of his missionary career and in the depths of his anguished sense of loss, Nathan never ceases to be aware of the higher order of the universe. There is no despair in his final waiting, just a constant and intense observation of the world about him. Nathan appears to have

522 / AMERICAN transcended emotion as well as desire and attachment, and even in his broken state there is no bitterness, only resignation and acceptance. The workings of an exceptional mind are a genuine concern in these last two novels of Oates's as well as in a novella she wrote at about the same time, The Triumph of the Spider Monkey (1976). Its hero, Bobby Gotteson (the surname alone, "God's son," links him thematically to Nathanael Vickery), is described as a "maniac" who is on trial for hacking nine women to death. Yet because it is recounted in the first person, Bobby's story arouses sympathy and some measure of understanding of why he behaves as he does. The sanity of the apparently mad and the madness of those who seem rational is a traditional theme of literature, but it is rare that we have the opportunity to listen in on the "madman's" thoughts and discover the depths of his character for ourselves. Through him we receive an overt statement of the tension between body and spirit that has raged through Oates's novels: "He scorned the body. Gotteson made love to the spirit, he sang his melancholycheerful ballads to the spirit." The actual murders are a confusion of body and spirit in which Gotteson feels that the body has taken over completely, yet also argues that the acts were spiritual ones in which "the great moment was the one in which I felt my opponent's ego collapse." Gotteson's "redemption" occurs with his last murder, when instead of feeling his usual pity for females as their egos crumble, he becomes aware that his victim is looking into the heart of a mystery. He stays with her as she dies, hoping to share something of her experience, and realizes that at that moment she was not "trapped" in being truly female, but shared an essence of existence with Gotteson himself. These last three works show an increased awareness that the barriers separating people from each other are artificial, and that all are

WRITERS

truly one family, even one self, under the skin. Night-Side (1977) is a collection of short stories particularly concerned with this aspect of existence. In examining the darker regions of consciousness, these tales deal with dreams, telepathy, madness, and other forms of psychic awareness. Oates's subsequent collection, All the Good People I've Left Behind (1979), contains certain characters who appear in more than one story, and all the stories examine highly sensitive and intimate personal relationships. Together these two volumes assert the connections people have with the cosmic Self, the universal Other, and other persons they encounter. The realization that everything is connected is worked out in both vertical and horizontal dimensions. As one character in the story "Sentimental Journey" says, "There are mystical connections between people sometimes ... between people who are, you know, sympathetic with each other." He adds that he has experienced coincidental situations that are in fact "certain small miracles." Small miracles make up the essence of many of the stories in these collections, and although it is tempting to differentiate between the two works by labeling one "supernatural" and the other "social" or "human," from Oates's point of view it appears that both are equally "natural," and that the natural world includes mysteries, perceptions, intuitions, and miracles. A rather simplistic explanation of these stories is found in "Further Confessions," one of the last stories in Night-Side. The central character utters a truth he has felt since he was a child: "The world is a fathomless mystery." As he faces apparitions of death from the "nightside" of earth, he is better able to accept his life itself as an immediate answer to those fathomless mysteries and to rid his world of all apparitions. Similarly, the central character of the title

JOYCE CAROL OATES / 523 story, "Night-Side," affirms the reality and value of this world while confronted with the attractions of the darker spirit world. Jarvis, an investigator for a psychic research society, witnesses the "conversion" of an unbelieving colleague, Perry Moore, when a seance puts him in contact with a dead friend. Moore fanatically pursues this contact, becoming unbearably intolerant of skeptics, or "heretics," until he dies suddenly of a stroke. Jarvis is faced with the choice of responding to Moore's visitation in a dream, with its plea to salvage his secret journals, or to resurface into the world of the living, to reassert the exuberant joys of life in the flesh. Jarvis' decision to come ashore from his morning swim represents his affirmation of the present and solid world over the floating, dreamlike state of the world of spirits and shadows. Without denying the existence of this other realm, he makes the only choice possible in the light of his knowledge: to emerge from the water to his proper medium, to carry out the work he must do in the "day-side" of the world he inhabits. This theme runs through the stories of NightSide in an eerie and portentous pattern, presenting less-explored areas of consciousness and integrating them into the present world. Natural and supernatural become interchangeable as the distinction between them blurs to show them as one world with many facets. The characters may be apparent social misfits, as in "The Giant Woman" and "Exile"; professional people, as in "The Snowstorm" and "The Sacrifice"; or loosely based on "real" people, as in the moving tale "Daisy," which is modeled on the poignant and painful relationship between James Joyce and his mad daughter Lucia. All are disturbing but enlightening explorations into the darker mysteries of human existence. The characters remain separate individuals, but at the same time assume the role of an Everyman as they probe regions that are a part of the consciousness of all human beings.

One of the most striking aspects of Oates's fiction—novels, short stories, novellas, plays, and poems—is its high degree of organization. The novels especially, perhaps because the form demands it, experiment with different points of view and chronological disruptions, but are always tightly woven. The structure does not selfconsciously impose itself on plot or character, as it does in, for instance, Joyce's Ulysses, but functions as an organizing principle. In the same way, the short stories and poems in the collections are placed in a careful sequence, so that one benefits most by reading an entire collection in its published order, so as to understand the separate items it contains. This is perhaps most necessary for Oates's collection of stories All the Good People I've Left Behind, a series in which particular characters reappear in several stories that recount the varying relationships within a group of loosely affiliated people. Oates's interests appear to be focused on the connections that unite and also transcend her individual characters, and not solely on the personalities as being of interest in themselves. No one character emerges as central; all exist only in relationships. More than any of her previous works, these ten stories insist that we do not, and cannot, live detached from others, and that we can transcend the commonplace only insofar as we realize that there are invisible threads connecting us to one another and to the universe itself. Even though good people are frequently left behind, their effect remains, and is assimilated into one's being. Some characters appear in only one of the ten stories, yet the collection would suffer from their omission. In the story "Sentimental Journey," Annie Quirt (who appears in more stories than any of the other characters) literally recalls into her life one of the people she had left behind a decade earlier, but the meeting becomes a nightmarish situation when she discovers he is not

524 I AMERICAN the person she had imagined from the past, but a frightening and disturbed being. Annie must once more leave him behind as she escapes to Quebec City. Her life there, recounted in the story "Walled City," leads her to the thought that "the world must have been perfect always . . . . It must have been my perception of it that was sick." The different perceptions of the world over a period of time are illustrated in the title story, which presents the shifting relationships between two married couples. It spans sixteen years, and at the end of that time it is obvious that the characters as they were initially presented have been "left behind." The changes they undergo are not presented judgmentally, even though one of them meets a tragic and bitter end. They are seen to be almost inevitable changes, part of an evolutionary cycle in which all things change, yet the greater whole in which they move remains constant; the world remains, as Annie had said, "perfect always." Joyce Carol Gates is undoubtedly one of the most prolific writers of today, but all she has written so far may well be just a prelude to the full blossoming of her talents. Her most recent works—the last two novels, collections of stories, and the novella—indicate that her writing may be moving in new directions that will ultimately prove of considerable importance to contemporary thought and literature. These latest works have a more metaphysical or visionary thrust to them than her previous volumes. Their characters function on a more universal level and point to dimensions other than the literal. Yet any generalities about Oates's work so far are risky, since we can expect many more volumes of writing from her and must withhold any definitive judgments about directions or trends in her work. Many of these "early" (for so the future will regard them) works record a restlessness and even an impatience with the limitations of per-

WRITERS

ception that, as William Blake stated, prevent us from seeing the universe as it really is, as a whole. At times this restlessness is perceived by the reader only as an uncertainty as to how a particular work ought to be read, leaving the reader unable to rise very far above the literal level of the text. He or she may be helped considerably by Oates's essays and critical works, which clarify many of her intentions and beliefs about fiction. Although these ideals are not always conveyed in her stories, when she does succeed in making her beliefs known, as she does so stunningly in her most recent work, the results are like her description of the first ripe pear of the season in her poem "That": "costly beyond estimation / a prize, a riddle / a feast." The thought of many feasts yet to be held for her readers is sufficient to whet the appetite for what is still to come.

Selected Bibliography WORKS OF JOYCE CAROL OATES NOVELS AND NOVELLAS

With Shuddering Fall New York: Vanguard, 1964. A Garden of Earthly Delights. New York: Vanguard, 1967. Expensive People. New York: Vanguard, 1968. them. New York: Vanguard, 1969. Wonderland. New York: Vanguard, 1971; Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett, 1973 (revised ending). Do with Me What You Will. New York: Vanguard, 1973. The Assassins. New York: Vanguard, 1975. Childwold. New York: Vanguard, 1976. The Triumph of the Spider Monkey. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Black Sparrow Press, 1976. Son of the Morning. New York: Vanguard, 1978. Unholy Loves. New York: Vanguard, 1979. Bellefleur. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1980. Angel of Light. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1981. A Bloodsmoor Romance. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1982. Mysteries of Winterthurn. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1983. Solstice. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1985.

JOYCE CAROL OATES / 525 COLLECTED SHORT STORIES

CRITICAL BOOKS

By the North Gate. New York: Vanguard, 1963. Upon the Sweeping Flood. New York: Vanguard, 1966. The Wheel of Love. New York: Vanguard, 1970. Marriages and Infidelities. New York: Vanguard, 1972. The Goddess and Other Women. New York: Vanguard, 1974. The Hungry Ghosts: Seven Allusive Comedies. Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1974. The Poisoned Kiss and Other Stories from the Portuguese. New York: Vanguard, 1975. The Seduction and Other Stories. Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1975. Crossing the Border. New York: Vanguard, 1976. Night-Side. New York: Vanguard, 1977. All the Good People I've Left Behind. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Black Sparrow Press, 1979. A Sentimental Education. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1981. Last Days. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1984.

The Edge of Impossibility: Tragic Forms in Literature. New York: Vanguard, 1972. The Hostile Sun: The Poetry ofD. H. Lawrence. Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1973. New Heaven, New Earth: The Visionary Experience in Literature. New York: Vanguard, 1974. The Profane Art. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1983.

POETRY

Women in Love and Other Poems. New York: Albondacani Press, 1968. Anonymous Sins and Other Poems. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969. Love and Its Derangements. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1970. In Case of Accidental Death. Cambridge, Mass.: Pomegranate Press, 1972. Wooded Forms. New York: Albondacani Press, 1972. Single poem. Angel Fire. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973. Dreaming America and Other Poems, n.p.: Aloe Editions, 1973. A Posthumous Sketch. Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1973. The Fabulous Beasts. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1975. Women Whose Lives Are Food, Men Whose Lives Are Money. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978. OTHER FICTION

Scenes from American Life: Contemporary Short Fiction, edited by Gates. New York: Random House, 1973. Miracle Play. Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1974.

CRITICAL ARTICLES

"Melville and the Manichean Illusion." Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 4:117-29 (Spring 1962). 'The 'Fifth Act' and the Chorus in the English and Scottish Ballads." Dalhousie Review, 42:119-29 (Autumn 1962). "The Comedy of Metamorphosis in the Revenger's Tragedy." Bucknell Review, 11:38-52 (December 1962). "The Existential Comedy of Conrad's 'Youth.'" Renascence, 26:22-28 (Fall 1963). "The Alchemy of Antony and Cleopatra." Bucknell Review, 12:37-50 (Spring 1964). "Porter's 'Noon Wine': A Stifled Tragedy." Renascence, 27:157-62 (Spring 1965). "lonesco's Dances of Death." Thought, 40:415-31 (Autumn 1965). "Masquerade and Marriage: Fielding's Comedies of Identity." Ball State University Forum, 6:10-21 (Autumn 1965). "The Ambiguity of Troilus and Cressida" Shakespeare Quarterly, 17:141-50 (Spring 1966). "Building Tension in the Short Story." Writer, 79:11-12,44 (June 1966). "Chekhov and the Theater of the Absurd." Bucknell Review, 14:44-58 (Winter 1966). "Ritual and Violence in Flannery O'Connor." Thought, 41:545-60 (Winter 1966). "Essence and Existence in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida." Philological Quarterly, 46:167-85 (April 1967). "Background and Foreground in Fiction." Writer, 80:11-13 (August 1967). "Man Under the Sentence of Death: The Novels of James M. Cain." In Tough Guy Writers of the Thirties, edited by D. Madden. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1968. Pp. 11028. "The Double Vision of The Brothers Karamazov." Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 27:20313 (Winter 1968).

526 I AMERICAN WRITERS "The Art of Eudora Welty." Shenandoah, 20:54-57 (1969). "Art at the Edge of Impossibility: Mann's Dr. Faustus." Southern Review, 5:375-97 (April 1969). "Yeats: Violence, Tragedy, Mutability." Bucknell Review, 17:1-17 (December 1969). "Tragic Rites in Yeats' A Full Moon in March" Antioch Review, 29:547-60 (Winter 1969-70). "With Norman Mailer at the Sex Circus: Out of the Machine." Atlantic, 228:42-45 (July 1971). "The Short Story." Southern Humanities Review, 5:213-14 (Summer 1971). "New Heaven and New Earth." Saturday Review, 55C:51-54 (November 4, 1972). "A Personal View of Nabokov." Saturday Review, 1:36-37 (January 1973). "The Myth of the Isolated Artist." Psychology Today, 6:74-75 (May 1973). "Art: Therapy and Magic." American Journal, 1:17-20 (July 3, 1973). "The Death Throes of Romanticism: The Poems of Sylvia Plath." Southern Review, 9:501-22 (July 1973). "The Visionary Art of Flannery O'Connor." Southern Humanities Review, 7:235-46 (Summer 1973). "A Visit with Doris Lessing." Southern Review, 9:873-82 (October 1973). "The Teleology of the Unconscious: The Art of Norman Mailer." Critic, 32:25-35 (November-December 1973). "The Unique/Universal in Fiction." Writer, 86:912 (January 1974). "Disguised Fiction." PMLA, 89:580-81 (May 1974). "Other Celebrity Voices: How Art Has Touched Our Lives." Today s Health, 52:31 (May 1974). "Is This the Promised End?: The Tragedy of King Lear." Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 33:19-32 (Fall 1974). "The Immense Indifference of Things': The Tragedy of Conrad's Nostromo" Novel, 9:5-22 (Fall 1975). "Updike's American Comedies." Modern Fiction Studies, 21:459-72 (1975)v "Many Are Called ..." In American Poets in 1976, edited by William Heyen. Indianapolis: BobbsMerrill, 1976. Pp. 202-11. "Jocoserious Joyce." Critical Inquiry, 2:677-88 (Summer 1976).

"Lawrence's Gotterdammerung: The Tragic Vision of Women in Love." Critical Inquiry, 4:559-78 (Spring 1978).

BIBLIOGRAPHIES Catron, Douglas M. "A Contribution to a Bibliography of Works by and About Joyce Carol Gates." American Literature, 49:399-414 (November 1977). McCormick, Lucienne P. "A Bibliography of Works by and About Joyce Carol Gates." American Literature, 43:124-32 (March 1971).

CRITICAL STUDIES Adams, R. M. "Joyce Carol Gates at Home." New York Times Book Review, September 28, 1969, pp. 4-5, 48. Allen, Bruce. "Intrusions of Consciousness," Hudson Review, 28:611-15 (Winter 1975-76). Allen, Mary I. "The Terrified Women of Joyce Carol Gates." In The Necessary Blankness: Women in Major American Fiction of the Sixties. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976. Pp. 133-59. Avant, John Alfred. "An Interview with Joyce Carol Gates." Library Journal 97D:3711-12 (November 15, 1972). Batterberry, Michael and Ariane. "Focus on Joyce Carol Gates." Harper's Bazaar, 106:159, 174, 176 (September 1973). Bellamy, Joe David. "The Dark Lady of American Letters: An Interview with Joyce Carol Gates." Atlantic, 229:63-67 (February 1972). Bender, Eileen T. "Autonomy and Influence: Joyce Carol Gates' Marriages and Infidelities." Soundings, 58:390-406 (Fall 1975). Boesky, Dale. "Correspondence with Miss Joyce Carol Gates." International Review of Psychoanalysis, 2:481-86 (1975). Bower, Warren. "Bliss in the First Person." Saturday Review, 51:34-35 (October 26, 1968). Burwell, Rose Marie. "The Process of Individuation as Narrative Structure: Joyce Carol Gates' Do with Me What You Will." Critique, 17, no. 2:93106 (December 1975).

JOYCE CAROL GATES / 527 "Joyce Carol Gates' First Novel." Canadian Literature, 73:54-67 (Summer 1977). demons, Walter. "Joyce Carol Gates: Love and Violence." Newsweek, 80:72-74, 77 (December 11, 1972). Creighton, Joanne V. "Unliberated Women in Joyce Carol Gates' Fiction." World Literature Written in English, 17:165-75 (April 1978). . "Joyce Carol Gates' Craftsmanship in The Wheel of Lover Studies in Short Fiction, 15:37584 (Fall 1978). -. Joyce Carol Oates. Boston: G. K. Hall (Twayne), 1979. Dike, Donald A. "The Aggressive Victim in the Fiction of Joyce Carol Oates." Grey friar, 15:13-29 (1974). Duus, Louise. "The Population of Eden': Joyce Carol Gates' By the North Gate." Critique, 7:176-77 (Winter 1964). Possum, Robert H. "Only Control: The Novels of Joyce Carol Oates." Studies in the Novel, 7:28597 (Summer 1975). Giles, James R. "Suffering, Transcendence, and Artistic 'Form': Joyce Carol Gates' them" Arkansas Quarterly, 32:213-26 (Autumn 1976). Goodman, Charlotte. "Women and Madness in the Fiction of Joyce Carol Oates." Women and Literature, 5:17-28 (1977). Grant, Mary Kathryn, R.S.M. The Tragic Vision of Joyce Carol Oates. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1978. Harter, Carol. "America as 'Consumer Garden': The Nightmare Vision of Joyce Carol Oates." Revue des langues vivantes, Bicentennial Issue: 171-87 (1976). Kazin, Alfred. "Oates." Harper's, 243:78-82 (August 1971).

Key, James A. "Joyce Carol Gates' Wonderland and the Idea of Control." Publications of the Arkansas Philological Association, 2:15-21 (1976). Kuehl, Linda. "An Interview with Joyce Carol Oates." Commonweal, 91:307-10 (December 5, 1969). Liston, William T. "Her Brother's Keeper." Southern Humanities Review, 11:195-203 (Spring 1977). Park, Sue Simpson. "A Study in Counterpoint: Joyce Carol Gates' 'How I Contemplated the World from the Detroit House of Correction and Began My Life over Again.'" Modern Fiction Studies, 22:213-24 (Summer 1976). Petite, Joseph. '"Out of the Machine': Joyce Carol Oates and the Liberation of Women." Kansas Quarterly, 9:75-79 (Spring 1977). Pickering, Samuel F., Jr. "The Short Stories of Joyce Carol Oates." Georgia Review, 28:218-26 (Summer 1974). Sullivan, Walter. "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?: The Short Story in Search of Itself." Sewanee Review, 78:531-42 (Summer 1970). "Transformations of Self: An Interview with Joyce Carol Oates." Ohio Review, 15:50-61 (1973). Waller, Gary F. Dreaming America: Obsession and Transcendence in the Fiction of Joyce Carol Oates. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978. Wegs, Joyce M. "'Don't You Know Who I Am?': The Grotesque in Gates' 'Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?'" Journal of Narrative Technique, 5:66-72 (January 1975).

—DIANE TOLOMEO

Clifford Odets 19O6—1963

F

tended after 1935 to tell his story often, to a great many interviewers, frequently altering the facts to suit the circumstances. Perhaps, like many of his contemporaries, Odets tended to locate the source of his unrest in the social inequities he saw while growing up; perhaps, too, his awareness of social injustices led to his brief association with the Communist party in 1934. Probably he found some release from his feeling of isolation, as well as a sympathetic community, through joining a junior acting company of the Theatre Guild in 1929, after having understudied Spencer Tracy in the brief run of Conflict earlier that year. In 1931 three leading Guild directors—Cheryl Crawford, Harold Clurman, and Lee Strasberg— broke away from the organization and, with Odets as one of the founding members, established perhaps the most distinguished theater company in the annals of American drama, the Group Theatre. It is difficult to imagine a more integrative atmosphere for a troubled young actor and aspiring dramatist. In his splendid history of the Group Theatre (1931-1941), The Fervent Years, Harold Clurman remembers closingnight curtain calls in 1931:

ELORRIE cries to Sid in Waiting for Lefty, "But something wants us to be lonely like that—crawling alone in the dark." As a youth, Clifford Odets was apparently as stricken as his young lovers with a sense of alienation from the bleak America of the Great Depression. "I've always felt homeless," he told Michael Mendelsohn late in his life, even though he had been born in Philadelphia, on July 18, 1906, into a family of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants that had gained financial security before Odets was out of his boyhood. The eldest child and only son of Louis and Pearl Geisinger Odets, Clifford Odets was brought up in the lower-middleclass milieu of the Bronx in New York City, and was educated at P.S. 52 and at Morris High School. At the age of seventeen, failing many of his subjects, he dropped out of school. According to legends that Odets apparently built up around himself after his rise to fame in 1935, his enraged father smashed the youth's typewriter upon learning that his son wished to become a writer rather than an advertising copywriter. Young Odets supported himself by acting jobs in radio and with Harry Kemp's Poets' Theatre and Mae Desmond's Stock Company. It is difficult to extract fact from fancy concerning much of Odets' early experience, including his oft-proclaimed feelings of suicidal depression and homelessness, for he

... a man in the balcony shouted: "Long live the Soviet Union!" Franchot Tone, on the stage,

529

530 / AMERICAN shouted back, "Hurrah for America!" Both outcries might be described as irrelevant, but evidently there was something in the air beyond theatrical appreciation. If the political spirit of the times was often quite leftward, the Group Theatre was not doctrinaire; indeed, Clurman recalls that its goals were to exploit the Stanislavski method and the Moscow Art Theater tradition of ensemble acting, with the view that their theater should stand as a metaphor for society as a more cohesive, collective entity. The only "philosophy" was to be a generally optimistic socialism, and such playwrights as Sidney Kingsley, Maxwell Anderson, Paul Green, and William Saroyan provided some of the best dramas of the 1930's in support of that concern. The Group further served as a model for such "workers' theaters" as the Theatre Union and for the much more broad-ranging Federal Theatre Project (19351939), the first government-sponsored theater in America. The Group fostered the distinguished careers of such directors as Harold Clurman, Lee Strasberg, Elia Kazan, and Stella Adler (who was also an actress), and of stage designers Boris Aronson and Mordecai Gorelik. Quite possibly no finer group of actors and actresses has existed in American theater history than the Group contingent, which included such luminaries as Morris Carnovsky, Luther and Stella Adler, John (then Jules) Garfield, Frances Farmer, Howard DaSilva, and the young Karl Maiden. The Group Theatre, wrote Clurman, was important "because it organized its actors as a permanent company and trained them in a common craftsmanship which ... became emblematic for the era [and made] the stage an instrument of social enlightenment." Odets' association with such an organization contributed significantly to his development as a dramatist. "I don't think I would ever have

WRITERS

written a play," he observed in 1936, "if it hadn't been for the Group.... They helped me to assert my values." Odets' great strength as a creator of lively, developed characters stemmed at least in part from the Group's ensemble system: the composition of the troupe substantially influenced the form of Odets' plays. After writing for them an unsuccessful draft of Awake and Sing! (then entitled / Got the Blues), Odets, according to Clurman in The Fervent Years, locked himself in a hotel room early in 1935, in an attempt to produce a work that would win a prize for one-act plays, and emerged three days later with Waiting for Lefty. Upon its enthusiastic reception, Odets revised Awake and Sing! and it soon opened to both popular and critical acclaim. The year 1935 became Odets' annus mirabilis as two more plays, 77/7 the Day I Die and Paradise Lost, appeared by December. The young playwright was the new sensation of the New York theater, but his acclaim was not merely the result of the social themes in these plays. Commenting on the force of his dialogue, Clurman recalls: "... but it is not precisely naturalistic speech, for Odets' writing is a personal creation, essentially lyric, in which vulgarity, tenderness, energy, humor, and a headlong idealism are commingled." Unfortunately, Clurman's appraisal was not heeded, as critics and public alike crowned Odets as a Great Depression playwright limited to social themes. That stereotype was to plague him for the remainder of his life, and has continued to diminish his reputation as a serious artist. Waiting for Lefty was first staged on January 6, 1935, at the Civic Repertory Theatre, with such Group stalwarts as Russell Collins (Harry Fatt), Elia Kazan (Agate Keller), Odets himself as Dr. Benjamin, and Lee J. Cobb as an extra. Sanford Meisner and Odets directed what is still doubtless Odets' most famous and most widely anthologized play. It has perma-

CLIFFORD ODETS / 531 nently labeled him as the archetypal "prophet of the proletariat"; indeed, its simple action of the coming to awareness of a group of urban taxi drivers that mass action is needed to defeat the machinations of a corrupt union is reminiscent of other agitprop works of the period by such playwrights as John Wexley, Marc Blitzstein, and Albert Malta. Yet even in this early play, Odets' themes and form show promise of richer things to come than were achieved by any of the social dramatists of the period. In Waiting for Lefty, Odets articulates the themes and motifs of individual loneliness in the modern world, the historical dislocations that made this loneliness almost inevitable, and the saving energy and dynamism of ordinary people that allow the suffering individual's existential decision to struggle toward dignity and moral value in the face of both political oppression and the hopelessness and alienation that seem to be metaphysical forces of the modern age. Waiting for Lefty is composed of two framing scenes and five "episodes" (six in the original version). As the play begins, Harry Fatt, a "well fed and confident" union boss, backed by a hired gunman, is trying to persuade the drivers to delay a strike. The crowd he addresses, planted among the audience, calls out for Lefty Costello, their elected leader, to speak; but since he is nowhere to be found, Fatt allows the crowd to be addressed by their committee, "this bunch of cowboys you elected." Fatt is so confident of the weakness of these six men that he waves away the gunman, allowing the committee members to speak. The heart of the play lies in the stories told by the committeemen in their "episodes," which reveal their degrading financial impoverishment, gradually inciting the men to social solidarity by the end of the play, in the famous "STRIKE, STRIKE, STRIKE!!!" at the curtain. The first and third "episodes" concern the disastrous effects of the cabdrivers' inability to

earn a living wage. Joe Mitchell, the first to speak, admits that "my wife made up my mind" that they need a strike; after a slow fade we see a lighted circle, in which Joe and his wife Edna play their story. In perhaps the most powerful scene of the play, Edna scornfully forces Joe to take responsibility for their lives, ultimately implying that she will leave him unless he takes action by trying to urge the other drivers to strike. At first, Joe echoes the myriad weak men in Odets' plays (Myron Berger in Awake and Sing!, Leo Gordon in Paradise Lost, Jerry Wilenski in Clash by Night), as he whines, "Jeez, I wish I was a kid again and didn't have to think about the next minute." Edna retorts acidly, "But you're not a kid and you do have to think about the next minute. You got two blondie kids sleeping in the next room. They need food and clothes." Their furniture gone, Edna bitterly accuses her husband and "any other hackie that won't fight" of moral cowardice. She forces Joe's evasiveness into action as she cries: I know this—your boss is making suckers outa you boys every minute. Yes, and suckers out of all the wives and the poor innocent kids who'll grow up with crooked spines and sick bones. Sure, I see it in the papers, how good orange juice is for kids. But dammit our kids get colds one on top of the other. They look like little ghosts. Betty never saw a grapefruit. I took her to the store last week and she pointed to a stack of grapefruits. "What's that!" she said. My God, Joe—the world is supposed to be for all of us. Spurred by Edna's disgust and anger, Joe leaves in search of Lefty and strike plans. Less optimistic is the resolution of "The Young Hack and His Girl," the third episode. Florrie, her life a drudgery of counter work and caring for her aged mother and brother Irv, screams at Irv, "Don't you see I want something else out of life. Sure, I want romance, love, babies. I want

532 I AMERICAN everything in life I can get." Her desire centers on her fiance of three years, Sid Stein, an impoverished driver, despite Irv's warnings that she must stay away from him because he lacks the money to make a good husband. ("Nowadays is no time to be soft. You gotta be hard as a rock or go under," Irv warns her.) Odets' persistent theme of homelessness echoes in Sid's lament to Florrie, "You and me—we never even had a room to sit in somewhere." In the most poignant scene of the play, the two lovers pathetically try to escape despair through a Hollywood fantasy, accompanied by a doleful dance that ends with Sid's burying his head in Florrie's lap, defeated by "the 1935 blues." Less powerfully moving than these two domestic scenes are the two "professional" episodes in which Miller, a former lab assistant, and Dr. Benjamin, a former charity ward intern, tell the stories of their disavowal of systems they have found corrupt. Miller, another man from the urban lower classes who reads "nothing but Andy Gump" in the newspapers, may not have Dr. Benjamin's middle-class awareness of radical issues, but his intuition leads him to punch Fayette, the reactionary industrialist, in the mouth after refusing to spy on a chemist with whom he has been assigned to make poison gas. Dr. Benjamin, displaced from his position by a less qualified physician who is Gentile and better connected politically, manages to elicit from his superior, Dr. Barnes, some radical sympathies as Barnes admits, "In a rich man's country your true self's buried deep." Another "professional" episode (originally the fifth), "The Young Actor," which Odets chose to drop from the final version, features Philips, first seen "isolated clear on the stage," desperate for a part and expecting to become a father in a few weeks, not knowing "what buttons to push," beseeching the producer, Grady, "I'm an artist! I can—." Grady's reply echoes the indifference of Fatt and the modern world to the spiritual and the aesthetic:

WRITERS

That's your headache. Nobody interested in artists here. Get a big bunch for a nickel on any corner. Two flops in a row on this lousy street nobody loves you—only God, and He don't count. We protect investments: we cast to type. Your face and height we want, not your soul, son. This scene ends with Grady's stenographer having sympathy for the youth and handing him a dollar and a copy of the Communist Manifesto. Perhaps Odets ultimately eliminated this scene not so much because of its agitprop obviousness as because Philips was one middle-class character too many in a play in which dramatic power derives, ironically enough, from the selfoppression of the lower class. In the final version the "Interne Episode" is preceded by the "Labor Spy Episode." Though very well positioned structurally, it is not at all effective dramatically, since after the first two men have spoken, Fatt feels he must introduce Clayton, a labor spy, in order to dupe the cabdrivers out of a strike. Most improbably, Clayton is unmasked by one of the crowd as his brother. Odets is on much surer ground in the final scene, with Agate Keller, minus an eye lost at age eleven from working in poor factory conditions, who wears his glass eye "like a medal 'cause it tells the world where I belong—deep down in the working class!" With heavy irony Keller sums up the previous speakers' anger, presenting a strongly Marxist line as he incites the men to band together for an immediate strike. The news that Lefty Costello has been murdered by Fatt's goons is anticlimactic, for the men are ready to act as a group for the first time, as Odets makes clear by the blocking and the choral speeches near the conclusion. Though Keller's final speeches are clearly Marxist, Odets universalizes the "storm-birds of the working-class" atmosphere by Keller's oft-forgotten last lines, "And when we die

CLIFFORD ODETS / 533 they'll know what we did to make a new world! Christ, cut us up to little pieces.... put fruit trees where our ashes are!" Keller's final image, the most arresting in the play and prefiguring Odets' final work, The Flowering Peach, universalizes the political content of the play: though these men suffer from intolerable working conditions, they finally become organic, lifelike, as they learn to make decisions for themselves, to grow, and to become—in Martin Buber's terms, to risk a response. Throughout his career Odets would use the political and social struggles of the 1930's as a vehicle for man's universal struggle to avoid moral solipsism by connecting to values beyond the self, by becoming responsible. The stage imagery in Waiting for Lefty shows this clearly. In the stage directions introducing episode 1 ("Joe and Edna"), the members of the committee are seated "very dimly visible" outside the spotlight, at the edge of which Fatt sits complacently blowing smoke into the lighted circle where Joe and Edna struggle. In contrast, at the end Agate Keller is in the middle of the stage, surrounded by a human wall of committeemen and other cabdrivers, joined in human solidarity for a better and more dignified life. Odets' existential theme is doubly underscored as Keller says, "Don't wait for Lefty! He might never come," for in the chaos of Florence's "crawling alone in the dark," only men who take direction of their own lives can have any chance against Harry Fatt and his gunman. Though in parts crudely written, Waiting for Lefty is a better work of dramatic art than is commonly acknowledged. Odets shows his ability to create a living, feeling (though not always thinking) character in few words and in restricted compass. This trait is particularly clear in the presentation of Edna Mitchell, whose clipped, angry responses toward her weak husband barely conceal a powerful attachment to him, and in Florence and Sid, whose jokes, posturing, crying, and meaningful silences strive to

mask their growing awareness and horror of the trap of diminishing social expectations from which they probably will never escape. Part of the tension in the play is that Odets arouses expectations of only a social melodrama but gives us more universal concerns to empathize with, as an undercurrent of less obvious action begins to surface as early as "Joe and Edna." Odets' potential for tragedy is evident even in this unrefined early drama. Neither the characters nor the form of the play is static, as several characters develop (Joe, Miller, Barnes) and Odets imparts an intelligible unity and coherence to the action. What is most interesting (and unusual in so young a writer) is that the suspense is generated not merely by causal, sequential development of action and character, but also by a contextual, comparative progression of event and character that allows the audience that sympathy so peculiar to Odets, given the rudimentary form of his early work. As Odets shows us different people confronted by threatened or actual loss of financial security, and we see them react with similar anger and disillusion, he elicits not only the expected feelings of political anger, but also the unexpected, deeper ones of social binding against the chaos of experience and the metaphysical injustices of modern life. Further, Waiting for Lefty fuses O'Neillian expressionism with naturalism as the barren stage (three years before Thornton Wilder used the device in Our Town), disconnected scenes, and flashbacks both bring the audience into the play and show modern man's isolation and alienation. Thus Waiting for Lefty emerges beyond social melodrama, as a significant representation of the human condition. In his careful study of the formal aspects of Odets' plays, Edward Murray chooses not to devote analytical chapters to Wait ing for Lefty or Till the Day I Die, feeling that these early efforts do not support a high estimate of Odets' craft. Till the Day I Die is probably the least regarded of his dramas: one early critic, Percy

534 I AMERICAN Hammond, dismissed it as mere "brutal sentimentality." Produced as the curtain raiser of a double bill with Waiting for Lefty, Odets' "antiNazi play" is considerably more than that: it is a powerful condemnation of all dehumanizing systems that would enslave the individual. Comprising seven scenes, Till the Day I Die recounts the story of Ernst Tausig, a Berlin Communist who is imprisoned by the Nazis for printing antifascist leaflets and is gradually destroyed, brutally by his Nazi captors and more subtly by his comrades, who are duped by the Nazis' lies that Tausig has become a collaborator and lose their trust in his loyalty. Odets broadens the thematic thrust of other antifascist plays of the period, such as Elmer Rice's Judgment Day, by depicting a protagonist manipulated and destroyed by two systems, both equally dismissive of his individuality and humanity. Much of the dramatic power of this underrated play comes from Odets' farcical mode, particularly in scenes 3 and 4, where the source of the evil of fascism is revealed to be its profound ignorance. Marx Brothers antics frame the senselessly degrading violence of the trooper, Thunderbolt, who on a simple bet casually knocks men unconscious with gun butt or fist. His evil is banal, unpremeditated, and so horribly natural to the storm troopers that the audience is induced to hate not only Nazis but any form of unthinking brutality or inhumanity. This prepares us for scene 6, one of the most moving in Odets' entire canon, in which Tausig is tried in absentia, on charges of being an informant, by a jury of a dozen Communist party members and is blacklisted, even by the woman who bears his child. The "Groupthink" (the term was actually coined years later by George Orwell in 1984) is summed up by one comrade: "Every unit paper in the country must carry his name and description. For our purposes he is deadly, dangerous." The tension of the scene is

WRITERS

heightened when Tilly Westermann, Tausig's lover, reads a note from him, smuggled through the underground, proclaiming his loyalty to the cause. By this device Odets plays to the audience's wish that the party will keep its trust in Tausig, as befits their social ideals. But Odets' power lies partly in defeating our sentimental expectations. Stieglitz, a leading theoretician just released from detention camp, is asked to speak. As he reveals a mind sundered by the horrors of his incarceration, the will of the party is fixed; and as the door slams locked behind the retreating Stieglitz, all hands rise in confirmation of the guilty verdict—even those of Tausig's brother Carl and Tilly. Tausig is thus cut off from party, home, friends, and the social community for which he has sacrificed so much. He is the archetypal scapegoat figure in his own community. Odets' skill in minor characterizations enhances this crucial scene. Lest we end in complete lack of sympathy with the party members, Julius, who cannot be seated for the discussion because "I left my shoe in the corner. My foot is cold," gives us in one superb stroke the sufferings of an individual and of an entire social group. He is seen later, but not heard, as he comes over to Tilly when she reads the pathetic note from the tortured Tausig. To heighten the ambiguity of the scene at the end, when Tilly's hand slowly rises to condemn her lover, a nameless man is heard eating nuts loudly, oblivious to the symbolic damnation that is taking place for the perceived needs of the group. Other characters are nicely delineated with a minimum of details. Here is another of Odets' sometimes neglected dramatic skills—his ability to allow individuals to emerge from recognizable type characters, thus satisfying both the average and the more discriminating theatergoer. This accounts in part for the surprising density of texture in many of Odets' plays— even in such overtly simple and comparatively

CLIFFORD ODETS / 535 crude early efforts as Till the Day I Die and Waiting for Lefty. While the early newspaper critics were correct in condemning the often clumsy dialogue of Till the Day I Die, the improbability of Duhring's "good Nazi" stereotype, and the sentimentality of the conclusion, the density of texture allows even Odets' apparently simple plays to contain a surprising amount of emotional power. For example, Tilly is at once a dedicated, driving party worker, who teases Tausig about his "male chauvinism," and his sympathetic lover. In the moving fifth scene Tausig, momentarily released by the Nazis in the hope that he will lead them to other party members because he is mortally ill, staggers to Tilly's dimly lit room, where she has avoided capture by pretending to be a prostitute. "It is true our work comes before our personal happiness. But we must try to wrest some joy from life," she admits realistically. In the final scene they are framed in the light from their cigarettes, as they were in the first scene by the light of the burning documents they momentarily touched together just before they were captured by the storm troopers. The lovers discuss their unborn child, the hope not only of their movement but also of the world. Tilly speaks memorably of what once was: I had a nice coat once. I had a mother. I had a father. I was a little girl with pigtails and her face scrubbed every morning. I was a good child. I believed in God. In summer I ate mulberries from our own tree. In late summer the ground was rotten where they fell. She speaks these lines also to Carl, Tausig's younger brother, a rabid radical whose demise we are led to expect because of his hotheadedness early in the play. Ironically, it is Ernst Tausig who will die, in large part because of the ignorant intemperance of what Carl represents. Perhaps Carl is the other side of Schlegel, the

brutal Nazi captain who, fearing his orderly Adolph's "expressive hands," viciously smashes Tausig's with a rifle butt. Carl allows his love for his brother to be dissipated by his zeal for what he perceives is a valid cause; like Schlegel, he sacrifices his humanity for an abstraction. In the trial scene Carl is a fine blend of polarized emotions, first speaking sentimentally of the music he and Ernst once shared, then ironically hardening into the argument that fascists have always used to sacrifice man to the state: "We must expose this one brother wherever he is met. Whosoever looks in his face is to point the finger. Children will jeer him in the darkest streets of his life!" Odets skillfully shows Carl's repression of the injustice he knows he has done in casting out his brother, in failing to acknowledge him, as Tilly forces Carl to take refuge at first in unreason to safeguard his need to kill Ernst. But Carl ultimately refuses to kill his brother, and even learns from Ernst's sacrifice: "Who am I to sit in judgment?" And after Ernst's suicide he provides the play's benediction, "Let him live " Ernst goads Carl to the realization that man's common humanity is greater than any social cause. Throughout the play he echoes Odets' frequent theme that "A man must have some place." His place is in the faces of the children he saw in Moscow: "When I saw them I understood most deeply what the revolution meant." At the end, a completely broken man, Ernst has been reduced to wandering the streets, buying perfumed soap because it reminds him of the smell of tulips he and old Baum discussed months before, at the start of the play. Though Ernst's final "Day must follow the night" speech is strained agitprop, he is nonetheless a pathetic figure. Listlessly holding the Nazi "wooden money" Baum had warned him against, he is condemned by its unwanted presence to his comrades' censure, an early victim of the power of a massive, organized media

536 I AMERICAN WRITERS campaign to manipulate the opinion of a credulous people. None of Odets' plays is richer in character, comic incident, depiction of ethnic identity, and memorable language than Awake and Sing!, considered by most critics to be his most distinguished play in a comic mode. The first of four Odets dramas to be staged on Broadway in 1935 (opening on February 19), Awake and Sing! continues his preoccupation with themes of risk and commitment, at both a deeper and a broader level. Young Ralph Berger's desire to transcend his Bronx beginnings is the dramatic pivot here; and the battle over his destiny is joined by Bessie, the archetypal Jewish mother whom Odets makes somewhat sympathetic despite her possessive, restrictive preoccupation with respectability. Her father, Jacob, is a faded Marxist who urges the boy to "Go out and fight so life shouldn't be printed on dollar bills." Ralph dreams of faraway, romantic sounds of trains at night and the evening mail plane bound for Boston ("I get a kick the way it cuts across the Bronx every night."), yet he indecisively allows his domineering mother to control both his paycheck and his love interest with Blanche throughout much of the play. Gerald Weales's comprehensive historicalcritical volume on Odets correctly identifies Bessie as the antagonist against whose values Jacob must struggle to teach Ralph (and by extension Ralph's sister, Hennie) to rebel. The most vital character in Awake and Sing!, Bessie is a tense amalgam of insecurity and pride who can repress her father's socialist wisdom with "Never mind, Pop! Pass me the salt," and yet badger Schlosser the janitor and justify her success ethic to Morty: "He didn't have skates! But when he got sick, a twelve-year-old boy, who called a big specialist for the last $25 in the house? Skates!" Confronted by Ralph with her guilt in marrying off f he pregnant Hennie to ineffectual Sam Feinschreiber (for whom "life is

a high chill wind weaving itself around his head"), Bessie is capable of driving her father to suicide by smashing his cherished opera records, the aesthetic and spiritual focus of his life; yet Odets preserves great stature for her in her last long speech: Ralphie, I worked too hard all my years to be treated like dirt. It's no law we should be stuck together like Siamese twins. Summer shoes you didn't have, skates you never had, but I bought a new dress every week. A lover I kept—Mr. Gigolo! . . . Or was Bessie Berger's children always the cleanest on the block?! ... If I didn't worry about the family who would? . . . here without a dollar you don't look the world in the eye. Talk from now to next year—this is life in America. To Ralph's reply that "If life made you this way, then it's wrong!... it can't stay like this," Bessie wearily replies before she goes off to bed: "Mom, what does she know? She's oldfashioned!" But I'll tell you a big secret: My whole life I wanted to go away too, but with children a woman stays home. A fire burned in my heart too, but now it's too late. I'm no spring chicken. The clock goes and Bessie goes. Only my machinery can't be fixed. Jacob throws himself with all his strength and principle against Bessie's materialism. From his first line, in which he reminds Ralph that his name in the paper is but a certain kind of success, the old man opposes his daughter: "But Ralph you don't make like you. Before you do it, I'll die first.... This is a house? Marx said it—abolish such families." Jacob's son Morty hears from the old barber, "To each face a different haircut. Custom built, no ready made." He worries that Ralph "dreams all night of fortunes. Why not? Don't it say in the movies he should have a personal steamship, pyjamas for fifty dollars a pair and a toilet like

CLIFFORD ODETS / 537 a monument?" Jacob sees Ralph slipping into the same arid values that have corrupted and made ineffectual the boy's father, Myron, whom he charges: The present smiles on you, yes? It promises yo\i the future something? Did you found a piece of earth where you could live like a human being and die with the sun on your face? . . . on these questions, on this theme—the struggle for existence—you can't make an answer. Odets' uncompromising honesty in Awake and Sing! extends even to Jacob's risking to see himself in a less favorable light. Shortly before Bessie smashes his records, he admits to Ralph that he has not acted often enough as he had advised the boy, that too often he has had "a glass tea" like Myron, acquiescing in Bessie's dominance. But he ultimately decides, with the prophet Isaiah, to "Awake and sing, ye that dwell in dust, and the earth shall cast out the dead," and slips off the roof on a winter night, leaving Ralph his insurance policy so that the youth may escape the moral decay of Bessie's house. It is the tenderest of the many ironies in the play that Ralph decides not to take Jacob's money, partly because of his grandfather's sacrifice and partly because of Hennie's decision to leave Sam and go off with her real love, the bitter yet life-affirming war veteran, Moe Axelrod (who wins her with "Nobody knows, but you do it and find out. When you're scared the answer's zero."). Ralph comes to maturity, realizing that his mother has suffered and sacrificed just as Jacob has, that society has strongly influenced her success ethic, and that Jacob didn't die "for us to fight about nickels." So he will stay in Bessie's house but no longer be Bessie's boy, as Moe recognizes with his penultimate line, "I wouldn't trade you for two pitchers and an outfielder." Perhaps no Odets play is as rich in urban eth-

nic humor as Awake and Sing! In his 1978 critical volume on Odets, Harold Cantor has exhaustively analyzed Odets' linguistic devices, including Yiddish humor, wisecracks, epigrams, and other verbal strategies. Since the play represents such specifically Jewish-American themes as the fragmented, incongruous nature of experience, the uncertainties of modern urban life, and the middle-class yearning for security, it is suitable that Odets should bring his most famous family to brilliant life with such lines as Bessie's praise of actress Polly Moran, "a woman with a nose from here to Hunt's Point, but a fine player," or her encomium to Wallace Beery, "He acts like life, very good." Odets' famed ear for dialect shows in Sam's fear at Hennie's disengagement from him, "It don't satisfy me more, such remarks, when Hennie could kill in the bed," or Bessie's early angry shot at her father, "He opens his mouth and the whole Bronx could fall in." Frequently, Odets' Chekhovian strain will reveal itself in ambiguous subject references, like Jacob's defense of his book collection, "It needs a new world," or janitor Schlosser's skewed syntax as he and Bessie squabble over the respectability quotient of Bessie's household: "In a decent house dogs are not running to make dirty the hallway." S. J. Perelman has parodied Odets' more clumsy lines amusingly—one need only read Sid's words to Florrie in Waiting for Lefty, "But that sort of life ain't for the dogs which is us. Christ, Baby! I get like thunder in my chest when we're together," to understand the source of Perelman's barbs—but at his best Odets is a superb stage poet. Odets' handling of the comic form is perhaps the finest aesthetic quality of Awake and Sing! Bessie's household, as utilitarian as it may be, upholds the celebration by comedy of man's social nature; and perhaps no American play except Eugene O'Neill's Ah, Wilderness! comments more generously on the benefits of family

538 I AMERICAN life. The healing, renewing force of the comic vision that celebrates man's ability to endure even after Jacob's suicide also manages to lift Ralph's spirit and make him capable of a more responsible act than would previously have been possible for him. The tolerance of comedy for even the weak and the foolish renders amusing the passive Myron's disordered ramblings about Valentino, as Odets reveals man's innate capacity for ludicrousness and self-delusion. The automatism of Myron and Bessie nicely supports Henri Bergson's theories of one of the main sources of laughter in comedy, while Moe's defensive sarcasm toward Hennie and his oral fixation on fruit reveal the power inherent in the derisive and the incongruous as two other staples of laughter in Odets' capable hands. The comic fact that, because of the narrowness of his vision, man seldom sees the changing conditions that make him ludicrous before he has a chance to adjust to them also provides tragedy, often just the other side of comedy. Bessie's actions are indeed despicable throughout much of the play. Having struggled for a decent material life for more than twenty years, she has raised a family that is opposed to her values because she does not see that Ralph and Hennie have different goals, that her middleclass aspirations have made her sacrifice honesty and integrity. In holding her family together, Bessie has derogated her father and treated her daughter as a thing to be manipulated, presumably (by Bessie's standards) for her own good. Seemingly at the surface level the most organic character in the drama, Bessie is really an automaton who confuses the validity of motive and act. Again the audience's expectations are derailed, for Odets writes more than another "Marxist play": Jacob is often weak, by his own admission, and after his death Moe and Ralph discover he has never read some of his cherished books. The meaning of Awake and Sing! extends beyond the limits of social drama, to universal dimensions.

WRITERS

Bessie's fears that families will be thrown out of their homes, "all the furniture on the sidewalk," are realized for the more prosperous Gordon family at the end of Paradise Lost (1935), the first of three further "family" plays in which the mood, both socially and humanistically, is darkened considerably beyond that of Awake and Sing! Most critics and audiences have been confused by its dark ambiguities and disappointed in Leo Gordon's ringing speech at the end, given the catastrophes that have befallen his sons and the betrayal of his friendship by his friend and partner, Sam Katz. Edward Murray's volume dismisses the play completely, and even Michael J. Mendelsohn's discriminating, balanced critical study regards Paradise Lost as an unquestioned failure. Odets, often an unreliable critic of his own work, is correct in considering it his best early play. Perhaps only in Golden Boy and in the much misunderstood Clash by Night would Odets manage the excellent fusion of formal and thematic effects that he achieves here. Paradise Lost is an allegory of the loss of a romantic dream to the carnage of modernism. Over the two and a half years covered by the drama, we observe the downfall of all that Leo Gordon has believed in: the promise of capitalism; the devotion of Sam Katz; the decline and fall of his beloved elder son, Ben, to a dimly understood success myth; and the physical erosion of his son Julie to a paralysis emblematic of the rot of the present century. "You can't read a paper nowadays," Leo muses. "The world has a profound dislocation." As he realizes Julie is dying, he beseeches his wife, Clara, "... what is happening here? Once we were all together and life was good." One of Odets' great comic creations, Gus Michaels, like Gaev in Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, mutters, "The whole world's fallin' to pieces, right under our eyes." Pike, the engaging Marxist furnace man, transcends Agate Keller's purely political concerns as he says sadly, "No one

CLIFFORD ODETS / 539 talks about the depression of the modern man's spirit, of his inability to live a full and human life." Leo and Gus strive to think and talk of these things, and Gus finally accomplishes a positive act by selling his precious stamp collection for a paltry sum, to try to help Leo and Clara after Sam Katz is found to have embezzled most of the money from the company he and Leo founded more than twenty years before. But Leo's ultimate tragedy—and the power of Paradise Lost lies in its tragic ending—is that for all of his effort to think liberally and wisely, he finally takes little decisive action, allowing himself to be trapped by a falsely romantic dream similar to the "faraway places" fantasies of Moe Axelrod and young Ralph Berger in Awake and Sing! Clara, practical yet kinder than Bessie Berger, tells us at the start that she has married "a fool, but I love him." Leo is trusting and honest, but will not look at the pictures of starving men that Pike tries to show him and fails to vote because "one side is as bad as the other." Deluding himself that happiness can never be found in material things, he promises to "face certain facts" tomorrow, but rarely does. He comforts himself with such mystical beliefs as "Maybe each hour is for some profound purpose . . . ," forgets where he puts his checks, and relegates to Sam all care of the "practical" sides of the business—and most of the worries that in their turn help drive Sam into mental, and thus moral, decline. Leo is the essentially passive man whom Dietrich Bonhoeffer would criticize for doing nothing, perhaps in hopes of avoiding taint, but ironically failing in the dream of service to others by his inaction. "Who are we, Mr. Gordon?" Pike reminds him. "Who then are we with our silence?" Leo recognizes, but does not act. His realization, "We cancel our experience. This is an American habit," is Odets' most powerful denunciation of the American dream before

Golden Boy. Its power comes not only from a Marxist but also from a more universally humanistic perspective. In the play's most mordant irony, Leo finally tries to act in the real world of affairs when he attempts to give the two homeless men Gus's stamp money. Though moral in his concern for others, he is naive, as the homeless Williams reminds him, in his assertion that he alone is responsible for their condition. Williams tells him he lives in a democratic dreamworld. "This kind of dream paralyzes the will—confuses the mind," says the homeless Paul, just before Leo's final, long "The world is beautiful" speech. Odets has thoroughly prepared his audience for this passage by Leo's passivity and dreaminess, and we ought not to find it surprising, since it bespeaks an illusion in which Leo has been ensconced throughout the drama. Though Odets' stage directions tell us that all are "deeply moved by this vision of the future," the last sound as the curtain slowly descends is Foley's fanfare for his "prosperity block party," held on the street where the Gordons' possessions have been deposited; the juxtaposition with Leo's final speech invests the resolution with a somber tragic irony. Leo Gordon has lost more than he knows, for his paradise was an illusion, yet one that might have been a reality had he had the vision and the courage to act upon its premises of honor, and a commitment to a value outside the self. Odets' wistful problem drama is his subtlest play in both structure and characterization, and perhaps the finest American example of this genre. Only Odets' frequent consignment to the role of social dramatist has kept Paradise Lost from the wide audience it deserves. Between late 1936 and mid-1939, Odets worked on what Harold Clurman called his last class-conscious play, The Silent Partner, which the Group Theatre never staged (though the Actors Studio presented twelve performances of it in May 1972). Strong thematically but weak

540 / AMERICAN WRITERS in any credible objective correlative, this more stridently radical version of Waiting for Lefty was unsuccessful because, according to Clurman, Odets' "political awareness was more a matter of sentiment than the outcome of any studied ideology or concrete experience." If The Silent Partner lacked Odets' developing skills of symbol and characterization, in Golden Boy (1937) he further refined talents shown in Paradise Lost for subtle dramatic foreshadowing, music imagery and symbolism, and character development. Kewpie, the ruthless urban hoodlum in Paradise Lost (" ... when you're in a jungle you look out for the wild life.... I'm out to get mine."), anticipates Odets' most memorable character, the musician-boxer Joe Bonaparte, in his searing self-revelation, "I'm sore on my whole damn life." Ben's self-destructive pursuit of success in Paradise Lost is only an important minor theme in that play, but Joe Bonaparte's transformation from musician to callous challenger for "Monarch of the Masses" is Odets' most dramatically powerful (if also his most theatrically and thematically obvious) embodiment of the essential hollowness of the modern version of the American dream. Odets' early plays, as well as O'Neill's, frequently gain dramatic density from the tension between romantic and modern attitudes and from the conflict of values created in a protagonist who is often confused and divided by psychic tremors. Joe Bonaparte is caught between the organic, life-renewing values of his father, his brother Frank, and Tokio, his trainer, and the mendacity, even brutality, of such men as Roxy Gottlieb and Eddie Fuseli. Some of the most brilliant and moving scenes in the play involve Mr. Bonaparte, first seen seated beneath plaster busts of Mozart and Beethoven, talking with his old friend Carp about the violin he has bought Joe for his approaching twenty-first birthday. The issue is joined, gently and abstractly at first, as Carp

uses Arthur Schopenhauer to support his fears concerning the increasing mechanization of society, while Bonaparte affirms his faith in Joe's love for music. "Music is the great cheer-up in the language of all countries," he says. Rooted in the encompassing affirmative rhythms of natural forces, he assumes that men cannot go wrong if they abide by their nature. So bound up is he in his love for his son that he introduces himself to the fight manager thus: "My name is Joe Bonaparte's father." Fearful of the boxing business, he nevertheless remains flexible, realizing that Joe must freely decide what he wants. "Help Joe find truthful success" is all he asks. But when he realizes that Joe has completely rejected music, yet still wants his father's approving word before departing for his second bout, Bonaparte hastily embraces his son but also cries out his opposition to this "unnatural" aspect of Joe's character: "No! No word! You gonna fight? All right! Okay! But I don't gonna give no word! No!" Joe's downfall is most skillfully presented by Odets through the father's eyes. In Joe's dressing room before a big fight that, if won, will next match him against the other leading contender for the championship, Mr. Bonaparte recognizes sadly that "he gotta wild wolf inside—eat him up!"—that his son's zeal to fight has passed the stage of competition and become, in his terms, unnatural. "Now I see whatta you are ... I give-a you every word to fight . . . I sorry for you," he mourns. After his son has left for the ring, the old man examines an older fighter's gnarled knuckles and thinks, "So strong ... so useless...." All that remains as the tragic events inexorably unfold is for the father to welcome his son's corpse "home . . . where he belong " The forces arrayed against Mr. Bonaparte are too strong for any sense of dynamic organicism to survive. Even Lorna Moon, the least of Joe's nemeses, admits at the beginning of the

CLIFFORD ODETS / 541 play, "It's the Twentieth Century— . . . no more miracles." Carp warns, "Fortunes! I used to hear it in my youth—the streets of America is paved with gold." Roxy Gottlieb, who has a "piece" of Joe early on, screams at Mr. Bonaparte, "We offer him magnitudes! . . . for the money that's involved I'd make Niagara Falls turn around...," making the obsessive modern error of applying quantitative measurement to qualities that do not readily admit of such evaluation. Joe's ultimate fall comes when he meets the Satanic figure of Eddie Fuseli. A mobster who takes control of most of Joe's contract, he is driven by sadistic compulsions that he does not understand to remake Joe into his own image, wanting him not just to win, but to kill in the ring. One of Odets' most repellent characters, Fuseli emerges from the gangster-type character of, for example, Maxwell Anderson's Winterset, to become the antithesis of all human values, his face depicted as gray, "dead," "inarticulate," first observed in the arena "above, unseen," representative of mechanized force that will destroy Joe long before his Duesenberg crashes in Babylon, Long Island. Karl Jaspers has said that tragic protagonists often exist in boundary situations where their control and knowledge—especially of themfcelves—are tenuous. Joe is especially vulnerable to Fuseli because he knows himself so little. Confused, having felt rejected all his life because of his small stature and bookish habits, needing to avenge himself for dimly comprehended feelings of humiliation, Joe fights in a travesty of the mythic initiation to maturity indicated by the approach of his twenty-first birthday. "Tomorrow's my birthday! I change my life!" he cries to his father at the start of his boxing career. But the goals are the possessions and status that Jacob warned Ralph against in Awake and Sing!—these and the ever present vengeance: "People have hurt my feelings for

years. I never forget. You can't get even with people by playing the fiddle. If music shot bullets I'd like it better...." He gets his wish in the most horrifying scene of the play as, his hand broken after the Lombardo bout, he screams out to Eddie Fuseli ("the only one here who understands me"), "Hallelujah!! It's the beginning of the world!" Even after he has accidentally killed in the ring, he is still so in the grip of forces within himself that he does not understand that he seeks escape with Lorna in his Duesenberg: "We'll drive through the night. When you mow down the night with headlights, nobody gets you! You're on top of the world then—nobody laughs! That's it—speed. We're off the earth—unconnected!" Important here is not only Joe's hostility to natural forces, but also the similarity of these feelings to his musical motivation: "If music shot bullets I'd like it better " Fuseli corrupts Joe spiritually, because Joe's music is at least in part a compensation for his feelings of humiliation, a way to seal himself off from engagement with the world. Thus it is not improbable that Joe could give up his music so easily when he found something equally "unconnected" and more tangibly remunerative, nor that Joe could take the final self-destructive ride. Odets' tragic vision integrates the manner of Joe's dying with the manner of his living. Golden Boy is his finest tragic play, and ranks with the best of those American tragedies in which the actions spring from the conventions of melodrama: Eugene O'Neill's Desire Under the Elms, Tennessee Williams' Orpheus Descending, Arthur Miller's All My Sons, Maxwell Anderson's Winterset, and Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Odets termed his next two plays romances, but Rocket to the Moon (1938) strains the conventional limits of the genre far more than does Night Music. About Rocket to the Moon there hovers an air of hopes eternally disappointed,

542 I AMERICAN possibilities forever unrealized. Approaching midlife, the dentist Ben Stark attempts to break away from his thin-spirited wife, Belle, to go to the moon—represented for him by his young secretary, Cleo Singer—in a play structured symbolically from afternoon to night and from June to the end of August. Odets turns this whimsical comedy into yet another meditation on the failure of indecisive modern man to connect to subjects outside himself, to risk a human response even with those he thinks he loves. Ben Stark discovers girl, wins girl, and then loses girl forever—ironically, due to self-determined inaction. For Ben, a dreamer, thought is ever the father of the wish. His father-in-law, Mr. Prince, the self-styled "American King Lear" and one of Odets' happiest creations, has offered Ben sufficient money to start up a more lucrative practice, but Ben cannot muster the inner conviction needed to oppose his wife's fear of taking chances. Often staring at the rear of the Hotel Algiers, where he fancies liaisons take place, as he muses upon his beloved William Shakespeare, he settles for "a life where every day is Monday," as Prince acidly describes it, trying to wake him up. "Never look away from a problem, Benny.... When you look away from the problem, it don't disappear. But maybe you might disappear!" warns his father-in-law. Ben recognizes Belle as a major part of the problem, but lacks the will to translate his perception into action until he senses that Cleo is just as insecure, lonely, and unfulfilled as he. He almost stands up to his wife over his feelings for Cleo, but Belle knows too well just how to manipulate his fear and guilt. When, at the end of the play, Ben receives Cleo's declaration of love, he crumbles into old habit and mumbles to Cleo only about his "second-hand life, dedicated to trifles and troubles...." Cleo sensibly decides to risk going off on her own so that she may live

WRITERS

more fully, for "Ben isn't free. He's a citizen of another country"—and, she might well add, the man is dead. Like Leo at the end of Paradise Lost, Ben tries emotionally to insist that the experience has made him feel something new, that "this is a beginning" for him; but the wiser Prince wearily tells him simply to go home. "Almost laughing," Ben repeats the same line he had said earlier, almost in self-congratulatory relief: "Sonofagun! . . . What I don't know would fill a book!" Odets' closing stage direction makes clear the thematic point: "The room is dark, except for red neon lights of the Hotel Algiers...." There is no security, only opportunity; but Ben is relieved not to have to face this truth, and instead will probably face a series of eternal Mondays for the duration of what will pass as his life. The sadness of this slight moral tale is considerably enlivened by some of Odets' finest characterizations. Cleo is frightened, sentimental, and ignorant (to a point that drove George Jean Nathan, ever an Odets nemesis, to sum up the thematic content of the play in part as "Modern conditions are hostile to the perpetuation of true love.... Eynotional and sexual experience broadens one ..."); yet she possesses a winsome charm, courage, and purposefulness that belie her years and scant education. Finding that she has absolutely no opinions on anything, as Prince has told her earlier, she does her best by malapropisms or opinions borrowed from others (usually Prince) to set her intellectual disarray in order. She is genuinely loving and kind, and not immature psychologically, realizing that Willy Wax, the producer, regards her merely as a bonbon and that debonair and experienced though he is, Prince (who has proposed to her) is at the end of his life, while she is just beginning hers. There is a quite genuine transformation in her character, for the pretty

CLIFFORD ODETS / 543 confection of Act I would hardly have been capable of her completely earned resolution (as opposed to Ben's final self-delusion): I'll go up all those roads till I find what I want. I want a love that uses me, that needs me.... It's getting late to play at life; I want to live it. Something has to feel real for me None of you can give me what I'm looking for: a whole full world, with all the trimmings! Her impish "You see? I don't ask for much ..." hints at least at a glimmer of ironic selfawareness that is completely absent when she and Ben first fall in need with each other. Ben's confidants, Frenchy, Phil Cooper, and Prince, provide an ironic counterpoint to the wistfulness of the "romance." "Who's got time to think about women! I'm trying to make a living!" wails Cooper. Wise, lascivious Frenchy labors mightily to rescue Ben from his emotional dormancy with such remarks about Belle as "Every generous impulse on your part brings her closer to insecurity." He justifies his frequent naps by "Why not? Just had my lunch. A snake eats a rabbit and falls asleep, don't it? Why should I be better than a snake?" And he tries to separate for Ben false dreams from true ones: "Love is no solution of life! Au contraire.... You have to bring a whole balanced normal life to love if you want it to go!" Prince cries to Ben, "Your nose is just the right shape to fit your wife's hand!" and proffers Cleo to him with another line that only Clifford Odets could conceive: "Look at her, Benny! Isn't she beautiful? Womanhood is fermenting through her veins...." Though realizing that Ben's case is hopeless, the audience is nonetheless grateful that this gallery of loonies exists in the cause of a cautionary tale. Rocket to the Moon is no romance, but it is a sprightly, lively, and thoughtful comic performance. Odets' final play for the Group Theatre,

Night Music (1940), is less formally coherent than Rocket to the Moon, though it is whimsical and elfin in spirit and Detective ^. L. Rosenberger is one of Odets' most delightful characterizations. "I am in love with the possibilities, the human possibilities," he tells the angry Steve Takis, who represents for the dying Rosenberger not only the youth of the country but his spiritual son as well. In several of his plays, Odets uses the archetypes of the wise father and the errant son toward a tragic resolution, as in Golden Boy and Clash by Night. Here, though, Steve learns to listen to the wisdom of the experienced father, and Night Music ends in celebration rather than in horror and human waste. Steve Takis' bitter anger against the external world is healed by Rosenberger's profound awareness of the healing power, the revitalizing principle, of love. He realizes the truth of Blackmur's observation (in another context) that the young rebel needs "the delicate submission of the arrogance of thought to the movements of life." Steve has been badly hurt by the deaths of his parents (his mother to cancer, which prompts Rosenberger to quip of his own cancer, "These higher class diseases are international, like music."). Further, he has landed in New York out of a job and his anger is all-encompassing, even extending to Fay Tucker, a warm, bright, young woman whose only sins are that she too is jobless and that she comes to love Steve, thereby threatening his defenses. Both young waifs end up at the shabby Hotel Algiers, hardly the symbol of dreams that it is in Rocket to the Moon. Rosenberger tries to protect them from the evils of the city (particularly the hurrying man's stolen fur piece: "It's got eyes? Look in the eyes—if it winks, it's stolen goods."), sees to it that they have something to eat, and says to Takis, "It's a Saturday night. You got a weekend here, in New York,

544 I AMERICAN WRITERS the greatest city in the world. You are ready for a crisp adventure, like a toasted sandwich. Go and enjoy yourself." He follows them through the park, where they meet young Brown, also a homeless youth and "prime spitter" who is ready to join the army for a bed and food. Always Rosenberger counsels them against despair. He helps Fay to achieve independence from her grasping philistine of a father: "To fall, Miss Tucker, is permitted. But to get up is commanded." In a pivotal scene at the World's Fair, beneath a statue of George Washington symbolically so huge that only its legs and a sword are visible, Rosenberger completes Steve's and Fay's educations and supervises their launching into the world. To the "night music" of the crickets, Rosenberger counsels Steve: There are two ways to look, Mr. Takis—to the past or the future.... You are feeling mad. Why shouldn't you feel mad? In your whole life you never had a pretzel. You think you have to tell me it's a classified world? . . . But your anger must bear children or it's hopeless.... You have the materials to make a good man. But stop breaking things with your fists.... God gave you a fine head—use it, dear boy. Rosenberger, never maudlin, adds, "Sincerely yours, A. L. Rosenberger, your old Dutch uncle." This moving declaration begins to break down Steve's defenses; and in a beautiful expressionistic scene he plays a love song to Fay on the clarinet, his own night music communicating what his incoherent, often blustering words cannot. Fay's lovely admonition to Steve against joining the army with Brown is the highlight of her own spiritual development (abetted by Rosenberger, who has become her spiritual father as well as Takis'): "It's war to make a living, to keep respect, to be in love!" In the old detective's parting reminder that

Washington declared, "You are the people," he symbolically sends Steve toward the energy of the city, away from the stasis of the past and toward personal authenticity. But in the gossamer world of Night Music, Odets allows little sentimentality; Steve's rejoinder to his mentor's ringing speech is an ironic, "Thanks, Fatso." He has learned that his former rigidity has made him ineffectual and ludicrous to boot, that, as Rosenberger says, "Everything remains to be seen." Though Odets' most misunderstood and most lyrical drama has never been commercially successful, it remains one of his three or four best works and stands with Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth in the highest rank of American expressionistic comedy. Odets' personal life darkened as the end of the 1930's approached. His three-year marriage to Luise Rainer, the Viennese actress who had won an Academy Award in The Great Ziegfeld in 1936, had not been happy (Clurman recalls in The Fervent Years that she had urged Odets to end Rocket to the Moon by having Cleo marry Mr. Prince), and they were divorced in 1940. (Odets' second marriage, to Bette Grayson in 1943, ended in divorce in 1951.) Neither Rocket to the Moon nor Night Music had been well received by critics or audiences, and the demise of the Group Theatre was imminent. The final disappointment that would send Odets to Hollywood for the second of three screenwriting stints was the overwhelmingly poor reception of Clash by Night (1941), perhaps caused in part by the miscasting of Tallulah Bankhead as Mae. It is a powerful psychological drama, but one whose unremitting pessimism caught both audiences and critics unprepared. This somber story of the moral downfall of decent but passive Jerry Wiienski, through his wife's adultery with his best friend, is saved from triteness by Odets' superior characteriza-

CLIFFORD ODETS / 545 tions of the three principals and two supporting characters, Jerry's elderly father and his uncle, Kress, perhaps Odets' most venal characterization. Kress's understanding of his victim helps him to destroy him more easily: "No manhood in the boy!" he comments early in the play; and this is an apt, if at the moment unintended, analysis of Wilenski, played memorably in the six-week run of the play by Lee J. Cobb. Wilenski is a thirty-seven-year-old child-man, emotionally dependent upon his wife, Mae, a restive spirit who has married him more out of need than love. Rooted in concrete things, his work, his physical strength, and his wife and infant child, this "Polish Apollo" neither thinks of his wife's needs nor considers a friend's wisdom that "Whatever happens in marriage you must think about.... Marriage is not a convent. It's not a harbor—it's the open world.... It's being out at sea in a boat." Instead, Wilenski dreams of childhood: "But you sit around an' no one tells you what to do—that's the worst thing!" Wilenski's discovery of Mae's adultery stops history for him; his simple world now seems absurd, unendurable. Instead of fighting for her, recognizing her needs for a more mature intimacy, he regresses to his childhood, fantasizing to his father: We had those Christmas cards when I was a boy—a little warm house in the snow, yellow lights in the windows . .. remember? It was wonnerful... a place where they told you what to do, like in school.... (Beginning to cry) I wished it was like on the Christmas cards again, so nice and warm, a wonnerful home.... No, I wished I never grew up now. Despite this need for dependency, Wilenski is not the only member of the ignorant armies of the play. The lovers, Mae and Earl Pfeiffer, trapped by lower-class origins, self-disgust, and lack of education and opportunity, come to each

other out of loneliness and lack of self-understanding similar to that which will ultimately destroy Wilenski. Earl feels himself "floating down the river like a barge," but for the few days before his murder by Wilenski he will find in Mae an answer to the frequently asked question in Odets' plays: "Where is home?" (The scene in which the lovers grope toward an understanding of each other's needs is one of the great psychological episodes in American drama.) Bitter, cynical, yet decent, Earl has been drawn, ironically, into the Wilenskis' lives by Jerry himself, through Wilenski's need to identify with a stronger, more self-possessed, and possibly authoritarian figure. It is Kress who will ironically satisfy Wilenski's need for dependency as he goads him into killing Earl. While the motives for Kress's action are not made sufficiently clear, he too is implicated in the world of unconsidered passion and ignorance that brings either moral or emotional destruction to the members of the triangle. Joe Doyle, the overly explicit conscience of the play, warns that "Paradise begins in Responsibility." As in Golden Boy, Odets ascribes men's horrors to their lack of vision and self-knowledge. Few Odets dramas establish atmosphere congruent to theme as brilliantly as Clash by Night. The first scene is particularly effective as Wilenski and his wife while away a June evening on the porch in the heat. Music predominates, as it so often does in Odets, but as a warning symbol foreboding destruction. Wilenski listens to his father's old Polish song about "the little old house, where you wanna go back, but you can't find out where it is no more, the house...." Mae, bored and listless, sings "The Shiek of Araby," symbolizing her discontent with her marriage. After she has gone inside, Jerry can only repeat the lyric mindlessly, vainly attempting to reach toward a connection with her as he follows her into the living room,

546 I AMERICAN trying to control his pitiful environment, his little dream. John Gassner has praised Odets as a "scenewright"; nowhere is the dramatist's power in construction of the expository and foreshadowing scene more evident. In Mae's final awareness that she must suffer for another, not just herself, that she and the incoherently praying Wilenski have unwittingl established a kinship of mutual loss, Odets achieves a first-rate tragic drama, sharing with O'Neill a capacity for the remorseless working out of the inevitable process from unawareness to carnage. His unrelenting drama possesses too many formal flaws to achieve the grandeur of O'Neill's great tragedies, but Clash by Night is nonetheless a play of deep psychoanalytic insight and great dramatic power. Even though its action in other hands could be mawkish or banal, Odets' play holds us as O'Neill's do, because in times of crisis life tends to imitate melodrama and Odets skillfully communicates the immediacy and tension of such situations. That Odets' remunerative Hollywood screenwriting provoked considerable ambivalence in him from the earliest of his three periods there (1936-1938, 1943-1947, 1955-1961) is evident from details in several of his plays. In Clash by Night the sound of "fraudulent" movie dialogue is heard as Wilenski stalks his prey in the projection booth, symbolically locked from the inside; the ineffectual Myron Berger in Awake and Sing! naively places his faith in the restorative powers of the "Marvel Cosmetic Girl of Hollywood"; and Willy Wax in Rocket to the Moon and Steve Takis throughout much of Night Music are seduced by the blandishments of Hollywood. Harold Clurman remembers that after his initial period in Hollywood, "Odets began to worry about himself; he was his own greatest problem." (Frank Nugent had greeted Odets' 1936 potboiler about the Chinese Revolution, The General Died at Dawn, with the legendary thrust,

WRITERS

"Odets, Where Is Thy Sting?") As early as 1935 the playwright voiced his ambivalence and guilt over his desire for material success and fame during an interview with A. J. Liebling, by worrying about his new status as a celebrity who "receives fantastic offers from Hollywood, invitations to address ladies' clubs, one hundred and fifty telephone calls a day and a lot of solemn consideration from guys who write pieces for the dramatic page." Because of the practice of collaborative scriptwriting in the film industry, it is difficult to determine exactly how many screenplays Odets was responsible for, though it is clear that he had nothing whatever to do with his own plays that reached the screen (Golden Boy, Clash by Night, The Country Girl and The Big Knife). A reading of three screenplays in typescript at the Library of Congress film archive for which he receives sole credit reveals that, despite occasionally incisive psychological moments, they add nothing to his artistic reputation. In Deadline at Dawn (1946), a philosophically inclined taxi driver (well played by Paul Lukas) pronounces of a murder suspect such lines as "The divine being made many loathsome creatures—but none so low as a woman with a cold heart." Things get worse in The Story on Page One (1960) and especially in Wild in the Country (1961), in which an aspiring young writer (played by Elvis Presley) weeps over his deceased mother, "Death, he's a quick one, ain't he?" Of a much higher order is Odets' poignant rendering of Richard Llewellyn's novel None but the Lonely Heart (1944), Gary Grant's one "serious" film, which Odets also directed. Young Cockney Ernie Mott— "tramp of the universe . . . like some homeless breath of wind ..."—grows beyond self-preoccupation and learns to commit himself to other people as he undertakes an archetypal quest for "a human animal which don't look for a master." Odets again deals nicely with the father-

CLIFFORD ODETS / 547 son motif, and despite some sentimentality the script is quite moving both in its themes of selfvictimization and brotherhood and as a social document of wartime London. While it may be possible that film writing honed his playwriting technique, it is uncomfortably true that in the twenty-two years left to him after the production of Clash by Night, Odets completed only three plays—The Big Knife (1949), The Country Girl (1950), and The Flowering Peach (1954)—none of which stands with his finest achievements. In an essay written in 1972, Harold Clurman bluntly pointed to the beginnings of a personal deterioration as early as Golden Boy, which "foreshadows his inability to resolve the conflict which led to his own final destruction." Clurman's biographical approach may oversimplify the complex case of a man eager for both fame and artistic integrity; as Gerald Weales points out, it was for the body of his plays that Odets received the Award of Merit Medal for drama in 1961 from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. What seems clear is that Odets perceived himself as having compromised his art to some degree by devoting so many years of his life to work that did not test his full potential. His close friend, playwright William Gibson, speaks judiciously in an interview with Michael Mendelsohn about screenwriting and the artist's integrity: He sells time, and that is the only thing which cannot be replenished. Whether there is any kind of damage to one's standards by working in movies I do not know. I think that we too glibly assume that there is. ... But you cannot write a movie and a play at the same time. There has been speculation that Odets testified before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) in May 1952 out of fear that The Country Girl would not be filmed without his cooperation. Perhaps he perceived

this act also as a compromise of his ideals and of his loyalties to his former friends and associates in the Group Theatre. It is certain that the testimony of Odets and Elia Kazan prompted Morris Carnovsky's bitterness toward Odets for many years, Carnovsky and Stella and Luther Adler feeling that Odets was partly to blame for Carnovsky's being blacklisted from the entertainment industry for several years in the 1950's because he had elected not to testify. Odets' testimony was his first public admission of his association with the Communist party for eight months in 1934-1935. Most members of the Group Theatre had been interested in the Moscow Art Theater, and this doubtless led some to an interest in Marxism. Odets informed HUAC of his comic-opera journey to Cuba in 1935 with a group of writers and union officials, ostensibly investigating the plight of labor and students under the BatistaMendieta regime, more probably publicizing the activities of the Cuban dictatorship. The group was arrested unceremoniously upon arrival in Havana harbor and shipped back to New York the following day. That event, together with increasing pressure to write agitprop plays, prompted Odets to abandon the Communist party shortly thereafter, as he explained to the committee: I didn't respect any person or any party or any group of people who would say to a young creative writer: "Go outside of your experience and write outside of your experience a play." I knew that as fumbling as my beginnings were, and they certainly were, that I could only write out of my own experience, out of my own incentive. I couldn't be given a theme and handle it. It was not my business. It meant to me, if I may say it this way, a loss of integrity. And so I persisted in going along on my own line and saying and writing what did come out of my true center. And whenever this happened, I got this violent

548 I AMERICAN opposition in that press and I became further disgusted and estranged from them. Odets' guilt at having betrayed the trust of his former Group Theatre associates and at having survived the witchhunt without being blacklisted may well have been intensified by the death of John Garfield a year after his own rather more heroic testimony before HUAC. (Edward Murray relates that Odets sobbed uncontrollably at Garfield's graveside.) Certainly, Odets' noble words about artistic integrity before HUAC must not have squared with his perception, revealed so clearly in The Big Knife, that an artist courts spiritual depletion by devoting years of his career to less than his best efforts. In The Big Knife, Charlie Castle (years ago Charlie Cass, a struggling actor on the legitimate stage) has fallen victim to a Hollywood machine ostensibly so vicious that having corrupted his soul, it must take his life as well. After years of playing stereotyped parts in return for huge financial rewards from his studio, he no longer cares for the liberal politics that once sustained him; and he humiliates both his wife, Marion, and himself through a series of tawdry sexual liaisons. He has even allowed the studio to pressure him into evading responsibility for killing a man years ago in a hit-and-run accident, while drunk, by forcing his best friend to go to jail for him. Now the studio boss, Marcus Hoff, threatens Charlie with exposure and prison if he will not sign another lucrative longterm contract. The strained improbability of the action is heightened when Hoff suggests to Charlie that he be an accomplice in the murder of a starlet who, unknown to Marion, was in the car the night of the accident and who now threatens to go to the police with her story in order to avenge herself against Hoff for manipulating her career. Feeling that Hollywood destroys all it touches ("Don't they murder the

WRITERS

highest dreams and hopes of a whole great people with the movies they make?"), Charlie commits suicide as final vengeance against Hoff for having corrupted him. The incredible series of events and coincidences almost obscures the fact that Charlie is at least as much to blame for his corruption and his problems as the evil system. Despite Odets' protestations that The Big Knife was intended as a universal statement about the average man's difficulty in maintaining his dignity in a corrupt world, it is difficult to avoid the inadequate objective correlative of the play and Clurman's reminder that Charlie's self-destruction is a slim, transparent allegory of an "Odets lacerated by self-accusation" for betraying his talent. While the contrived action makes clear that Charlie is obsessively attracted to the Hollywood that is destroying him, the thematic thrust denies that obvious fact. The play falls apart under its author's psychic discomfort with his materials. The final suicide is more punishment for guilt than affirmative triumph, since nothing is affirmed. While The Big Knife contains some vital characterizations (particularly Marion and Smiley Coy, Hoff's hatchet man) and occasionally trenchant dialogue, including Charlie's famous lines from Victor Hugo, the romantic source of his youthful inspiration and idealism ("Love people, do good, help the lost and fallen, make the world happy, if you can!"), it is Odets' first play that does not unsparingly reveal the major role played by weakness of character in human misery. It is that striking avoidance of his previous toughness and sincerity—and not the widely alleged absence of social concern— that may account for the curious lack of thematic density and resonance in Odets' late plays. If The Country Girl also rather obviously dramatizes Odets' continuing conflict over desire for material success and for artistic growth,

CLIFFORD ODETS / 549 it is a stronger performance than The Big Knife and, with Odets directing, proved to be both critically accepted and his first commercial success since Golden Boy thirteen years earlier. Frank Elgin, once a distinguished stage actor but presently a disintegrating alcoholic, gets one last chance at a good part on the faith of a young director, Bernie Dodd. But Elgin has become so terribly dependent upon his long-suffering wife, Georgie, that his own sense of inadequacy threatens throughout rehearsals to send him back to the bottle and oblivion. Elgin has convinced Dodd that it is Georgie who is alcoholic and resentful of his successes, playing upon Dodd's own failed marriage and resultant insecurity and misogyny. The central action involves the working out of the conflict between Georgie and Dodd for Elgin's career and soul. Improbably, Elgin scores a great success on opening night and Georgie, tempted to leave him for Dodd, finally decides to stay with the man-child to whom she is so symbiotically attached. Once again Odets shows his awareness of the passively dependent male's psychology: Elgin is the last in a generally distinguished line of such characters as Myron Berger, Ben Stark, Jerry Wilenski, Charlie Castle—and Bernie Dodd, as well. Elgin's manic-depressive swings are made more theatrically than dramatically credible, but Dodd is more interesting as he becomes increasingly hostile to Georgie for "ruining" her husband. Projecting his own dependency needs for a strong, maternal woman onto Elgin, he unconsciously wishes to win Georgie from him, even though he dimly realizes that such an eventuality would destroy both his play and, probably, Elgin's tenuous hold on reality. Like Jerry Wilenski, both Elgin and Dodd fear rejection and unconsciously seek to return to the security of childhood, and can resort to destructive behavior when this illusion fails to be realized. Yet Dodd is mature in several ways, at

least at the conscious level, assuming responsibility for Elgin's comeback and employing all his considerable theatrical knowledge to accomplish this. It is perhaps hanging one more gun on the wall than will be fired (Anton Chekhov's warning to playwrights) for Odets to make Dodd attracted to Elgin as a father figure, for the playwright strains Georgie's characterization by inserting this motive in her persona as well. The need of this supposedly strong woman for Elgin "as a father" is dubious, seeming to contradict her knowledge of his long-term drinking problem, which itself suggests an element of masochism in her having stayed with him for so many years. It is difficult to believe Georgie when she says to her husband, "I married you for happiness...." The source of her psychological weakness and her exact status as a "country girl" are insufficiently resolved by Odets; as a result the theatrically exciting effects of the play are not all dramatically earned, and texture is sacrificed to structure. These flaws account for the rather hermetically sealed quality of The Country Girl: it seems to refer to little outside its own narrow world except, perhaps, to excessive wish fulfillment on the part of its author. Happily, Odets' final play is more fully dimensional than The Country Girl. Never published in complete form, The Flowering Peac came close to capturing for Odets his sole Pulitzer Prize, the trustees overruling the Columbia Faculty Committee and awarding the prize for 1955 to Tennessee Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. If The Flowering Peach does not show Odets at the peak of his powers, there are present in his retelling of the Noah legend considerable dramatic inventiveness, rounded characters, wry humor, and a return to the thematic vigor of the early family plays. "All men are Jews," Bernard Malamud has said, to indicate that Jewish suffering can stand

550 / AMERICAN as a metaphor for universal human misery. Throughout his career Odets anticipated many of the ideas and motifs of such Jewish American writers as Malamud and Edward Lewis Wallant, particularly themes of the need for a sense of community and the human aptitude for rising beyond suffering to attain moral harmony and dignity. Odets' Noah, a frequently drunk authoritarian, is one of his most appealing characters, as he tries both to obey to the letter God's injunction to build an ark in order to save at least a remnant of the human family, and to persuade his radical son, Japheth, to compromise his ideals and accede to the family's standards and traditions. Once again Odets employs the generational conflict: Noah vigorously opposes Japheth's wish to equip the ark with a rudder, staunch in his view that if God had wanted Noah to build a rudder, he would have made that clear at the start. Odets amusingly dramatizes the intimate antagonism between the father and the son, as Japheth argues, "And God didn't tell you to invent the hoe and the rake and yet you did!" to which Noah can only reply, "I was a youngster then—what did I know? If you'll ast me today, I'm sorry I done it! . . . It made work too easy an' people for loafers!" The Flowering Peach gains much of its power and charm through Noah's character transformation. Realizing that Japheth's humanism is ultimately closer to godliness than his own procrustean morality, Noah learns to grow toward a more moderate anthropocentricism: I'm thinkin' back a good many years. My father's father, Methusaleh . . . he knew I was born for something special—what you call a BIG JOB! "Go out, Noah, go out an' preach repentance to the world!" Yeh, that was the story! (Sighing) What should I tell you? Evil is a stone wall.... I hurt my head a lotta times!

WRITERS

Though the several subplots in The Flowering Peach rarely cohere with the main theme of Noah's growing self-awareness, the old man's coming to maturity is one of Odets' most moving dramatic passages. At the end of the play as the ark pulls in to a new shore, Noah accepts from Japheth a branch of flowering peach and murmurs, "From the new earth." Mute for a moment with the recognition that aboard the ark they have faced themselves as well as external dangers, and have conquered both (the dying Esther had whispered to Noah, "I'll tell you a mystery."), Japheth realizes that he too has learned: "Maybe God changes when men change." As his children go off to found their families, Noah prudently chooses to live with Shem, his materialistic son, whose thriving manure briquette business means fuel for the new age, for "It's more comfortable.... Write sometimes...." Odets refuses to sentimentalize the resolution, and this realism nicely balances Noah's last great speech, as he beseeches God for proof that he will not destroy the world again, and receives only the rainbow in answer: But what I learned on the trip, dear God, you can't take it away from me. To walk in humility, I learned. And listen, even to myself... and to speak softly, with the voices of consolation. Yes, I hear You, God—Now it's in man's hands to make or destroy the world.... I'll tell you a mystery. As in Awake and Sing! and Paradise Lost, the base of Jewish family comedy undergirds the dramatic structure. The fruit imagery of Japheth's final gift of love and forgiveness to his father resonates with Odets' frequent use of such images in earlier plays: Wilenski's old father in Clash by Night mumbling "have eat orange"; Moe Axelrod's obsession with fruit as a replacement for Hennie's love in Awake and Sing!; and Clara Gordon's repeated offerings of

CLIFFORD ODETS / 551 fruit to the members of her suffering family in Paradise Lost are all used symbolically by Odets to indicate the possibilities for regeneration in the cohesive family unit. Odets' superior ear for terse, ironic Jewish dialect also gives the play buoyancy. Esther nags Noah at his news of the coming flood, "Noah, Noah, tell the truth— when they gave out the brains, you weren't hiding behind the house? . . . Answer me a question, a realism—why should we be saved?" Noah's attempts to evade God's having chosen him to save life are also amusing: "You are All and Everything an' I'm unworthy.... All I do is cough an' spit. Pass me by, pass me by. Please. ..." God's refusal to do so and Noah's reluctant acceptance of the challenge to transcend his former self make The Flowering Peach the best of Odets' late plays. Though by his own account Odets was to begin several plays after 1954, none was completed. Whether or not a guilty conscience over his comfortable life in Hollywood caused an artistic decline will remain debatable until the appearance of Margaret Brenman Gibson's authorized biography. On July 23, 1963, Odets entered Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Los Angeles for treatment of stomach problems; the condition was soon diagnosed as inoperable cancer, and Odets died on August 14,1963. Harold Clurman recalls that Odets was troubled by his ambivalence between material and artistic success until the day he died, and remembers Odets on his deathbed in Hollywood: "I saw him turn to the wall and cry out, with a lofty dramatic gesture (he was always an 'actor'), 'Clifford Odets, there is so much more work to be done!' But he knew it was too late for him. That was his (American) tragedy." "I admired O'Neill," Odets recalled late in his life. "I am influenced by O'Neill in terms of becoming a big American dramatist." If it is certainly fair that Odets' critical reputation

today is less substantial than O'Neill's, it is indeed unfortunate that his position lags far behind that of other prominent dramatists in whose company he rightfully belongs. Despite weaknesses also typical of O'Neill, such as sometimes straining an incident beyond its dramatic effectiveness, and his penchant for the overblown line—speeches like Charlie Castle's praise of his wife, "She's the iron hoop that holds my staves together," remind us of John Mason Brown's quip that at his worst Odets sounded as if he were writing with pen held in clenched fist—it must be remembered that Odets compiled a record of first-rate plays superior to that of Maxwell Anderson, William Saroyan, Elmer Rice, Thornton Wilder, or Edward Albee. Perhaps the tendency of critical reputations to rise and fall in Spenglerian cycles may someday remove the "Clifford One-Note" stigma that has clung to Odets since the end of the 1930's because of the facile categorizing of his dramas as social tracts. In any event, Odets' achievement compares well even with O'Neill's in his great themes of the individual's search for self-fulfillment and self-transcendence, the importance of the family to one's sense of "belonging," the American ambivalence between material goals and spiritual ideals, and the necessity of individual responsibility amid the chaos and unreason of the modern world. In Golden Boy and Clash by Night Odets produced fine tragedies in a country not renowned for its tragic drama. In American dramatic literature, only O'Neill and Tennessee Williams are superior in the tragic form, and only they are Odets' masters in the psychological delineation of character. Whereas Williams' and Arthur Miller's characters frequently seem determined by their environments, in Odets we sometimes sense the possibility of growth and change. Ralph Berger and Mae Wilenski establish with those who love

552 / AMERICAN them at least some sense of the kinship of victimhood, learning to share suffering, choosing to accept the limitations of life and to assume responsibilities willingly, not resentfully—in Malamud's terms, to become assistants for subjects beyond the self. Only O'Neill outstrips Odets in the variety of dramatic genres in which he achieved first-rate plays; besides tragedy, Odets did fine work in comedy, the problem play, and the quasi romance. Odets also excels in his capacity to suggest much through compressed, concentrated detail, a skill that can be seen even in his least esteemed play, Till the Day I Die: at the end of scene 5, in little more than a page of dialogue Odets moves rapidly from the pathos of Tausig's shattered readiness for sleep to his brother's entrance, thence to the immediate need for Carl's escape and Tilly's lightning ruse to effect his safe departure. If a writer can be evaluated at least partly in terms of his influence, Arthur Miller and William Gibson have stated their indebtedness to Odets, and Tennessee Williams' and Paddy Chayefsky's plays show resemblances to Odets' hard-edged poetic dialogue among common urban people. Clearly, Odets' lyrical presentation of ordinary people poised in constricted spaces metaphoric of the modern condition, his fusion of the spirit of the Great Depression with more universal themes, his sense of the growing urbanization of American life, and what Clurman has termed his "radical humanism" qualify him as a serious artist. In his best plays—Awake and Sing!, Paradise Lost, Golden Boy, Night Music, and Clash by Night—Odets belongs with Williams and Miller, high in the second rank of American dramatists.

WRITERS

Selected Bibliography WORKS OF CLIFFORD ODETS PLAYS

"TheSilent Partner" [Act II, scene 2]. New Theatre and Film, 4:5-9 (March 1937). Six Plays of Clifford Odets. New York: Modern Library, 1939. (Contains the shorter version of Waiting for Lefty, Till the Day I Die, Awake and Sing!, Paradise Lost, Golden Boy, and Rocket to the Moon, as well as a preface by Odets and three introductions by Harold Clurman.) Night Music. New York: Random House, 1940. Clash by Night. New York: Random House, 1942. The Big Knife. New York: Random House, 1949. The Country Girl. New York: Viking, 1951. Waiting for Lefty (complete version). In Representative Modern Plays: American, edited by Robert Warnock. Chicago: Scott, Foresman, 1952. The Flowering Peach. (Never published in complete form, this play is in typescript at the Theater Collection, New York Public Library.) An abridged version was published in The Best Plays of 19541955, edited by Louis Kronenberger. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1955. SCREENPLAYS

Deadline at Dawn (1946), The Story on Page One (1960), and Wild in the Country (1961). (Unpublished continuity scripts in the Library of Congress.) None but the Lonely Heart. In Best Film Plays, 1945, edited by John Gassner and Dudley Nichols. New York: Crown, 1946; repr. New York Garland, 1978. MISCELLANEOUS WRITINGS

Deals, Carleton, and Clifford Odets. Rifle Rule in Cuba. New York: Provisional Committee for Cuba, 1935. "Some Problems of the Modern Dramatist." New York Times (December 15, 1935), sec. 11, p. 3. "I Can't Sleep" (monologue). New Theatre, 3:8-9 (February 1936). Introduction to Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls, trans-

CLIFFORD ODETS / 553 lated by Constance Garnett. New York: Modern Library, 1936. "Democratic Vistas in Drama." New York Times (November 21, 1937), sec. 11, pp. 1-2. "Genesis of a Play." New York Times (February 1, 1942), sec. 9, p. 3. The Russian People, in Seven Soviet Plays, edited by Henry W. L. Dana. New York: Macmillan, 1946. (American acting version of Konstantin Simonov's The Russian Question.) "Two Approaches to the Writing of a Play." New York Times (April 22, 1951), sec. 2, pp. 1-2. "How a Playwright Triumphs" (discussion with Arthur Wagner, September 1961). Harper's, 233: 64-74 (September 1966).

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL STUDIES For relatively complete listings, see the bibliography in Cantor (below), pp. 214-229. BOOKS Aaron, Daniel. Writers on the Left. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1961. Brooks, Cleanth, R. W. B. Lewis, and Robert Penn Warren. "Clifford Odets." In American Literature: The Makers and the Making, vol. 2. New York: St. Martin's, 1973. Brown, John Mason. As They Appear. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1952. Cantor, Harold. Clifford Odets: Playwright-Poet. Metuchen, N. J.-London: Scarecrow Press, 1978. Clurman, Harold. The Fervent Years. New York: Hill and Wang, 1957. , ed. Famous American Plays of the 1930s. New York: Dell, 1959. Downer, Alan S. Fifty Years of American Drama. Chicago: Regnery, 1951. Dusenbury, Winifred L. The Theme of Loneliness in Modern American Drama. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1960. Freedman, Morris. American Drama in Social Context. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1971. Gassner, John. The Theatre in Our Times. New York: Crown, 1954. Gibson, William. Introduction to Golden Boy (musical version). New York: Atheneum, 1965.

Goldstein, Malcolm. "Clifford Odets and the Found Generation." In American Drama and Its Critics, edited by Alan S. Downer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965. . The Political Stage: American Drama and Theater of the Great Depression. New York: Oxford University Press, 1974. Gorelik, Mordecai. New Theatres for Old. New York: Samuel French, 1940. Griffin, Robert J. "On the Love Songs of Clifford Odets." In The Thirties, edited by Warren French. DeLand, Fla.: Everett-Edwards, 1967. Krutch, Joseph Wood. The American Drama Since 1918. New York: George Braziller, 1957. Mendelsohn, Michael J. Clifford Odets: Humane Dramatist. DeLand, Fla.: Everett-Edwards, 1969. Murray, Edward. Clifford Odets: The Thirties and After. New York: Ungar, 1968. Nathan, George Jean. Encyclopaedia of the Theatre. New York: Knopf, 1940. Shuman, Robert Baird. Clifford Odets. New York: Twayne, 1962. Sievers, Wieder David. Freud on Broadway. New York: Hermitage House, 1955. Warshow, Robert. The Immediate Experience. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1962. Weales, Gerald. "The Group Theatre and Its Plays." In American Theatre (Stratford-uponAvon Studies 10), edited by John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris. New York: St. Martin's, 1967. . Clifford Odets: Playwright. New York: Pegasus, 1971. ARTICLES Clurman, Harold. "Found: A 'Lost' Play by Odets." New York Times (April 30, 1972), sec. 2, pp. 1, 21. Cowley, Malcolm. "While They Waited for Lefty." Saturday Review, 47:16-19, 61 (June 6, 1964). Fagin, N. Bryllion. "In Search of an American Cherry Orchard" Texas Quarterly, 1:132-41 (Summer-Autumn 1958). Fiedler, Leslie A. "The Breakthrough: The American Jewish Novelist and the Fictional Image of the Jew." Midstream, 4:15-35 (Winter 1958). Hayes, Richard. "The Flowering Peach." Commonweal, 61:502-03 (February 11, 1955). Hyams, Barry. "Twenty Years on a Tightrope." Theatre Arts, 39:68-70, 86 (April 1955).

554 I AMERICAN McCarthy, Mary. "Realism in the American Theatre." Harper's, 223:45-52 (July 1961). Mendelsohn, Michael J. "Odets at Center Stage: A Talk with Michael J. Mendelsohn." Theatre Arts, 47:16-19, 74-76 (May 1963); 28-30, 78-80 (June 1963). Miller, Arthur. "The Family in Modern Drama." Atlantic, 197:35-41 (April 1956). Nathan, George Jean. "The White Hope Gets Paler." Newsweek, 15:42 (March 4, 1940).

WRITERS

O'Hara, John. "Desire Under the Rose." Newsweek, 19:46 (January 12, 1942). Willett, Ralph. "Clifford Odets and Popular Culture." South Atlantic Quarterly, 69:68-78 (1970). Young, Stark. "Awake and Whistle at Least." New Republic, 82:134 (March 13, 1935). —FRANK R. CUNNINGHAM

Charles Olson 1910-1970

c

In actual fact, Olson was born inland in Worcester, Massachusetts, on December 27, 1910. He was the son of Karl Joseph Olson, a Swedish letter carrier father, and Mary Hines, an Irish mother who was "only the most beautiful woman in Southern Worcester." At points in the Maximus sequence he effectively scrutinizes his family history and even refers to the Worcester trolley tracks as his "inland waters." Yet, for the poet it was Gloucester, not Worcester, "where fishing continues / and my heart lies." Before finally renting his own house in the Fort Point section of Gloucester in 1957, Olson spent memorable boyhood summers there with his family and thereafter adopted Gloucester as his "home." In 1929, the summer after he entered Wesleyan University, Olson acted and took dance classes at the Gloucester School of the Little Theater, experiences that figure in two early Maximus poems and inform the sixfoot, eight-inch poet's notion of "stance" or posture in the essay "Projective Verse." In 1932, after graduating Phi Beta Kappa from Wesleyan, he returned for the summer to Gloucester and the theater. Olson continued to be "uneducated," as he put it, at Wesleyan, where he earned a master's degree in 1933; at Yale, where he took further

SCATTERED poets on the fringes of American literature might have found in Charles Olson a new Moses to lead them home from literary exile. His 1950 essay "Projective Verse" proclaimed the need to participate in local reality unimpeded by ego, and for each to feel the rhythms of his breath and to hear the syllables of his native speech. Early sections of The Maximus Poems (1960), his major poetic sequence, demonstrate and fulfill these demands. They insist on long, breath-related lines and marginless pages while a metamorphic, expansive figure called Maximus weaves through, liberating and liberated, a local inhabitant of the Cape Ann town of Gloucester, Massachusetts. Yet, despite Olson's gradually increasing influence on his readers and despite the growing numbers of poets among them, the dispersion of poets continues. And, similarly, as the sequence grew to three volumes (The Maximus Poems, Maximus Poems IV, V, VI, and The Maximus Poems Volume Three), Maximus the citizen disappeared and the Gloucester locale was gradually abandoned until both returned in the posthumously published Volume Three. Nevertheless, even when Olson was searching for a cosmic locus for his sequence, he claimed Gloucester as his adoptive mother and place of origin, and the sea itself as spiritual father. 555

556 I AMERICAN graduate courses on a fellowship; and at Harvard, where he was a doctoral candidate in American Studies and studied under F. O. Matthiessen. He left Harvard in 1939 without submitting a dissertation, but he had won a Guggenheim fellowship to continue research on Herman Melville begun at Wesleyan. Olson's Melville studies were the basis for his master's thesis, for the paper "Lear and Moby-Dick" (1938), and eventually for his maverick 1947 critical study, Call Me Ishmael. In 1940, Olson moved to New York, where he worked briefly for the American Civil Liberties Union and for the Common Council for American Unity until 1942. He then took a post in Washington, D. C, as assistant chief of the Foreign Language Section in the Office of War Information. But by 1945 Olson had ended his political career. Apparently disenchanted, he resigned from the Office of War Information and refused U. S. Post Office and Treasury Department appointments. According to Paul Christensen's informative Charles Olson: Call Him Ishmael (1979), Olson discovered during this brief excursion into liberal politics that the American government and economic system "dissolved communal life in a deliberate leveling of the population into competitive individuals." There followed a period of exploration during which Olson traveled to Florida, then returned to Washington. During this time he wrote the final revisions of Call Me Ishmael and regularly visited Ezra Pound, then confined to St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington. In 1948 he received another Guggenheim fellowship for a study of racial interaction in the settling of the American West and saw the publication of a pamphlet of his poems, Y & X. That same year he began what was to become a long and fruitful association with Black Mountain College, the pioneering, innovative, experimental college

WRITERS

in North Carolina that has since become known as a point of origin for the most avant-garde movements in dance, painting, music, and poetry in the 1950's. Olson was first a visiting lecturer, then director of a summer theater program in 1949, and finally a faculty member and rector of Black Mountain College from 1951 until its closing in 1956. It was not until the college was sold that Olson returned to Gloucester. His stay at Black Mountain College coincided with the presence there of such diverse talents as artists Josef Albers and Robert Motherwell, choreographer Merce Cunningham, composer John Cage, and poets Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, John Wieners, and Ed Dorn. A loose-knit community of artists, students, and teachers, Black Mountain College formed the actual basis for Olson's poetic conception of "polis," the civic ideal ascribed to Gloucester in The Maximus Poems. Ideas of such visitors to Black Mountain College as mathematician Hans Rademacher, with whom Olson studied topology, and architect R. Buckminster Fuller, whose geodesic dome graced the campus one summer, left impressions on Olson, just as modern scientific thought had left imprints on the works of James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and William Carlos Williams. Like these earlier contemporary writers, he tried to accommodate a modern view of the ever-changing physical universe to man's timeless need for language and form. But, unlike Joyce and Eliot, Olson depended more upon mapping than memory to locate man in the universe. His concern with the aesthetic and philosophical significance of projective geometry and topology suggests that the new mathematics provided a major thematic and aesthetic focus, as well as a motive for much of Olson's poetry and for his famous essay "Projective Verse." By 1950 and the publication of that essay, the new geometries had become no less

CHARLES OLSON / 557 than a "redefinition of the real" for Olson, a view of reality that sees space as inseparable from matter. The result is that Olson's poetry does not lend itself readily to summary or evaluation. Throughout his work he attempted to "stay in the condition of things"; but as much as he admired John Keats's "negative capability," the ability "to remain in uncertainties . . . without any irritable reaching after fact and reason," his own vision and poetry were shaped more by the discontinuities of a universe in flux than by an organic view of the world. Keats's dramatistic suspension of personality did not suit Olson's purposes. Olson preferred an intellectual form of self-abnegation more typical of philosophers, mathematicians, and historians. His greatest achievement was that he transformed this apparent handicap into poetic effects that included a "new stance toward reality"; the metamorphic, metaphoric figure of Maximus; The Maximus Poems, an open-ended poetic sequence that is less time-bound than Pound's Cantos and less local than Williams' Paterson; and a vocabulary from every available modern discipline of thought. Perhaps Olson's major contribution is that he represents what his poem "The Kingfishers" refers to as "the will to change." Olson, more than such modern American poets as Pound, Wallace Stevens, Williams, or Robert Lowell, gives the impression of being a sign of the times. Only a few recent novelists leave the reader with the same feeling of being propelled into the future. Even Olson's most admiring fellow poets do not approach his prosodic breadth, thematic inclusiveness, and perpetual motion. The sensibilities of contemporary American novelists—Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon, and Ishmael Reed, for example—provide clues to the nature of Olson's poetic achievement. His poems reject the limitations of a poetic

speaker's perspective for the relative omniscience of a more inclusive focus. In consequence, all sorts of references, allusions, and sources impinge upon and enter into his poetry. In addition, Olson frequently relies upon random coincidences, even in his own creations. Most of Olson's early poetry is in Archaeologist of Morning (1970), which includes all of his poetry authorized for publication during his lifetime, except the Maximus sequence. His 1950 essay "Projective Verse" expresses the position implicit in poems written between 1945 and 1951 more precisely than it does that of his later work. The essay, as the title and opening paragraphs show, is as much a dismissive characterization of most contemporary poetry in 1950 as it is a prescription for future poets: Verse now, 1950, if it is to go ahead, if it is to be of essential use, must, I take it, catch up and put into itself certain laws and possibilities of the breath, of the breathing of the man who writes as well as of his listenings. (The revolution of the ear, 1910, the trochee's heave, asks it of the younger poets.) Citing Pound, Williams, and Keats as forerunners, Olson does not at all claim to be the inventor of "open" verse. Nevertheless, the energy of his essay and its use of terminology borrowed from mathematics and physics made a powerful impression on his contemporaries. Part I of the essay refers to "closed" verse as "inherited line, stanza, over-all form, what is the 4old' base of the non-projective." "Open" poetry is "projective, percussive, prospective." The poet working in "open" learns how to transfer poetic energy, "the kinetics of the thing." The next thing he discovers is a kind of poetic materialism, the law that "FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF CONTENT." Finally, he discovers the essence of the poetic process. Olson puts it dog-

558 I AMERICAN matically: "ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION." A related formula comes in the guise of an incantation: THE HEAD, by way of the EAR, to the SYLLABLE the HEART, by way of the BREATH, to the LINE. This formula is born of Olson's belief that the syllables of language are rooted in human intelligence, while its rhythms are physiologically inspired. The second, shorter part of his essay is more relevant to Olson's total work. His insistence that projective verse requires a "new stance toward reality outside a poem as well as a new stance toward the reality of a poem itself suggests the exploratory nature of all phases of his poetry. Noting that Pound and Williams were each involved in a movement called "objectivism," Olson proposes "objectism" instead. The term, he says, implies "getting rid of the lyrical interference of the individual as ego, of the subject and his 'soul' ... by which western man has interposed himself between what he is as a creature of nature . . . and those other creations of nature which we may . . . call objects." That poet and poem are also "objects" was always a presupposition of Olson's poetry. Guarding against lyricism, ego, and "soul," he sought new forms to express the reality shared by man and "those other creations of nature." But when subjectivity and "soul" demanded inclusion in Olson's later work, projective verse had not evolved along lines adequate to the task. Olson's essay tries to "scieritificize" poetics by arguing that the typewriter has given the modern poet "the stave and bar a musician has had." He often used the typewriter to great effect in his poems, as a method of denoting sound relationships. Yet, his early poetry does not always suggest its open structure by such visual

WRITERS

representation as spacing and placement of phrases, and the visual aspects of his later poems are related more to topology and topography, and to abstractions and mapping, than to breath or sound. No single exemplary Olson poem reveals a pattern typical of his entire development; but a double movement pervades the early years of his poetry, with poems such as "The Praises," "The K," and "There was a Youth whose Name was Thomas Granger" achieving formal and tonal self-transcendence, and poems such as "The Kingfishers" and "In Cold Hell, in Thicket" demanding continuation instead of resolution. As early examples of "open" verse, these poems present patterns of discovery that are sometimes repeated in Olson's later poetry. "The Praises" is a celebration of "process" as it modulates from inquiry to revealed truth and sings the praises of the secret processes common to history, thought, nature, and poetry. "There was a Youth whose Name was Thomas Granger" exemplifies "humilitas," the "realization that a man is himself an object" that Olson thought essential to all men as well as to projectivist poets. "The K," in its transformation of rhetorical observations into perceptions, is a very early example of the "new stance toward reality" required of the poet. Olson's most famous poem, "The Kingfishers," is a desperate search for form and order that tests the uses and limits of "the lyrical interference of the ego" by using an Olson "persona." "In Cold Hell, in Thicket" anticipates characteristics of the long Maximus sequence and comes as close as Olson ever does to a dejection ode. Olson's best-known poem, "The Kingfishers" is, paradoxically, both a good example of projective verse technique and atypical of Olson's poetry. Although written before the essay "Projective Verse," examples of Olson's energy principle abound in it, including magnificent use of "the advantage of the type-

CHARLES OLSON / 559 writer." Yet "The Kingfishers" also employs a poetic voice and meditative mode that is usually associated with lyric poetry and disavowed by Olson. Nevertheless, it is among the strengths of this poem that it depends upon a speaking voice so distinct that it is almost Olson's "persona." In it Olson assumes the voice of primitive, unaccommodated man, the stripped-down ego that has always been the true subject of meditative poetry, a mode that he soon abandoned for a less introspective stance. "The Kingfishers" is both a projective sequence and a meditation on endless change, with a theme-and-variations structure that reinforces both open-endedness and repetition. The opening statement ("What does not change / is the will to change") immediately emphasizes human willfulness in a changing universe. It also implies that at least one element recurs in this state of constant change. The word "change" is stressed twice, underlining the simultaneously progressive and futile nature of human thought. The repetition of words and syllables later becomes a basic structural technique, while variations on the theme of change inevitably include recurrent ideas and motifs. Variations on the theme of change do not necessarily correspond to numerically ordered sections. For example, part I constitutes more than half the poem and is subdivided into four sections. Iy it there are modulations from a party scene to deeper thoughts comparing the life cycle of kingfishers with the revolutionary process expressed by Mao. Further meditations on war and peace in the history of Mexico build up to a desperate recapitulation of a universal law of change that includes the inevitability of death and the fragility of "a state between / the origin and / the end." The shorter part II compresses several motifs from part I into a meditation on baptism and burial rituals of the Aztecs. The poet's stance shifts from philosophical perspective to bitter

anguish at man's violent nature. Part III is his attempt to transform bitterness into resignation, to regain perspective, and to control his own outrage. In the context of the poem the conclusion is inadequate. The question "shall you uncover honey / where maggots are?" remains, and the answer is nowhere in the poem. Yet such a "downbeat" conclusion is not typical of Olson. Part I, section 2, contains Olson's most quoted lines. In itself it is a marvelously self-enclosed, complete poem. In the larger context it seems a non sequitur. Yet its beautifully balanced double movement appropriately contrasts the single-minded repetitiveness of the preceding section. I thought of the E on the stone, and of what Mao said la lumiere" but the kingfisher de Faurore" but the kingfisher flew west est devant nous! he got the color of his breast from the heat of the setting sun! As images of "la lumiere de 1'aurore" and "the heat of the setting sun" are woven together, only brief reiteration of "but the kingfisher" recalls the more prosaic first section. The interweaving technique is not new with Olson, nor is the image of kingfishers that "catch fire" as they fly, but the juxtaposition of the "E on the stone" and Mao's poetry of revolution with the kingfisher symbol of decline is uniquely Olson's, a combined vision of the simultaneous processes of history and life as recurrent change. There is ideological justification for concluding section 2 with continued quotation from Mao, simultaneously revealed as a part of the cycle of rise and fall, inevitable as the kingfisher's nest, but also merely another swing of Time's pendulum. As it helps to know about mathematical al-

560 I AMERICAN lusions in "The Praises" and about Olson's uses of William Bradford's Plymouth Plantation as a source for "Thomas Granger," so it is important to read "The Kingfishers" in light of its borrowing from William Hickling Prescott's Mexico, and the Life of the Conqueror Fernando Cortes (1898) and William Carlos Williams' essay "The Destruction of Tenochtitlan" (In the American Grain [1925]. Williams' imaginative reconstruction of Mexican history explains several otherwise mysterious associations that appear in part I, section 3, of "The Kingfishers," and it may well have been a major source for the poem. In section 3 "the jungle / leaps in" and there is neither recollection nor disciplined synthesis. These lines are not like T. S. Eliot's "heap of broken images" but are, rather, a tumult of unspecified references and disparate quotations. They represent change as chaos in a flood of thoughts about primitive impulses of men throughout history, specifically Mexican history. Interpreted history or history-as-poetry constitutes the remainder of section 3. Olson "borrows" almost verbatim from Prescott. He only changes "All was now confusion, tumult, and warlike menace, where so lately had been peace and the sweet brotherhood of nations" to a more laconic form: In this instance, the priests (in dark cotton robes, and dirty, their dishevelled hair matted with blood, and flowing wildly over their shoulders) rush in among the people, calling on them to protect their gods And all now is war where so lately there was peace, and the sweet brotherhood, the use of tilled fields.

Undoubtedly some readers will view such borrowing as questionable poetic practice. Yet

WRITERS

the context of Prescott's words in Mexico, and the Life of the Conqueror, compared with their context in "The Kingfishers," makes it clear that the historian necessarily reduced his sentiments to sentimentality and his facts to footnotes. Montezuma's gifts assume new connotations in the poem, and one of many battles between Spaniards and Aztec priests takes on generalized moral significance. Apparently both Williams and Olson read Prescott and, like D. H. Lawrence, both were intensely interested in "what was slain in the sun." Yet, despite their similarities, Olson does not accept the "religious practices" of the Aztecs with Williams' detachment, nor does he characterize Montezuma and the priests as "such a surface lifted above the isolate blackness of such profound savagery." Rather, he tries desperately to understand the relationships of Montezuma and his priests, feather and stone, Aztec and conquistador, civilization and anarchy. In contrast, Williams described the Aztec hecatombs with the relative equanimity of an anthropologist: Here it was that the tribe's deep feeling for a reality that stems back into the permanence of remote origins had its firm hold. It was the earthward thrust of their logic; blood and earth; the realization of their primal and continuous identity with the ground itself where everything is fixed in darkness. He went on to describe the idols: . . . of extra-human size and composed, significantly, of a paste of seeds and leguminous plants ... together with human blood, the whole then being consecrated with a bath of blood from the heart of a living victim. Williams noticeably betrays some anguish at man's inhumanity in the opening of his next essay, "The Fountain of Eternal Youth," where he comments:

CHARLES OLSON / 561 History begins for us with murder and enslavement, not with discovery. No, we are not Indians but we are men of their world. The blood means nothing; the spirit, the ghost of the land moves in the blood, moves the blood. In "The Kingfishers," Olson seems to be trying to answer Williams' indictment, and in section 4 he restates the law of change, a new humanism to counter the violence of section 3. The theme originally stated so concisely is all but dissipated in restatement. By the end, though, the conventional wisdom of tired cliche is revitalized through insistent echoes of ancient Mexico and modern technological culture: . . . the message. And what is the message? The message is a discrete or continuous sequence of measurable events distributed in time is the birth of air, is the birth of water, is a state between the origin and the end, between birth and the beginning of another fetid nest is change, presents no more than itself And the too strong grasping of it, when it is pressed together and condensed, loses it This very thing you are From the labored reiteration of phrases comes an incantation to the law of change. From exhausted dejection arises a dispassionate but forceful conclusion, a restatement of "the law" in different terms. Indian lore and Alfred North Whitehead, Mexican gods and technological terminology are juxtaposed to relay this

"message." Section 2 used the method of interweaving motifs; section 4 interweaves whole philosophies. To contain the horror of section 3, the fourth brings into relief the unifying force of change as a universal principle. Were the poem to end at this point, it might have conveyed the theme adequately. Yet, it is crucial to the poetic realization of Olson's message that poet and poetry are part of the unending process of change. Accordingly, part II returns to the psychological heart of the poem, "the heart of darkness" that Olson refuses to deny, "the new 'double-axis' of primitive-abstract" cited in his "Letter to Elaine Feinstein." In part II the poet's interest in anthropology translates into an immediacy and urgency found nowhere else in the poem. Associations with Prescott's history of Mexico and Williams' essay are clear, as is the allusion to Mao, yet the intensity of Olson's reaction is entirely his own. Carefully rendered dichotomies of East and West, birth and death, culture and genocide serve only to enrage the poet who knows how inseparable these poles are. Intellectual perspective fails as he extrapolates from scholarly citations to a condemnation of all culture. From brief references to Aztec rites, the section builds to a crescendo of personal outrage at the violent basis of civilization. It is a recognition that Olson repeats with reference to the Mayans in a letter to Robert Creeley written at the beginning of his six months on the Yucatan Peninsula before he joined the Black Mountain College faculty. It is dated February 24, 1951: . . . don't let even Lawrence fool you (there is nothing in this Mexican deal, so far as "time in the sun" goes:... but this is a culture in arrestment, which is no culture at all ... when I say that, however, I give these people much more head, than their recent slobberers for the arrestment, surely, was due to the stunning (by the Spanish) of the Indian, 400 yrs ago . . . culture is confidence, & surely, Mao makes

562 I AMERICAN

WRITERS

Mexico certain ... (this whole Peninsula ... is a muzzle rammed for firing)

With part III the poet shifts ground completely:

The point is, the arrestment, is deceptive: it is not what fancy outsiders have seen it as, seeking, as they were, I guess, some alternative for themselves (like DHL & his Ladybird). ...

I am no Greek, hath not th' advantage. And of course, no Roman: he can take no risk that matters, the risk of beauty least of all.

Point (2) above, was VIOLENCE—killing, the heart, out, etc: those sons of bitches, those "scholars"—how they've cut that story out, to make the Mayan palatable to their fucking selves, foundations, & tourists!

But I have my kin, if for no other reason than (as he said, next of kin) I commit myself, and, given my freedom, I'd be a cad if I didn't. Which is most true.

Recollection and repetition, synthesis and interwoven lines are forcefully brought together in part II of "The Kingfishers" to point out the paradox of any philosophy and to call into question the original theme in the light of the violence of human history. Three fragments of Indian lore are cited, including an excerpt from one of Prescott's notes on the Aztec naming ceremony. The fragmentation of thought continues until it is abruptly cut short by associations of the temples of Tenochtitlan with "human gore" and "dry blood." By the end of part II, the theme of change is submerged in an outcry of revulsion worthy of a Jacobean playwright: with what violence benevolence is bought what cost in gesture justice brings what wrongs domestic rights involve what stalks this silence what pudor pejorocracy affronts how awe, night-rest and neighborhood can rot what breeds where dirtiness is law what crawls below There is a loss of expansiveness in invective. The bitterness of part II calcifies into the staccato assertions of a sputtering old man. In fact, William Shakespeare's Timon of Athens is the source of the line "how awe, night-rest and neighborhood can rot."

It works out this way, despite the disadvantage. I offer, in explanation, a quote: si j'ai du gout, ce n'est gueres que pour la terre et les pierres. Despite the discrepancy (an ocean courage age) this is also true: if I have any taste it is only because I have interested myself in what was slain in the sun I pose you your question: shall you uncover honey/where maggots are? I hunt among stones There are no suspensions of syllables or juxtapositions of phrases typical of open verse until the last three lines. Instead, there are fairly regular four-foot lines organized into four stanzas of four lines each. They give the impression of uniformity, consecutiveness, and control, not exploration or fragmentation. The sense of a "closed" formal structure is further reinforced by the patterning of sounds and repetitions of words. The Olson "persona" reverts to apologia, suggesting that preceding attempts at philosophy and satire were inadequate in the face of the poet's discoveries. He admits the "disadvantage" in claims of kinship over those of literature and philosophy, yet accepts Arthur Rimbaud's bitter formulation for himself. The logic

CHARLES OLSON / 563 of associating kinship with Rimbaud's "la terre et les pierres" and "what was slain in the sun" is peculiar to Olson, for he never loses sight of history as "the confidence of limit as man is caught in the assumption and power of change." Yet, in the context of this poem, the discovered "limit" of brutal blood lust is not acceptable. Thus the poem ends on a note of decided dejection:

may be that poetic progress for both men depended upon their articulating images of an ideal man. The two poems are remarkably similar in subject, tone, even expressions, despite differing poetic techniques. Nevertheless, Olson called Stevens "a profound misleader." In a letter of June 13, 1952, to Origin editor Cid Gorman, Olson wrote:

shall you uncover honey / where maggots are?

. . . i do not include Morse on Stevens, and the reason . . . is not any difference from Stevens— it is never that easy—but the degree of apprehension of the reality contemporary to us. ... Stevens is a profound misleader simply that he is in a deeply important area (what I have yet no better word for than ornamentation: . . . I would still say none of us are that far along that we can say (((we might do))) what it is IN COLD HELL, was my try

I hunt among stones In "The K," his meditation on human volition, Olson discovers both the circular movement of the poem and the secret of his own attention as an act of will. The double process of "There was a Youth whose Name was Thomas Granger" yields both a folk-tale and a moral vision from an examination of historical source material. The secret of "The Praises" is that all knowledge is important primarily in its use. Paradoxically, the only revelation of "The Kingfishers" is that neither theme nor form develops further when the poet confronts the impulse to violence. When the object of attention is man's inhumanity, then Olson's shapes necessarily waver between fragments and imitations of past forms, for exploration ends in revulsion and disgust impedes discovery as limits of art and life mix. Olson's search for order took a different form in "In Cold Hell, in Thicket," a short, open sequence that begins in desolation but ends with a belief in human action. In many respects this 1953 poem resembles "Asides on the Oboe," another humanistic poem of doubt and belief written by Wallace Stevens ten years earlier. Each poem represents a crucial stage in the poetic development of its author. As "Asides on the Oboe" anticipated Stevens' "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction," "In Cold Hell, in Thicket" seems to have been a major impetus for the sustained sequence of The Maximus Poems. It

It is that deep, that is a wholly different disposal of attention to anything. It is what all the cry of myth & rite is falsely about It is how men take life (collectivism is another of its signs) Yet it shall come to be in its own guise—and modern man is altogether too literate yet (in his thinking, in his trying to push it into existence, like as tho he were capable of couvade! You see, the problem is to clear ourselves of the negatives—all Greek myth as we distribute our attention to it after Herodotus, as well as such men of decoration as Stevens.... Although Olson may have been "misleading" in citing Stevens as one of "the negatives," he never doubted the seriousness of Stevens' approach to the same problem he attacks in "In Cold Hell, in Thicket." It is the problem of a loss of faith that is for the poet a loss of voice

564 I AMERICAN and a loss of meaning. In many of Stevens' major works there is a search for a "supreme fiction." In Olson's poetry the search is more often for space, orientation, size, and a flexible relationship between man and the universe established "by fixes only." "In Cold Hell, in Thicket" says that man is "in hell or in happiness, merely / something to be wrought, to be shaped, to be carved, for use ..." but that nevertheless, by nature He shall step, he will shape, he is already also moving off In "The Praises" Olson asserts that " . . . for a man to act after he has taken thought, this! / is the most difficult thing of all"; but he never seeks, as Stevens did, "the time to think enough." Where Stevens' quest included timelessness, Olson's passion is for space and motion. This basic difference is inherent in the two poets' attempts to resolve the doubt and end the dejection so prevalent in modern poetry. A finished projective poem, "In Cold Hell, in Thicket" exemplifies the maxim from "Projective Verse" that "FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF CONTENT." Like "The K" and parts of "The Kingfishers," it is a poetic realization of self-transcendence. But, unlike these earlier examples, it is also an open-ended sequence that anticipates characteristics of the long Maximus sequence. A metamorphic speaker, a search for space, and a fusion of speaker and place make "In Cold Hell, in Thicket" seem very much a prototype of The Maximus Poems. It is also a point of departure from early, more self-contained projective verse to the more continuous affirmations of the sequence. As it reveals the "secret" of man-as-object in the "shape" of an open sequence, it prepares the way for Maximus to merge with his Gloucester locale and emerge as a principle of history.

WRITERS

The further development of projective verse into an open, changing, yet continuous sequence depended, as "The Kingfishers" did, upon repeating certain elements while remaining exploratory and open-ended. A cumulative progress characterizes The Maximus Poems, but this forward movement cannot easily be understood without closely reading the entire sequence as it moves from poem to poem and from discovery to discovery. The figure of Maximus, the town of Gloucester, and Olson's search for what he called a "new discourse" create a structural unity, however temporary, within the progressive continuity of these poems. Eventually, even these three principles diffused into little more than echoes in the fragmented discontinuity of the end of the sequence. In the first twenty-two Maximus poems, though, they appear often enough to structure the sequence before "documentation" and a new conception of poetic process enters in the twenty-third poem. The discovery of poetic space in "In Cold Hell, in Thicket" lay in the transition from "thicket" to "field." In The Maximus Poems, space is initially represented by Gloucester, geographically bounded, yet omnipresent in past, present, and future. This structural freedom is achieved primarily through the invention of Maximus, who is like a Vonnegut hero on a "time warp," never limited in time, often absent, yet nevertheless specifically earthbound. A protean figure like the speakers in several modern sequences such as Williams' Paterson and Pound's Cantos, Maximus shares in the "metamorphic tradition" identified by Bernetta Quinn. He even resembles the "trickster" figure of Indian legend, although Maximus' "shapechanging" is rarely mischievous or malicious. He can be subject or object, person or place, and, like Gloucester itself, he is limited only in terms of geography and spatial relations. Olson's focus on the city is part of his desire for "alternative discourse" appropriate to a

CHARLES OLSON / 565 "human universe." In Williams' Paterson the search for a language "to make them vocal" slowly moves out from the city. In The Maximus Poems the replacement for the old discourse develops only where a vital culture and human perception interpenetrate in Gloucester. Williams' quest increasingly relies upon symbolic metaphor. In The Maximus Poems, Olson's ideal language presumably resembles topology, which is defined as geometry that describes relations invariant under distortion. For the writer, as Olson said in a speech at Black Mountain College in 1956 (published in Ann Charters' Olson/Melville: A Study in Affinity): It comes down to fact and form. A writer, I dare say, goes by words. That is, they are facts. And forms. Simultaneously. And a writer may be such simply that he takes an attitude towards this double power of word: he believes it is enough to unlock anything. Words occur to him as substances—as entities, in fact as actual entities. My words were space, myth, fact, object More key words in the essay "Projective Verse" suggest that such "entities" as "process," "humilitas," and "attention" inform The Maximus Poems even when the sequence is sometimes less "projective" than meditative or less exploratory than didactic. The open, continuous sequence often seems at variance with the temporary resolutions of its components. Its "kinetics" is not always as apparent as lyrical moments or didactic repetitions in specific poems or groups of poems. Yet the exchange and reinforcement of energy between the long poem and its parts reflect the simultaneously continuous and discrete universe that Olson felt an artist had to reenact. Previous poems were inquiries into the nature of man and the modern universe. The Maximus Poems establish interpenetration of man and universe in the very specific terms of Maximus and Gloucester.

The first twenty-two poems generally fall into groups more or less unified according to their uses of Maximus, historical documentation, and the time and space of present-day Gloucester. The first four establish Maximus and bring in the themes of the invasion of Gloucester by the lies of "pejorocracy" (like Pound's usura, it is the ascendancy of lies and diminution of meaning in language) and the dissonant "mu-sick" of ownership. Poems 5, 6, and 7 remind the citizens of Gloucester that their only hope of "polis," the essential heterogeneous community, lies in their own use of their eyes, since the life of the community depends upon individuals' perceptions and awareness. In the eighth and ninth poems the problem of definition and discovery identified in the essay "Human Universe" appears in poetic form. In poems 10 through 17, Maximus becomes more and more merged with the history of Gloucester, dissolving altogether in some poems as the "facts" of history come to the fore. The only return to the Maximus of preceding poems is in the brilliant twelfth poem, "Maximus, to himself," where the price of being a poet is not alienation but a slow and painful self-realization. Poems 13 through 16 echo the tone of "Maximus, to himself" as they confront the dejection and disillusionment that seem to be the inevitable concomitants of human exploration and discovery. However, with the seventeenth poem, "On first Looking Out through Juan de la Cosa's Eyes," the poet's faith in human attention returns as the world is rediscovered through the eyes of the cartographer de la Cosa and a new "mappemunde" is created. Poems 18 through 22 return temporarily to Maximus. They also introduce some concerns "relating to the care of souls," including questions of morality, honor, and a new nobility. In letter 22 nobility and honor consist in being the writer who stops the "battle" to celebrate a moment of beauty. Letters 12, 17, and 23 culminate larger

566 I AMERICAN curves of movement within the formal progression of the first twenty-three poems. At first the Maximus figure, logopoeia or "PLAY of the mind," and documentation of Gloucester's origins are central poetic postures in the quest for a new use of language. But with the twelfth poem the emphasis changes, as Maximus confronts a deep disillusionment almost as paralyzing as that revealed in "The Kingfishers." Techniques of self-assertion, Pound's logopoeia ("the dance of the intellect among words"), and documentation, as they were used in early poems, are still basic to the first eleven Maximus poems; but after "Maximus, to himself they are often exchanged for more free-associative explorations and fragmented forms. After the twelfth Maximus poem, the organizational principle of Olson's "epic" lies somewhere between the immediacy of a rhapsodic oral tradition and symphonic timelessness. In letter 15, Olson characterizes his new emphasis as "Rhapsodia," the "songs stitched together" technique of epic poetry. Linda Wagner has defined modern epic in her work on Williams through a more complex musical analogy, with "the symphonic" a "reflection of modern man's consciousness" that conveys "a sense of timelessness—or rather of the unity of all time." The seventeenth poem, "On first Looking Out through Juan de la Cosa's Eyes," restores energy to the open sequence and typifies the combination of rhapsodic and symphonic in a single poem. Thereafter, poems 18 through 22 return to Maximus' perspective, the play of ideas, and the memories and histories of Maximus and Gloucester; but they return with an increasing reliance on dreams and meditations. Letters 15 through 22 were written at Black Mountain College in only nineteen days of May 1953, in what Daniel Hise in boundary 2 described as "an unusual burst of creativity" preceding a "crisis of direction" that left Olson "backing and filling before he was able to get

WRITERS

the sequence moving again." Perhaps, as Thomas Whitaker has remarked about Williams' Paterson, the formal progression of an open sequence is necessarily "one of descent and emergent order—one of repeated release from blockage and renewal of alertness." A new conception of the poetic process was at work when the second "run" of Maximus poems was written in Gloucester four years later. Beginning with letter 23, Olson's preoccupation was with history as a structuring principle. That part of the sequence will be examined later, with special emphasis on Olson's use of concepts presented in The Special View of History (1970) and the documents, heroes, and villains of Gloucester's past. The opening three Maximus poems are both a thematic introduction and a poetic model of the process of the sequence. As in "In Cold Hell, in Thicket," their motive for motion and their impulse to overcome dejection, as well as their aversion to stasis, are manifest in movement. Like most poems in an open sequence, they function doubly, as individually complete poetic structures and as links in a sequence that is itself an^ opening to further poetry. Approximately contemporaneous with "The Praises" and "The Kingfishers," these three poems were written during 1949-1951. Yet in sequence they seem products of a single impulse. They preface the Maximus sequence by introducing the motifs of Maximus, the city, and the outcry against "pejorocracy" and ownership. They also form a symphonic development. Separately they project three voices of Maximus, but together they seem more like musical movements, related in their continuity and recapitulation of themes, rhythmic breaks, and resolutions. From the "offshore" ode of letter 1 through the history-as-poetry of letter 2 and the diatribe against ownership of letter 3, the overall symphonic movement begins with a presentation of

CHARLES OLSON / 567 themes and motifs, then shifts to a slow section, and ends with a recapitulation and resolution of themes. Letter 1 builds to a crescendo; letter 2 slows the pace as it elaborates the themes; letter 3 resolves the movement with rhetorical recapitulation of the "wondership stolen by / ownership." The curve of movement of these three poems is often repeated with degrees of variation throughout the sequence. The lyrical celebration of possibility that characterizes letter 1 is a touchstone and dominant tone that returns at those points when dejection and disillusionment have been strongest. The "hidden city" revealed in letter 2 is another point of reference visited over and over again to document the viability of "polis." The fusion of lyric and personal history in letter 3 is a model of persuasive rhetoric in an epic voice that becomes prevalent whenever Maximus tries to convince Gloucester of its unique value. The sequence begins again with the fourth poem, "The Songs of Maximus," a mini-sequence or "song cycle" that introduces a new sort of lyricism at the same time that it incorporates the praise, parable, and exhortation that characterized the first three poems. It anticipates the more personal tone of poems like "Maximus, to himself (letter 12) and "Maximus to Gloucester, Letter 19 (A Pastoral Letter," and even such a dream poem as letter 22. At first glance the form of "The Songs of Maximus" echoes the songs and snatches of a wandering minstrel. On closer reading, the six songs are bound together in an open structure paradigmatic of the entire extended open sequence. Throughout the sequence, and emphatically in the invitation of song 6 to "sing" at the end ("you sing, you / who also / wants"), Olson requires participation in the form, whether it is a lyric, a meditation, an exhortation, a story, a parable, or even a document. The fragmented sentences of Maximus appear everywhere in the

sequence, yet in "The Songs of Maximus" they contribute to an effect of lyrical buoyancy that contrasts with the more prevalent hesitancies, fragmentations, and indirections of later poems. It is as if the rhapsodic technique alluded to in letter 15 were accomplished here in miniature, "the songs stitched together" just adequately covering one who usually prefers being "out at the elbows." "Rhapsodia" is again exchanged for "the symphonic" and preoccupation with Gloucester's past, present, and future in the next three poems. In contrast with letters 1 through 3, letters 5 through 7 are less "literary" examinations of Gloucester, polis, and poetry. As they work out the roles of artist and history, they recombine rhetoric, documentation, and subjective expression in a letter writer's focus on specifics that gives a new perspective on "polis." These were among the poems written by Olson in the spring of 1953, at Black Mountain College, which may account for their tone of catharsis. In any case they contribute to a sense of the sequence as an exchange of letters with Gloucester, a felt need for unity and continuity rather than for poetic form or theory. The implication of these three poems is that the "hidden city" will not tolerate the perversions of its truth that Olson found in the platitudes about the common man expressed in the new literary magazine Four Winds, which was edited by his friend Vincent Ferrini and published locally in Gloucester. Letters 5, 6, and 7 represent a poet's recovery of "polis." And they demand that he revitalize the language of this "human universe" with at least the same care that Gloucester's men gave to fishing. In "Tyrian Businesses" and letter 9, Olson begins to explore the necessary relationship between definition and discovery later marked in the essay "Human Universe." These two poems also predict the modulations in letters 10, 11, and 12 from inquiry to assertion, with a great

568 I AMERICAN deal of exploration in between. Despite obscurities, they take stock, extol realism and "measure," and finally rely upon an absolute relation of language to experience in order to discover and define Maximus and Gloucester. Despite its assertive tone, "Tyrian Businesses" tries to prove empirically that the "names" and "verbs" of its second section correspond to the hypothetical "objects" and "actions" of the first. Letter 9 is less complicated, relying on memory and associations, but it also compares two kinds of knowledge. Its contrasts between "men's affairs" and the poet's work, between deeds and words, and between history and poetry lead to the discovery of the inseparability of each as a measure of the other. The eighth and ninth poems also provide an important turning point in the sequence because they reestablish the faith in "alternative discourse" that allows Maximus to document the founding of Gloucester in the next two poems. A new sort of "truth" begins with letters 10 and 11. The care, attention, and "measure" of preceding poems are taken for granted and the sequence regains momentum. The newfound method for achieving dynamic stability is, as in letter 9, both poetic and historical, a reintegration of definition and discovery in the context of inquiry into Gloucester's origin. At this point in the sequence, historic materials are still primarily evidence of the rhetorical truths of earlier poems. Yet, paradoxically, a recovery of denotative language, an absolute faith in "fact," is the major revelation of these two poems. The story of Gloucester's origin does not wholly sustain the belief in exploration and discovery that seems to motivate the sequence. Historical facts transform poetic joy into confrontation with the dogma, parochialism, and persecution that was concomitant to Gloucester's founding by the Dorchester Company and Captain John Smith. Yet, despite the self-limiting nature of Maximus' inquiry, these

WRITERS

poems insist upon a physical connection with the germinative energy of the past. They return to Gloucester's geographic reality. Stage Fort and Tablet Rock, the fishing stage that was the original site of the first house and the thirty-foot-high rock commemorating the fight for Cape Ann's fishing rights, are concrete evidence that "the sacred & profane" were once vital in Gloucester. Stage Fort and "the rock" are sources of daimonic energy for Maximus. They are physical connections between past and present that infuse historical documentation with poetic life, add human value to the language of "fact," and point toward a solution to the problem set forth at the beginning of letter 10: on founding: was it puritanism, or was it fish? And how, now, to found, with the sacred & profane—both of them— wore out Poetic solutions lie in renewed emphasis on humilitas, the recognition and respect for manas-object that is strangely exemplified in John Smith's projection of the settlers as objects of his attention: "they (the settlers) have been my wife, my hawks, my hounds, my cards, my dice, in totall my best content" For Olson, John Smith is yet another source of energy, like the rock. He is a heroic image of possibility, in contrast with the "shrinkers": The Capteyne he was, the eye he had for what New England offered, what we are other than theocratic.... The rediscovery of a hero, a "sacred" place, and the humilitas appropriate for "founding"

CHARLES OLSON / 569 renews possibilities for continuing the sequence. Nevertheless, the tendency toward constriction remains. Even as Maximus seeks new methods "for forwarding" in letters 10 and 11, a corresponding recalcitrance follows in the brilliant "dying fair of letter 12. The inevitable dejection of "Maximus, to himself" echoes the loss of motion in the beginning of letter 10. What remains poetically fresh, despite Maximus' doubts, are the facts of founding and the words of the documents recording them, a combination of poetic and historical method that begins to be systematic only after it is more fully expressed in The Special View of History (1970). The twelfth poem is among Maximus' last assertions, and a strange kind of minimal selfassertion it is. By itself the poem is an excellent modern meditation on failure. In the context of the sequence it acquires even more significance from contrasts between its opening line, "I have had to learn the simplest things / last," the tribute to John Smith that precedes it at the end of letter 11, and the exploration of values in the four poems that follow. The dominant tone of "Maximus, to himself is one of quiet desperation, yet Olson's despair is almost always tinged with optimism: I know the quarters of the weather, where it comes from, where it goes. But the stem of me, this I took from their welcome, or their rejection, of me And my arrogance was neither diminished nor increased, by the communication The key word in these lines is "arrogance." A gloss on the word appears in The Special View of History, in the context of a transcribed lecture about objective knowledge as both exper-

iential and methodological, both knowable and usable. ... what you do will stay inside what you know. This is one of the reasons, for example, for two things: (1) the constant despair for any man, therefore his need for courage; and (2) the immediate rejoining of the struggle ... both of these two results of discrimination hold for any of us: despair, and faith. For there is a counter which includes them both, and the Latins called it "humilitas," but the word is an old Indo-European root meaning arrogance, actually (from rogo, to ask a question to or of something, to make a demand which has to be answered.) And because the demand is made of yourself (that with which you are most familiar) it turned over and became that horror and practice of western man, humility. Indirectly, then, there is resemblance between John Smith's "femininities" and Maximus' "arrogance." The two-part structure of the poem itself is ambiguous and ironic when self-questioning and self-assertion are inseparable. The important shift in the last five lines of part II is not so much a shift from words to reality (as it is, for example, in "The K" or "Tyrian Businesses") as a shift from past tense to present. It is undone business I speak of, this morning, with the sea stretching out from my feet Again the sea and Olson's unique sense of the ecology of poetry transform a stopping point in the sequence into a point of departure. Success and failure are expressed in personal, self-analytic, emotional terms in this poem. Yet lengthy self-questioning and briefer self-assertion also establish the extent and limits of Maximus' consciousness for the rest of the sequence.

570 I AMERICAN In the next four poems Maximus' self-conscious exploration of personal values is subordinate to more intellectual, historical, and aesthetic considerations of economics. "Undone business" turns into confrontation with the terrors and failure attending the discovery of the New World. Maximus disappears from the poems and reappears again only after a consolidation of energy represented by "On first Looking Out through Juan de la Cosa's Eyes." After the twelfth poem, Olson partially relinquishes the symphonic, rhapsodic, and epistolary methods developed as formal elements in the first nine poems. Instead, he tries to combine the faith in fact discovered in letters 10 and 11 with the "arrogance" revealed in letter 12, "Maximus, to himself," in order to reassess the "economics and poetics" of being Maximus of Gloucester. The painful self-realization of the twelfth poem echoes in the agonizing confrontation with Gloucester that characterizes the next four poems. In the seventeenth poem the pendulum swings back to reaffirm a faith in fact. As a result, a newly heroic image of Maximus reappears in the remaining five poems (18-22) written in May 1953. With the admission of dreams into the sequence in letter 12, Olson's commitment to history and poetry takes on a new dimension, a level of meaning complementary but opposite to the faith in fact that characterizes letters 10, 11, and parts of 13 and 14. The refusal to countenance illusion and mythicize history in letter 13 is somewhat attenuated by the dream and the nightmare vision of the skeletal radiator in letter 14. There are no dreams in letters 15 through 17; but "The Twist" and letter 22 both begin with dreams, and the five poems following "The Twist" depend heavily upon dream material. Even the reference in letter 15 to poet Paul Blackburn's view of "the poem as a sleeping car" and Olson's rejoinder, "I sd, 'Rhapsodia'," recognize the need for a less constrained level of associations, a level never fully exploited

WRITERS

because Olson found that dreams lack the continuity required for a sequence. "Attention," like the eyes of Gloucester's fishermen and artists, continues to underlie the sequence; but, from letter 17 on, noteworthy details include maps as well as records of the past. The map central to this poem is de la Cosa's map of the world, the first "mappemunde" based on explorations of the New World: . . . before La Cosa, nobody could have a mappemunde Letter 17 represents both a culmination of historical and poetic developments in the sequence and an anticipation of the "mapping" techniques more frequently used in later poems. As the poem "maps" the founding of Massachusetts syllabically, it also fuses Maximus and Gloucester in newfound geographic terms. Inspiration, commitment, and a sense of renewal in letter 17 were necessarily preceded by dreamlessness, despair, and the deterioration noted in preceding poems. It is in the nature of the sequence to subsume and incorporate discoveries of each new poem into those that follow. Accordingly, the next five poems also rely upon the "maps" of Juan de la Cosa as they intertwine Maximus' dreams and personal history with the history and topography of Gloucester. The tension between motion and motionlessness, facts and dreams, "la verite" and "rhapsodia" begins to slacken in the last five poems written in May 1953, before, as Olson said, The Maximus Poems "got off its proper track." By the time the sequence reaches letter 22, Olson's reliance upon the dream level of associations is at its limit, and documentation of the founding of Gloucester all but ceases. Olson paraphrases Voltaire at the end of "Juan de la Cosa": On ne doit aux morts nothing else than la verite

CHARLES OLSON / 571 The implication is that the poem's truth will be a memorial to Gloucester's fishermen. But rigorous attempts to find proper terms of commemoration are necessarily at odds with the seductive demands of the dream landscape. Relying on a Celtic concept of the poet as measurer of valor, Olson transposes a passage from Robert Graves's White Goddess in letter 22: And what I write is stopping the battle, To get down, right in the midst of the deeds, to tell what this one did, how, in the fray, he made this play, did grapple with that one, how his eye flashed to celebrate (beauty will not wait)

men, and girls Olson the poet succeeds in "stopping the battle" here temporarily through frequent pauses, line breaks, and rhyme. But this concept of the poet counters Olson's original insistence on the inseparability of poetry and history, words and actions. A four-year hiatus between letters 22 and 23 resulted from the contradiction in terms. Yet, "stopping the battle" at this point also cleared the way for Olson's new conception of poetic process, the recombination of "Muthos" (myth) and "Logos" (fact) that motivates the remainder of the sequence. Letter 22 ends with an allusion to a dream about car trouble: (I swung the car to the left, confronted as I was by the whole hill-front a loading platform, the lip of it staring at me, grinning, you might say, five feet off the ground

And made it. It was only after that the car gave me trouble. For there is a limit to what a car will do. At this point the emphasis on limits also applies to the writer. Olson's dream of "(Trouble / with the car" is analogous to the temporary mechanical breakdown of the sequence's discovery process and to the end of a continuity based upon Maximus and "polis." Although The Maximus Poems was at a standstill after the spring of 1953, the four years before Olson was "back at the MONSTER" were not uneventful. In addition to writing several non-Maximus poems, Olson published In Cold Hell in Thicket (1953), The Maximus Poems 1-10 (1953), and Mayan Letters (1954). At the same time, while rector of Black Mountain College and attending to its development as an arts center, and to its subsequent fiscal demise and eventual closing, he continued to work on the essays of Human Universe (1965). He also was divorced, remarried, and became a father for the second time during this hectic period. In a letter to Origin editor Cid Gorman, dated June 6, 1954, Olson wrote: I am back at the MONSTER. Or so it became over the past year. Simply that I had to reattack. It got lost, somewhere in the '40s. And I had to find my way back on my own path. As well as its path. feel now I have: a spate of new ones done. But also—and this was the breakthrough—altogether non-Maximus poems. Crazy. Whether this was the wanted breakthrough remains to be seen. Poems like "Love," "The Motion," and "The Pavement" resemble Robert Creeley's work more than they do The Maxi-

572 / AMERICAN WRITERS mus Poems, and the sequence remained at an impasse until Olson's new view of the poet as historian demanded different formal constraints and principles of selection. In the 1957-1958 version of letter 23, the new role of the poet is stated concisely: "I would be an historian as Herodotus was, looking for oneself for the evidence of what is said " By virtue of its tentative position between the dreams of May 1953 at Black Mountain College and "grey water" realities of the winter of 1957 in Gloucester, letter 23 attains poetic significance. It is a major turning point in the sequence, comparable in impact with "In Cold Hell, in Thicket" and "Maximus, to himself," despite its prosaic quality and antipoetic structure. The poems that followed it in the winter of 1957-1958 show how Olson did, in fact, come to terms with history-as-poetry and his new role as Gloucester's resident poet-historian, terms more clearly spelled out in The Special View of History, an invaluable gloss for clarifying and indicating thought processes that are often reduced to shorthand in the rest of The Maximus Poems. These remarks were made in the course of lectures, readings, and discussions while Olson was still at Black Mountain College in 1956, but they are a guide to complex changes in poetic process that shaped the sequence from then on: We inherit an either-or, from the split of science and fiction. It dates back at least to Plato, who used the word "mouth" as an insult, to say it lies, and called poets muthologist Story was once all logos "The normal characteristic function of the ancient Story Teller," says J. A. K. Thomson ... "was not to invent. It was to repeat...." to those who listened to the Stories a Muthos was a Logos, and a Logos was a Muthos. They were two names for the same thing. ... Herodotus may have been conscious

of a difference he was making when he did add the word "history" . . . 'istorin in him appears to mean "finding out for oneself," instead of depending on hearsay.... It is Miss Harrison's analysis which I offer, from Themis: ... The tenses ... of the mythological are never past but present and future ... and history, like religion, myth, and poetry, share the common property that the thing done is not simply done but is re-done or pre-done. It is at once commemorative, magical, and prospective. . . . says Aristotle in the Poetics, 'by myth I mean the arrangement of the incidents.' Although The Special View of History survives as a compilation of notes and tapes from lectures, readings, and seminars, it includes significant attempts to expand Olson's earlier poetic theory by translating and elaborating the open field concept in cultural terms. Examinations of language, myth, and ritual add a collective dimension to the earlier theory as the poet's "objects" necessarily become the "facts" of history. The new process still demands humilitas but adds the demand of "finding out for oneself instead of depending on hearsay." Now the poet must also appropriate recorded history as part of the creative process. Hence, Olson's concern with redefining history. The following excerpt from The Special View of History is perhaps his most useful definition of history for the purposes of his poetry: . . . History is the confidence of limit as man is caught in the assumption and power of change. History is story, it means nothing else as a noun. Herodotus was the first to use the word (sign enough of the 5th century change) and he used it as a verb: to find out for yourself.... The evidence is there, for you did find out. It is in this sense, the prospective sense, that history in this century has re-presented itself.

CHARLES OLSON / 573 If "History is story" and myth is no more than "the arrangement of the incidents," then the cultural and aesthetic dimensions of history, myth, and poetry are linked by an underlying syntax, a sequence of consecutive events and possibilities that depends upon man's participation to give form and value to human experience. By the time Olson had fully expressed his "special view," the shaping power of the sequence as a poetic form and its processive nature as "unfinished business" were felt to be congruent with history and life. While Olson saw history, poetry, and life as less and less separate, his search for a new use of language originally articulated in the essay "Human Universe" became more important in his work. Correspondingly, he began to emphasize notions of "context" and "syntax" more than ideas of field, line, and syllable in his poetic theory. He put greater emphasis than before on location in the intrinsic relationship between "things spoken" and "things done." By 1957, Olson's poems began to look as if charting and mapping this relationship on the page were more important than finding ways to transfer poetic energy. His earlier preoccupation with the destruction of energy became subordinate to faith in the genetic principle that "life is the chance success of a play of creative accidents" and in the space-time continuum. The absolutes of this new cosmology, as described in "The Topological" in The Special View of History, are "autoclytic multiplication" (the principle of randomness in creation) and space-time coincidence and proximity, physical observations that are analogous to considerations of context and syntax in poetry. Coincidence and proximity ... become the determinants of chance and accident and make possible creative success.... Suddenly what used to be aesthetic in the old cosmology—sec-

ondary, because purpose was and had to be primary, is seen to be the nature of the stain of form across all reality. And man's order—his powers of order—are no longer separable from either those of nature or of God purpose is seen to be contingent, not primordial: it follows from the chance success of the play of creative accidents, it does not precede them. The motive, then, of reality, is process not goal. Only in the relative of the coincident and the proximate can . . . the ideal (which is the possible) emerge. Significantly, in The Special View of History Olson relies on an aesthetic concept to reinterpret history and humanism, and to redefine man. He also points out how the particular must be absolute in a truly relativistic theory of history. One of the many poetic implications of identifying the particular as absolute is that a poet no longer needs to assert his presence, voice, or persona as if he alone were the prime energy source. Although Olson had previously implied that the poet was part of the "field," not until the twenty-fourth poem, "a Plantation, a beginning," does he merge documentation of Gloucester's origins with personal references in a poem free of rhetoric and self-consciousness. Olson's stress on "context" expanded his previous notion of poetic field to include all knowable history, both personal and public. Paradoxically, in The Maximus Poems its effect was to limit the poetic subject. In poems 24 through 30, Olson began a series of experiments with syntax, but he did not yet continue to explore new areas of knowledge and modes of discovery. Instead, these poems hark back, seeking to repossess Gloucester by reintegrating muthos and logos ("things spoken" and "things done") in a local context. One more variation on the story of Gloucester is letter 24, "a Plantation a beginning." Yet, because nothing in the poem is subordinate to anything else, it refocuses on "the facts" in a

574 I AMERICAN WRITERS pattern that includes information past and present, mythic and personal. The twenty-fifth poem, "Maximus, to Gloucester," begins with long verse paragraphs that lead through a leisurely flow of introductory phrases to an important point about Gloucester's topography. The "turning" of Gloucester is further reflected in short lines that weave across the page. This transition to shorter accented lines makes the timeless presence of "fisherman's field" emphatic:

(like backwards of a scene I saw the other way for thirty years)

reality of fisherman's field, "the first place" and "the turning" that started Gloucester. In the next poem, though, radical innocence disappears as the story of Gloucester is revealed again. "So Sassafras" achieves a uniquely experimental exploration of Gloucester's story. The compression and dispersal of energy that peaked with the "fish rush" are expressed directly here through rhythmic and syntactic shifts. The accident of events is congruent with the stream of words to the extent that poetry, history, and life are interchangeable examples of the random order of creation. Arhythmic, nonaccentual lines about the slave trade, forced labor, and other, more subtle forms of economic servitude follow, representing a deep sense of loss that contrasts with the earlier enthusiasm of "the fish rush." The loss is pervasive. Drained by money interests, just as "Europe just then was being drained swept by pox," Gloucester remains tainted. In the next poem, "History is the Memory of Time," even the poet's "finding out for oneself seems as dependent upon speculation as upon facts. Alternations between events and speculation about them create a "memory" effect. But, in the last four lines Olson ends with explicit assertion, forsaking the memory process for a memorial:

Gloucester can view those men who saw her first

They should raise a monument to a fisherman crouched down behind a hogshead, protecting his dried fish

The point is not that Beverly turned out to be their home, that Conant Norman Allen Knight Balch Palfrey Woodbury Tilly Gray are Babsons Parsons there But that as I sit in a rented house on Fort Point, the Cape Ann Fisheries out one window, Stage Head looking me out of the other in my right eye

The poem's last lines incorporate a reciprocal relationship between Gloucester's origin and geography in an image of balance that becomes increasingly important later in Olson's work. Stage Head is still "where fishing continues / and my heart lies." The brief lyrical dissolution of time is justified by Olson's actual location in the house on Fort Point and the topographical

These lines are one more attempt to commemorate Gloucester's fishermen. Yet, as they lead into the next three poems, they also mark the decline of fishing and the need for hard evidence to counterbalance speculation. "The Picture," "The Record," and "14 Men Stage Head Winter 1624/25" provide evidence to answer previous speculation. They chart the

CHARLES OLSON / 575 poet's progress toward repossessing Gloucester by shifting emphasis from experiments with syntax to documented details of the town's history. They are both prospective and commemorative, pointing to the inevitable decline of fishing at the same time that they commemorate the nation's coastal origins. The search for polls, faith in fact, sense of discovery, and even the quest for muthologos that have characterized the sequence to this point fall off in the face of Gloucester's loss. The premature frustration of its early development reveals again the painful cost of discovery. Except for a few reflex actions in the rest of The Maximus Poems, the remaining efforts to repossess Gloucester are tempered by dejection. Yet poems 31, 32, and 33 continue to search for coherence as they recapitulate tensions between possibility and disillusionment, discovery and colonization, outwardness and inwardness, and documentation and exhortation. Where poems 24 through 30 tried to repossess Gloucester through prosodic experiments and documentation, these three poems temporarily abandon the search for new forms and relinquish the town to "the second comers." They turn instead to quasi-mythical figures who are less flesh and blood than directional signs mapping the new land. Despite retreat from painful documentation, they continue a last-ditch effort to salvage a mythology that is "at once commemorative, magical, and prospective," as they portray John Smith, John Winthrop, and Christopher Levett. Olson uses Smith and Levett as signs of movement in sharp contrast with Winthrop's anachronistic colonial "stiffening." But by projecting these men as measures instead of as heroes and villains, he restores a sense of openness to the sequence and converts the despair hereafter associated with Gloucester's founding into a new hope. Ironically, Olson's denial of a folkloric impulse often comes very close to the Puritan

imaginative process that relates historic events to a providential God. He even gives his own version of the fall from grace, with Cape Ann the earthly paradise, Rene Descartes and Winthrop twin serpents in the garden, and Levett's settlement in Maine a possible sanctuary. Yet, although The Maximus Poems often resemble Puritan jeremiads, the voyage literature typified by John Smith's writing is a more likely model for Olson's effort. In "Some Good News," John Smith, always a central figure in the sequence, takes on added significance. These references to Smith build further upon previous ones, but his importance to Olson here is more a matter of his writings. Now John Smith, not the Dorchester Company, is the "demarcation": Smith changed everything: he pointed out Cape Ann, named her so it's stuck, and Englishmen, who were the ones who wanted to, sat down, planted fisheries so they've stayed put, on this coast, from Pemaquid to Cape Cod. Winthrop's distortions inevitably follow Smith's true perceptions but finally lead to the outward movement of Levett's descriptions. The legacy of Winthrop's prose was "knots where instance / hides order," not the doctrine of experience inherited from Smith and Levett. Although Olson's style sometimes partakes of "knotty" conceits and the difficult tone of Puritan elegies, his view of history cannot accom-

576 I AMERICAN modate an incomprehensible "plan" initiated by a prime mover. For the will of God and willfulness of frustrated man, Olson substitutes "creative accidents" and "housekeeping": "the stain of form across all reality. And man's ... powers of order . . . no longer separable from either those of nature or of God." Anne Hutchinson's trial revealed the dangerous implications of Winthrop's theocratic commonwealth. Olson was less concerned with her religious conviction than with her right to rouse up women on Thursdays at her house talking grace versus works, when housekeeping Dealing with reality's affairs.... Levett is also a directional sign and measure because he wrote about building a house in Portland harbor in Voyage into New England: so we, who live at this poor end of goods, & things, & men,

when materials, of each, are such a man can't eat sleep walk move go apart from his own dwelling, the dirtiness of goodness cheapness shit is upon the world. We'll turn to keep our house.... Even Smith's discoveries are referred to as a housekeeping which old mother Smith started. ...

WRITERS

Olson portrays Smith, Hutchinson, and Levett as natural participants in an abundant, pervasive reality. Winthrop, on the other hand, is alien, a willful, phallic patriarch. "Capt Christopher Levett (of York)" completes the pattern of discovery, "stiffening," and renewed desire for innocence that began with the first three Maximus poems and continued with variations up to this point. The possibilities of Smith's "Good News" constricted when Winthrop's commonwealth converted outward movement to "inward act" by ignoring that American space was 1630 still sailors' apprehension not Boston's leaders'.... Levett's House Island in Maine represents a sort of way station between Smith's discoveries and the continuing westward motion, but further possibilities of inland discovery are not even suggested until the very end of The Maximus Poems. In its search for innocence, the poem on Levett marks the end of the discovery process because it finds the lesson of Smith, Levett, and the Dorchester men to be this "single truth": the newness the first men knew was almost from the start dirtied by second comers. About seven years and you can carry cinders in your hand for what America was worth. May she be damned for what she did so soon to what was such a newing. . . . Early signs of the fragmentation that characterize the remaining volumes of the sequence appear here. The effort to incorporate discursiveness, hesitations, and digressions of logical

CHARLES OLSON / 577 discourse into a cumulative flow of processive discovery is necessarily unsuccessful as Olson strives to contain the inherent historical contradictions and coincidences that the poem explores. "Capt Christopher Levett (of York)" gives up the quest for muthologos in order to move outward. A sort of exorcism takes place in the process, even in the face of bitter disillusionment. In this poem's last lines the word "out," used with various connotations throughout these three poems, purges the sequence of despair. "Some Good News" relayed the message that Out of these waters inland, it went. In the poem on Winthrop, "throwing people out" was "spiritual matter," but the poem on Levett insists that we, who out of the side of her come (have cut ourselves Out of her drugstore flattened-hillside gut like Wash-Ching-Geka cut the Winnebago nation out of elephant... Out, is the cry of a coat of wonder. . . . The final wondrous cry of "out" acquires great complexity, coming as it does after so many repetitions, after the harsh rhyme of "gut" and "cut," and the dental and guttural sounds of "drugstore flattened-hillside" and "Wash-Ching-Geka cut / the Winnebago nation out / of elephant." The word "out" takes on connotations of rebirth and amazement, as well as of religious expulsion and the westward, inland movement. By the end of "Capt Christopher Levett (of York)," the outward push is not only an excommunication, but also the birth trauma of a new nation. With "Out, / is the cry

of a coat of wonder" the sequence again renews itself. The remaining poems in the volume are more a memorial to the original Gloucester than a celebration of rebirth, as they mourn the dead and confront change. There is a sea change nevertheless in these last of The Maximus Poems. Like every other poem in the open sequence, they function doubly. And as a group they are both a coda and a new beginning in which the relationships within the long series gradually alter, along with the ever-changing relationships of "NW shifting / man," the land itself, and the sea. After Levett's outward movement, the sequence retreats to Gloucester, as it retreated to dreams and "inland waters" following Juan de la Cosa's "mappemunde." But these poems are not "off the track" as poems 18 through 22 were. Instead, they face the need to "step off onto the nation" and the intolerable truth that the facts of Gloucester are facts of loss. Yet, as in much of Olson's poetry, the stopping point is also a starting point, and moments of despair contain new sources of strength and energy. The first letter on Georges Bank follows the poem on Levett but moves in the opposite direction, away from westward, inland discovery and back to the sea. The simple eloquence of the account (taken from The Fisherman's Memorial and Record Book) is one more memorial to the fishermen as it moves the sequence forward. It foreshadows the increasingly antiaesthetic tone of the last two Maximus volumes, while harking back to parts of letters 2 and 15. Like the inscription on Tablet Rock, Columbus' descriptions of the New World, Juan de la Cosa's map, and Smith's poem and journals, it is the sort of factual evidence that the poet-historian now depends on to maintain the momentum of the sequence. The offshore shoals in the next poem, "1st

578 I AMERICAN WRITERS Letter on Georges," are controlling forces in Gloucester's life as well as one more unifying element in the sequence. These references to the shoals echo earlier ones, but now they show how illusory and dangerous a sense of stasis is when even land and sea shift. The ever-changing universe is a constant theme in Olson. In this letter it is precisely located in the treacherous geography that takes its toll in human lives. The shifting shoals also anticipate allusions to the theory of continental drift, a leitmotif of the last volumes. With this letter on Georges Bank, there is no doubt that the fact of loss is still the main fact of the sequence. The sea leads neither inland nor outward, but to a dead end, a burial ground. Yet a faint note of emotion recollected in tranquillity warns the reader that, as always, Olson resists the epic impulse in order to return to poetry that is both commemorative and prospective. An article on a city council meeting in the Gloucester Daily Times, January 3, 1958, was auspicious for The Maximus Poems. It gave Olson a "prospective" subject that was as close as he could get to a present-day hero. If Four Winds editor Vincent Ferrini was the villain in the fifth poem, then councilman Burke is the hero in the thirty-fifth. Although Olson faulted Ferrini for lack of attention to the city, he shows Burke immobilized by such an effort of attention. Burke's conflict, like the poet's at this point in the sequence, was that he was "caught in the assumption and power of change." He is a throwback, an anachronism, Against the greased ways of the city now (of the nation) this politician himself a twisted animal. . . . The poem "John Burke" resolves nothing. But "A FOOTNOTE TO THE ABOVE," appended by way of apologia, points to a new direction for the sequence. As "John Burke" marks a surviving resis-

tance to Gloucester's decline, so "A FOOTNOTE TO THE ABOVE" revives Gloucester in different terms. It is no longer a matter of "polis is eyes," or that the fishing stage fight was a fight "against all sliding statism," or that Smith discovered and named Cape Ann "so it's stuck." The footnote states that in The Maximus Poems "local / relations are nominalized" and subject and object, person and place are one: To speak in Yana-Hopi about these matters with which I, as Maximus, am concerned (which is Gloucester, and myself as herea-bouts, in other words in Maximus local relations are nominalized) one would talk, Yana being a North California tongue, & Hopi is a language peculiarly adjusted to the topological as a prime and libidinal character of a man, and therefore of all of his proximities: metric then is mapping, and so, to speak modern cant, congruent means of making a statement), I, as Mr. Foster, went to Gloucester, thus: "And past-I-go Gloucester-insides being Fosterwise of Charley-once-boy insides" From here on, Gloucester exists primarily as it is incorporated in Olson / Maximus. As Maximus reappears, he merges with the city as the locus of both the local and the universal. Loss, death, and burial are still the main facts of Gloucester, but a "new" discourse transforms the city into "Gloucester-insides" and the poet into "Charley-once-boy / insides," and frees them both from the past. The language that Olson refers to as "YanaHopi" is in effect a linguistic fantasy in which, as linguist Edward Sapir says of Yana, "The noun and verb are well distinct, though there are certain features that they hold in common

CHARLES OLSON / 579 which tend to draw them nearer to each other than we feel to be possible. But there are, strictly speaking, no other parts of speech." "Yana-Hopi" also encompasses the world view that Benjamin Lee Whorf ascribes to the Hopi in "An American Indian Model of the Universe." As Whorf notes, The Hopi do not need to use terms that refer to space or time as such. Such terms in our language are recast into expressions of extension, operation and cyclic process provided they refer to the solid objective realm. They are recast into expressions of subjectivity if they refer to the subjective realm—the future, the psychic-mental, the mythical period, and the invisibly distant and conjectural generally. Thus, the Hopi language gets along perfectly without tenses for its verbs. Whorf describes the grammar of the Hopi in terms of "manifested" (or objective) and "manifesting" (or subjective), instead of in terms of static, three-dimensional space and flowing time divided into past, present, and future. The "manifested" and "manifesting" are different but inseparable realms that exist in dynamic relation to each other. Whorf describes their continuousness as follows: As the objective realm . . . stretches away from the observer . . . there comes a point where extension in detail ceases to be knowable and is lost in the vast distance, and where the subjective, creeping behind the scenes as it were, merges into the objective, so that at this inconceivable distance from the observer—from all observers—there is an all-encircling end and beginning of things where it might be said that existence, itself, swallows up the objective and subjective. The borderland of this realm is as much subjective as objective. It is the abysm of antiquity, the time and place told about in the myths....

Whorf s essay acknowledges that "the relativity viewpoint" also provides an alternative to the naive Western view of time and space. In the footnote to "John Burke," Olson tries to suggest the possibility of a new sort of language, like the Hopi or topology, where subject and object are closer than we feel they can be ("local relations are nominalized") and past, present, and future tenses are unnecessary ("metric then is mapping"). The change of emphasis at this point in the sequence is not from history to geography, or from time to space, as much as it is from the "manifested" context of historical Gloucester to a "manifesting" context of perpetual motion and change, perhaps because Gloucester's revealed history is too painful. Olson finally experiments with almost an entire poem of "alternative discourse" free of time / space and subject / object distinctions in "Letter, May 2, 1959." The difficulties of this poem result in part from the conclusions drawn in the footnote to "John Burke." Burke, "solid in refusal," is a paradigm of the substitution of intellect for sensibility that frequently plagues the sequence from here on. When Olson's intellect is negative "in refusal," as in parts of this poem and the remaining volumes, the continuity of the sequence and its lyric moments become fragmented. Although "Letter, May 2, 1959" signals a loss of momentum and returns to the fragmented style that characterized letter 13, it is nevertheless the first poem that views Gloucester in a context of perpetual change. The verbal mapping technique originally used in "On first Looking Out through Juan de la Cosa's Eyes" has a different purpose here. The effort now is to chart specific points in the ever-changing relationships of land, sea, and migratory man. It is no longer a matter of mapping the discovery of the New World. These "maps" are more like star charts than "mappemundes." They are

580 I AMERICAN WRITERS "fixes" on positions in a universe in motion more than visual (or verbal) equivalents of geographic sites or the channel's depths. Like "In Cold Hell, in Thicket," this poem finds an answer to isolation and despair in motion: step off onto the nation The sea will rush over The ice will drag boulders Commerce was changed the fathometer was invented here the present is worse give nothing now your credence start all over step off the Orontes onto land ... As in "In Cold Hell, in Thicket," the poet's own motion is imbued with cosmic reference, but this time it is the earth that is in the evolutionary process of change. "The sea will rush over" and "sentimental / drifty dirty / lazy man" will continue to migrate according to "lines of force" and changing commerce. The peripatetic exercise yields little more than conjectures about the movements of other men, the earth, and the sea in terms that almost redeem Burke's immobility. Yet, by the poem's end there is reaffirmation of these changes. Tidal rivers, the "depths of the channel," and the idea of a new start far from "this stuck-out /10 miles Europe-pointing / cape" replace the ice, the sludge, the mud, and "the rubbish / of creation" that bog down Maximus. Although principles of motion and change have been there throughout Olson's poetry, it is not until the footnote to "John Burke" and "Letter, May 2, 1959" that they are accommodated in the language and embraced in cosmic terms. By the end of The Maximus Poems, even Gloucester as a reference point becomes subject to continual change. The touchstone of "polis" is abandoned; the sea is a dead end; the original Gloucester is an anachronism. But Olson redis-

covers the inseparability of land, sea, and man, together with the belief that "metric then is mapping." Before Olson refuses "Maximus song" entirely in Maximus Poems, IV, V, VI, he pays a final tribute to Gloucester. An annual memorial procession "when not one life was lost" is the occasion of "Maximus to Gloucester, Sunday July 19," but the poem is not a memorial. For example, in the following passage Olson transforms an elegiac subject into a marriage of earth and sea: When a man's coffin is the sea the whole of creation shall come to his funeral, It turns out; the globe is below, all lapis and its blue surface golded by what happened The poem's lyric power comes from the context of change established in the footnote to "John Burke" and "Letter, May 2, 1959" more than from Gloucester's history of loss. It is a meditation, but not an elegy. It deals more with the cosmic interdependence of life and death, and land and sea, than with the specific geography and history of loss. As this antimemorial poem continues to map changes that were alluded to in the preceding poem, it effects the final, major reversal of the sequence. The original offshore stance of Maximus, the sailor's periplus, turns around and becomes a view of the sea from the shore. Instead of observing Gloucester from offshore islands, Maximus remains onshore, observing the parade to the Cut. The flower ceremony is an image of transformation: the flowers turn the character of the sea The sea jumps

CHARLES OLSON / 581 the fate of the flower The drowned men are undrowned in the eddies of the eyes of the flowers opening the sea's eyes The disaster is undone Olson's refusal to mourn is consistent with his new sense of language described in the footnote to "John Burke." Without death and loss as subjects, the poet is free to explore the realm where "night and day are one." From this point in the sequence, the flowing continuity of the objective, historical, painful world of Gloucester gradually becomes the more subjective, discontinuous area that Whorf describes as "the realm of HOPE or HOPING" in the Hopi grammar. In "April Today Main Street" the poet carefully avoids the wind from the harbor and turns his attention away from the original Gloucester. As he walks the streets of "the Gloucester / which came late enough, April, 1642, to stick," Olson/Maximus takes his first hesitant steps beyond the self-imposed, self-enclosed boundaries of the objective realm of history manifested in the city. A one-word paraphrase of Smith's poem, "The Sea Marke," . . . "Slow," Smith cried Upon you as he died, reverberates throughout the poem and even colors the question that ends the volume: . . . Biskie Island? to this hour sitting as the mainland hinge

of the 128 bridge now brings in what, to Main Street? Main Street is sheltered from the "mean easterly . . . coming up each cross street" but has no protection against inland influences. Even "the Gloucester which held" is subject to change. With this final recognition and acceptance of his growing distance from the original Gloucester, Olson ends his study of the "manifested" city and the more historic, objective aspect of the sequence. In the next two volumes the sequence eventually moves away from Gloucester and then finally back again by way of outlying Dogtown, describing a larger, more distant, "manifesting" world. As the context of the poem expands, the syntax changes too. In an extreme reduction of muthologos, words are as often topographical place holders as verbal references. And the speed and immediacy of each poem gradually begins to take precedence over the continuity of the sequence. Like Whorf's translation of the Hopi verb for "hoping," Olson's later poetry often "refers to the state of the subjective, unmanifest, vital and causal aspect of the Cosmos, and the fermenting activity toward fruition and manifestation with which it seethes." During his last ten years, Olson wrote poems that both culminated and fragmented his incremental, continuous earlier work. They may be a "truer" poetry than The Maximus Poems or early Archaeologist of Morning poems, but they are no longer poems of discovery or exploration. Olson's poetry is usually characterized by the effort to stay "open," but volumes 2 and 3 of the Maximus sequence raise several questions about the process and limits of open form. From projective verse, through a cumulative series of discoveries, to muthologos (or poetry-as-history), Olson maintains a sense of positive syn-

582 I AMERICAN tax, context, and continuity. But in Maximus Poems IV, V, VI (1968) and The Maximus Poems Volume Three (1974), he often sacrifices the continuity of the sequence and its selftranscendent moments to illustrate principles. As he implied in "for Robt Duncan, who understands what's going on ...," his purpose by then was to show that "the world / is an eternal event." In the Gravelly Hill poem the poet who had included himself so successfully in a universe of perpetual motion says "leave things alone" and, as Gravelly Hill: leave me be, I am contingent, the end of the world is the borders of my being This sentiment is comparable with Wallace Stevens' "desire to be at the end of distances" in the second poem of "The Rock" sequence. Yet, whereas Stevens wrote a late poem entitled "The Poem That Took the Place of a Mountain," Olson's later poetry often gives the impression that mountains, rocks, or hills will replace poems. Fragmentation and calcification may be in the nature of the "unmanifest" universe, but after 1959 the sequence seems increasingly disoriented. Instead of the earlier double movement of "succession and simultaneity" or alternations between manic affirmation and depressive transcendence, there is "stiffening" and a breakdown. The substitution of intellect for sensibility takes its toll. Dogma is an essential aspect of the new discourse. Both the second and third volumes of the sequence often allude to earlier work, demanding knowledge of the whole to a greater degree than the first volume did. They shed light on preceding parts of the sequence, but in turn they require a sense of Olson's overall cosmology, a systemless system that slowly evolved as he tried to create lan-

WRITERS

guage compatible with modern conceptions of the universe. Nevertheless, as these poems alternate between echoes of the "manifest" world and speculations on the "subjective" realm of myth, there are occasional triumphs like this brief mapping:

Indian

otter

by the way into the woods orient

'Lake" ponds show me (exhibit myself) Ambiguous verbal reference and the rigidly fixed spacing of each word explore a poetic ecology of self and surroundings that is finally Olson's central concern. An elegant sound pattern reinforces the relationship, with repetition of long a in "way" and "Lake" and similarity between syllabic appearances of "orient" and "exhibit" leading the reader into the poem just as the poet was led into the woods. "The way" leads to the end parenthesis of "myself)," a word in which the first syllable is as unique in the poem as the human figure in the Cape Ann landscape. Most of the other poems in IV, Vt VI and Volume Three do not "orient" the reader but have an opposite, disorienting effect. Nevertheless, the poetry-in-motion compels us by its sheer momentum. Its language, speed, and immediacy effectively communicate the principle of endless change originally established in "The Kingfishers." The ebb and flow of change are mirrored in movement from land to sea and back again, with Dogtown the place of origin where sea-father and mother-city meet. Backand-forth motion between Dogtown or Portland and Gloucester's coast provides both a topo-

CHARLES OLSON / 583 graphic and a mythic ground for the end of the sequence. In the winter 1957-1958 poems, Olson discovered how painful it was to confront history through poetry. Thereafter he seemed more determined to discover "alternative discourse." Geologic references to earth and stone throughout the 1959 and 1960 poems paved the way for later allusions to Eleusinian mysteries, Gnostic wisdom figures, and prehistoric mother goddesses. A corresponding emphasis on cyclical time also led to the use of more experimental syntax, nonreferential words, and symbols. Olson became a muthologos, a poet-historian combining myth and fact, when he no longer felt the two were separate. Rhapsodia, the "sewing" together of episodes and perceptions, became less relevant the more he assumed that all fragments automatically cohere. Humilitas, the sense of self-as-object, was subsumed in the integration of subject and object. And there was less need for attention to syllable and line as formal principles. What stayed poetically valuable was Olson's attempt to find a new use of language and a cosmology consistent with the true nature of the universe. He said in Poetry and Truth, subtitled "The Dogmatic Nature of Experience," in the 1968 Beloit Lectures: One must ask that any act of yours or my life or anyone else's, be not actually that life but its act or production. And that that is something which is essentially our language. I don't care in what form it occurs, and I'm not speaking aesthetically. And that that act be—or that production—is something that one can even specifically call something that neither realism or idealism even covers, that both bend your attention away from, the transcendent. As dogmatic and unpoetic as Olson's delayed efforts at "the transcendent" often were, they were nonetheless heroic attempts to go beyond

realism and idealism through acts of language. When, occasionally, there is a glimpse of a new direction among his late poems, even the failures seem a valuable legacy. At the end of Maximus Poems IV, V, VI, the expanding energy of the sequence reverses to implosive inclusiveness. At first the "outward push," the need to "get it all further," resulted in the growth of protective verse into the long sequence. Then alternations between symphonic and rhapsodic forms developed. Poetic mappings followed. Eventually the sequence was transformed into "alternative discourse." But when symbolism and synchronicity became myth in book 5, Olson brought the outer universe into his poems more than he projected his poems outward. He still refused to distinguish poet and poem from environment, believing all to be in one field, but after book 5 the field's forces were more centripetal than centrifugal. The consolidation that began in book 5 continued in book 6, with a difference. Book 6 depends upon more localized sounds and subjects, echoes that introduce earth as a familiar part of the human universe. Its repetitions of themes and phrases convey a passive relaxation that rarely appears earlier in the sequence. Appropriately, the opening fragment returns to the city under the protective aegis of an earth goddess: The earth with a city in her hair entangled of trees The poems that follow review previous symbols, now safe and familiar. Despite an occasionally oracular tone, discontinuities are presented without tension, as if they were connected. Hereafter the sequence is a magnetic, all-inclusive force attracting anything in its field; it no longer strives for coherence. The "Fort Point Section" returns from Dogtown to the geographic and historic fortification that was Olson's home. It seems to resolve the

584 I AMERICAN WRITERS sequence at last. Yet, despite the way these last fourteen poems tie up loose ends in phrases like "spread the iron net" and "the River Map and we're done," they are also poised for new explorations. The closing poem of Maximus Poems IV, Vt VI incorporates both a transformation and a return to origins: I set out now

in a box upon the sea As it recalls the ancient myth of the Night SeaCrossing, this fragmentary poem presents the possibility that the sequence's end, like Gravelly Hill's, is a new beginning. In Volume Three, published posthumously in 1974, several scattered poems point in a new direction at the same time that they reflect upon an earlier, more human universe. The difference between these poems, written after Olson left Gloucester to teach at the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1963, and the poems written five and ten years earlier (primarily at Black Mountain College in 1953 and at Gloucester in 1958) is that Olson's interest in "man-as-object" changed at last to include subjective man. In the more successful of these poems, intellectual rigor is often mitigated by a dramatic, centered focus. The sequence becomes less important than its parts. Although Olson did not live to oversee its publication, Volume Three frequently replaces the efforts of IV, V, VI at universality with a renewed emphasis on individual human possibility. Nevertheless, by the end of Volume Three there is an overriding sense of dejection. Lines like these abound: Nasturtium is still my flower but I am a poet who now more thinks than writes, my nose-gay

and

I live underneath the light of day My life is buried or the final poem: My wife my car my color and myself The death of Olson's second wife in a car accident in March 1964 was a turning point in his later poetry. With "Maximus to himself June 1964," the pathos, anguish, and "memorial words" of earlier poems give way to numb pain: no more, where the tidal river rushes no more the golden cloak (beloved World) no more dogs to tear anything apart—the fabric nothing like the boat (no more Vessel in the Virgin's arms no more dog-rocks for the tide to rush over not any time again for wonder the ownership solely mine Echoing the phrase "wondership stolen by ownership" from letter 2 of The Maximus Poems, the poet makes an apologia of his elegy, taking upon himself the responsibility for negating

CHARLES OLSON / 585 "wonder" as he mourns his loss. Thereafter, the poetic pace changes. Yet Olson remained faithful to such earlier concerns as "the divine" and an "actual earth of value," even though "the bright body of sex and love" was gone. It may be that Olson's poetry would have taken a different direction had his wife survived and had he himself lived longer. There is at least one more incipient "stage" of development apparent in poems like "The Festival Aspect," "Maximus of Gloucester" the sonnetlike sixtyninth and seventieth poems, and the anguished poem in praise of his father. In them he had begun to unite his inner, subjective state with his perceptions of the cosmos in local images that were neither mystical nor symbolic. When Olson gave form and direction to the ever-present tension between thought and feeling in his early projective poems and in the beginning of the sequence, every impasse presented the possibility for new discoveries. By the time subjective states had been intellectualized and diverted into a poetic cosmology, the sequence required an elaborate, extrapoetic superstructure to maintain its momentum. With the final volume and its recurring theme of personal death, the poet's original motivations of joy, fear, and anger came bubbling to the surface again. The fragmentation of Volume Three is more personal than philosophical. The poet questions his own necessities as he tries to map one more section of Dogtown in the poem dated "Tuesday April 25th 1966":

Olson did not often question his purposes; but here, having returned once more to Cape Ann, he tried to convey a relaxation never before admitted. Unfortunately, the sequence had carried the weight of too many other changes to be open to this one. Consequently, Volume Three, with some outstanding exceptions, is mainly anticlimactic. Had Olson survived its publication, he might have strengthened it, but that speculation remains purely conjectural. Olson became ill with cancer of the liver while teaching at the University of Connecticut. He died in New York City on January 10, 1970. His friend and fellow poet Robert Duncan had visited him there a week earlier and wrote:

shall I lay out those lots as well or

Call Me Ishmael New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1947. Maximus Poems 1-10. Stuttgart: Jonathan Williams, 1953. Mayan Letters, edited by Robert Creeley. Mallorca: Divers Press, 1954. Maximus Poems 11-22. Stuttgart: Jonathan Williams, 1956.

fall now in sleep on this grass and do that work for you tomorrow?

.. .tremendous change in the look of the man . . . only the minimum flesh remaining. ... It was not grievous or sorrowful; he was fiercely concerned about the stage he is in ... I see him always ahead along a way (the way or quest of what those of us who set out in 1950 with a mission in poetry were promised to). ... He was concerned to tell me he had done his work.

Selected Bibliography WORKS OF CHARLES OLSON

586 I AMERICAN WRITERS The Maximus Poems. New York: Jargon/Corinth, 1960. A Bibliography on America for Ed Dorn. Writing 1. San Francisco: Four Seasons Foundation, 1964. Human Universe and Other Essays, edited by Donald Allen. San Francisco: Averhahn Society, 1965. Proprioception. Writing 6. San Francisco: Four Seasons Foundation, 1965. Charles Olson Reading at Berkeley, transcribed by Zoe Brown. San Francisco: Coyote, 1966. Selected Writings, edited by Robert Creeley. New York: New Directions, 1966. Maximus Poems IV, V, VI. London and New York: Cape Goliard/Grossman, 1968. Pleistocene Man. A Curriculum for the Study of the Soult I. Buffalo: Institute of Further Studies, 1968. Causal Mythology. Writing 16. San Francisco: Four Seasons Foundation, 1969. Letters for Origin 1950-1956, edited by Albert Glover. London: Cape Goliard Press, 1969; New York: Grossman, 1970. The Special View of History, edited by Ann Charters. Berkeley: Oyez, 1970. (Compilation and transcription of tapes, lectures, and notes.) Archaeologist of Morning. London: Cape Goliard Press, 1970; New York: Grossman, 1971. Poetry and Truth. The Beloit Lectures and Poems, transcribed and edited by George F. Butterick. Writing 27. San Francisco: Four Seasons Foundation, 1971. Additional Prose: A Bibliography on America, Proprioception, & Other Notes & Essays, edited by George F. Butterick. Bolinas: Four Seasons Foundation, 1974. The Maximus Poems Volume Three. New York: Grossman, 1974. Charles Olson and Ezra Pound: An Encounter at St. Elizabeth's, edited by Catherine Seelye. New York: Grossman, 1975.

CRITICAL STUDIES Butterick, George F. A Guide to the Maximus Poems of Charles Olson. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978. Charters, Ann. Olson/Melville: A Study in Affinity. Berkeley: Oyez, 1968.

Christensen, Paul. Charles Olson: Call Him Ishmael. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979. Dembo, L. S. Conceptions of Reality in Modern American Poetry. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1966. Duncan, Robert. "Notes on Poetics, Regarding Olson's 'Maximus.'" the Review, no. 10: 36-42 (January 1964). Goodwin, K. L. The Influence of Ezra Pound. New York: Oxford University Press, 1966. Kenner, Hugh. A Homemade World. New York: Knopf, 1974. Paul, Sherman. Olsons Push: Origin, Black Mountain and Recent Poetry. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978. Rosenthal, M. L. The Modern Poets. New York: Oxford University Press, 1960. . The New Poets. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967. Stepanchev, Stephen. American Poetry Since 1945. New York: Harper and Row, 1965. Von Hallberg, Robert. Charles Olson: The Scholar's Art. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978. Weatherhead, A. Kingsley. The Edge of the Image: Marianne Moo^e, William Carlos Williams, and Some Other Poets. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1967.

RELATED WORKS Bradford, William. History of Plymouth Plantation 1620-1647, edited'by W. C. Ford. 2 vols. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1912. (Source for "There was a Youth whose Name was Thomas Granger.") Duberman, Martin. Black Mountain: An Exploration in Community. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1972. (A nontraditional "history" of Black Mountain College.) Herodotus. The Histories, translated by Aubrey de Selincourt. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1954. (Basis for Olson's idea of the poet as historian.) Hesiod. Theogony, translated by Richard Lattimore. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1959. (Source for several mythological poems in IV, V, VI and Volume Three.) Kramer, Samuel Noah, ed. Mythologies of the Ancient World. New York: Doubleday, 1961. (Useful guide to mythological allusions.)

CHARLES OLSON / 587 Marks, Robert W. The New Mathematics Dictionary and Handbook. New York: Bantam Books, 1964. (Useful guide to mathematical allusions.) Miller, Perry, ed. The American Puritans, Their Prose and Poetry. Garden City, N. Y.: Anchor, 1956. (Some precedents for Olson's poems on the founding of Gloucester.) Neumann, Erich. The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype, translated by Ralph Manheim. Princeton: Bollingen, 1972. (Essential source of Maximus IV, V, VI.) Prescott, William H. Mexico, and the Life of the Conqueror Fernando Cortes. 2 vols. New York: Peter Fenelon Collier and Son, 1898. (Source for "The Kingfishers.") Quinn, Sister M. Bernetta, The Metamorphic Tradition in Modern Poetry. New York: Gordian Press, 1966. (Analyzes the metamorphic perspectives in modern poetic sequences.) Wagner, Linda W. The Poems of William Carlos Williams: A Critical Study. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1964. (Seminal study of the development of a poetic sequence.) Whitaker, Thomas R. William Carlos Williams. New York: Twayne, 1968. (Analyzes Williams' creative process.) Whitehead, Alfred North. An Anthology, edited by F. C. Northrop and Mason W. Gross. New York: Macmillan, 1961. (Sampling of ideas influential in Olson's later work.)

Whorf, Benjamin Lee. Language, Thought & Reality. Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1956. (Crucial in footnote to "John Burke" and thereafter.) Williams, William Carlos. In the American Grain. New York: New Directions, 1956. (Source for "The Kingfishers.") . Paterson. New York: New Directions, 1963. (Major contemporary American poetic sequence.)

SPECIAL ISSUES OF MAGAZINES boundary 2, 2, nos. 1 and 2 (Fall 1973/Winter 1974). (Contains articles by Charles Altieri, Maxine Apsel, Matthew Corrigan, Cory Greenspan, Daniel Hise, John Seoggan, Catherine Stimpson.) Massachusetts Review, 12, no. 1 (Winter 1970). (Contains "A Gathering for Charles Olson," with contributions by William Aiken, John Finch, M. L. Rosenthal.) OLSON: The Journal of the Charles Olson Archives, nos. 1-10 (1974-1978). (Contains previously unpublished poems and prose, notes, transcriptions, and notes on lectures by Olson, as well as a list of Olson's reading compiled by George Butterick.)

—MAXINE OLlAN APSEL

Francis Parkman 1823-1893

p

JL RANCIS PARKMAN was born in Boston on September 16, 1823, when the western frontier stretched down the Mississippi River and twothirds of the nation was yet unbounded and unsettled. Seventy years later, on his birthday, almost two months before his death on November 8, the last major land rush took place in the Indian territory of Oklahoma, and all but four of the contiguous states had joined the Union. To many events of the American nineteenth century, Parkman was an unwilling witness: the displacement of the Indians, the slaughter of the buffalo, the Civil War, and the gradual retreat and disappearance of a line of demarcation between civilization and savagery. Each was in its way unwelcome testimony to the national commitment to physical expansion and material growth. Parkman belonged to a different age, one that cherished the values of culture as interpreted in Boston. At the same time, quite unlike his fellow Brahmins, he was devoted to the wilderness and all it signified. In the summer of 1846, when travel beyond the Mississippi was still uncommon, he rode out on the Oregon Trail in search of the primitive romance of the wild; but his true frontier lay among the Adirondacks, along the Penobscot and St. Lawrence rivers, and on the shores of the Great Lakes, a frontier that had closed sixty years before his birth.

Parkman inherited a rich legacy of social and cultural traditions, properly centered on Beacon Hill in the "three-hilled city of the Puritans." Like many of the patrician clans of Boston, his family had achieved a graceful harmony of solid commercial prosperity and intellectual distinction. On the paternal side, his great-grandfather, Ebenezer Parkman, had graduated from Harvard in 1721 and served for most of his life as the minister in Westboro, Massachusetts. Parkman's grandfather, Samuel Parkman, built a fortune in the China trade, that made possible much of his grandson's scholarship. Through his mother's family, Parkman was allied to one of Boston's most eminent families, the line descended from the great Puritan, John Cotton (whom he later accused of writing "longwinded sermons"). The clerical tradition so strong on both sides of his family was carried on by his father, the Reverend Francis Parkman, pastor of the New North Church (which another Parkman had helped to found). He had studied with William Ellery Channing, the guiding spirit of American Unitarianism, played an active role at Harvard as his forefathers had, and was remembered by Richard Henry Dana, Jr., as a "strange, minute, whymsical man, with a good deal of quiet wit," a "thin piping voice," and a drawl. In appearance and temperament Francis, Jr., resembled his

559

590 I AMERICAN mother, a reserved woman from whom he drew his strong but carefully hidden emotions. "Causes antedating my birth," Parkman wrote later in life, "gave me constitutional liabilities to which I largely ascribe the mischief that ensued." His father suffered a nervous collapse in 1845, and throughout his life seems to have manifested an extreme excitability. Parkman inherited his father's nervous constitution. His indifferent health soon gave way under the tremendous pressures to which he subjected his system, and by the age of twenty-four he was an invalid, incapacitated by mental pain of a neurotic character that has never been adequately diagnosed. One great benefit that shaped the rest of his life derived from his poor health as a child: at the age of eight, his parents sent him to live with his maternal grandfather, Nathaniel Hall, outside Medford, Massachusetts, where he had retired from business. Though his stay did not have the intended effect on his physical condition—he remained, as he said, "sensitive and restless, rarely ill, but never robust"—its consequences for his mental development were enormous. The school he attended was nearly a mile distant in Medford, but the Middlesex Fells lay just across the boundary of Nathaniel Hall's land. An average student at the time, Parkman received his real childhood education in the woods. Barren of any sign of humanity, the Middlesex Fells offered wildlife and a sense of primitive remoteness in which he could create the illusion of exploring a pristine land. After four years of "collecting eggs, insects, and reptiles, trapping squirrels and woodchucks, and making persistent though rarely fortunate attempts to kill birds with arrows," his blissful exile came to an end and he returned to Boston permanently. The natural literary consequence of Parkman's young life in the woods was a taste for the works of James Fenimore Cooper and Sir Walter Scott. Their novels and the realization

WRITERS

that he would never be healthy enough to lead a fully active life turned his interests toward literature. In the fall of 1840, after three or four years of preparatory schooling during which he was distinguished for his efforts in "the rhetorical department," he entered Harvard, as had nearly all the men in his family before him. His career there was unusual, for he determined during his sophomore year to write the history of the "Old French War," or, as he more aptly called it, "the history of the forest." This goal endured throughout his life, and though the shape of his project changed gradually over the years, his original enthusiasm for his subject is as visible in the last of his works as in the first. Even more impressive than the firmness of his plan is the maturity with which Parkman sought the means to fulfill it. With characteristic foresight and energy, he took from Harvard exactly what he needed, carefully balancing the requirements of the college with his own. The history of the forest was to be based on a combination of scholarly research exacting to a degree not common in the early nineteenth century, thorough experience of forest life, and personal inspection of historical sites scattered across the eastern United States and Canada. Fortunately, Parkman found at Harvard one of the few men in the country who could teach him about historical writing as a profession: Jared Sparks, who held the recently created McLean professorship of ancient and modern history, the first professorship of history in America. He offered the young undergraduate valuable bibliographical aid; in return Parkman dedicated his first historical work, The Conspiracy ofPontiac, to Sparks. Writing to his former professor in 1851, he even proposed an "elaborate life of La Salle, your name as well as my own to appear on the title page." Though he was a popular and social undergraduate, Parkman lived alone after his freshman year in order to accommodate the intensity

FRANCIS PARKMAN / 591 of his preparatory reading. At the same time he began to convert himself into a consummate woodsman. He worked out in the new Harvard gymnasium, hired a former circus rider to refine his horseback skills, and, with "Injuns on the brain," roamed the local marshes endlessly, rifle in hand, sometimes venturing over to Medford and the woods of his childhood. From the letters of this period a brief self-portrait of a hunter, poised man of leisure, and penitential rogue emerges: "One great amusement of mine has been to sit in a grove of pine or hemlock, a cigar in my mouth, and rifle across my knee, and take off the heads of the chick-a-dees with the bullet. But I have come to the conclusion that the sport is too barbarous." Coupled with his extensive extracurricular reading in history, Parkman's physical regimen proved too strenuous; it gave him the skills of a backwoodsman but broke his frail health. Afire "to paint the forest and its tenants in true and vivid colors" and "to realize a certain ideal of manhood, a little mediaeval, but nevertheless good," he applied "heroic remedies" to his sensitive system. The result was severe heart strain and nervous fatigue in his junior year; to recover his health, he left Harvard and sailed for Europe in November 1843. Although he had often expressed his resentment toward American cultural dependence on Europe, Parkman found many things abroad suited to his taste, particularly the lack of onrushing transformation and self-conscious national progress. "Here in this old world," he wrote in his journal, "I seem, thank heaven, to be carried about half a century backwards in time." He climbed Vesuvius with Theodore Parker, entered a Passionist monastery in order to understand more fully the psychological workings of Roman Catholicism (he read Cooper's The Pioneers instead of devotional literature), visited a reprobate uncle in Paris, saw Charles Dickens' London (where he immedi-

ately visited George Catlin's gallery of portraits of American Indians), and toured Scotland, discovering that "Sir Walter Scott is everywhere." In truth, he did not leave America far behind. Parkman's European tour was merely the longest of numerous excursions that had punctuated his years at Harvard. Each summer vacation the young historian packed his rifle, notebook, and other essentials, recruited a usually hesitant companion, and headed for the wilderness. Traveling to his favorite White Mountains and Maine in 1841, Lake George, Lake Champlain, and the Green Mountains in 1842, Montreal and Quebec in 1843, and Concord and the Berkshires in 1844, he crisscrossed New England in search of forest hardships and historical lore. Parkman's motto for these summer trips, which made no small contribution to his ill health, might have been taken from an entry written among the White Mountains in 1841: "There was a path, but I did not avail myself of it." His friends Dan Slade and Henry White complained bitterly of this propensity in him, for together they learned the stumbling, blind, pathless nature of exploration in the woods. The journals of these trips (and later rewritings like "Exploring the Magalloway" in Harper's magazine for November 1864) vividly record confusion in the forest, repeated drenchings, cold nights, and Parkman's ceaseless attempts to lead his friends farther from the path and the "dwellings of men." A clear literary purpose is evident even in the earliest of Parkman's backwoods notebooks. He underwent the tortures of breaking trail in order to write from experience about exploration and forest warfare, and he learned to narrate the trials of French and English soldiers by recounting his own. At first, details of landscape, incident, and personality are sometimes lost in the folds of his prose, but it is remarkable how quickly he attained his true strength as a writer.

592 / AMERICAN WRITERS All his life Parkman was a much better narrative than descriptive artist. The actions of men had for him a cleanness and intent that his prose could imitate; when he turned to the face of nature in hisjearly writings, he frequently became embroiled in his own emotions and in descriptions recollected from romantic literature. Reading his first journal, written at seventeen, one can envision him weighing his phrases as he stared out over the White Mountains in 1841: On each side, thousands of feet below, stretched a wide valley, girt with an amphitheatre of mountains rising peak after peak like the black waves of the sea, the clouds now sinking over their summits, now rising and breaking, disclosing yet more distant ranges, and then settling thick and heavy so that nothing was visible but the savage rocks and avalanche slides of the neighboring mountains looming dimly through the mist. Mannered though this is, it reveals the core of a descriptive style that Parkman would simplify and strengthen as he grew older. Parkman spent 1845 and 1846 fulfilling his father's wish that he enter a regular profession by studying law at Harvard; he took the LL.B. in 1846. There were no illusions about his true purpose, though: he continued his historical reading and published in the Knickerbocker magazine prose sketches based on historical fact and his own nearly calamitous experiences in the White Mountains. Most important, Parkman also began preparations for his first major historical project by touring the Old Northwest Territory in search of information and scenic background relating to the conspiracy of Pontiac, whose confederacy of Indian tribes attempted to repel the English from the frontier after 1763. Only one preparatory exercise remained: to attain a deeper understanding of the Indian character. "I have also read, almost all the works on the Indians," he wrote in a letter of 1843, "and have arrived

at least to one certain result—that their character will always remain more or less of a mystery to one who does not add practical observation to his closest studies." Once again strenuous labor had overstrained Parkman's faculties, this time affecting his eyes, and vacation seemed in order. On April 1,1846, he left New York for St. Louis, there to meet his cousin Quincy Shaw (who had proposed the trip) and set off on what he glibly called "a tour of curiosity and amusement to the Rocky Mountains," the most important "summer's journey out of bounds" in his life. In 1846, from St. Louis to San Francisco, the whole West was in ferment. That year more than 2,500 emigrants, seeds of a new empire, rolled alongside the Platte River, crossed the Rockies, Sierras, and Cascades, and settled in Oregon and California. An entire spiritual tribe was on the march, for the Mormons, goaded by persecution, had fled from Nauvoo, Illinois, toward the basin of the Great Salt Lake. Following Lansford Hastings' Emigrants9 Guide to Oregon and California, the Donner party probed a new cutoff through the Wasatch Mountains, missed the season for crossing the Sierras, and found themselves buried in snow just short of the Central Valley. Southward, down the Santa Fe Trail, rolled a steady stream of traders' wagons and, behind them, Colonel Stephen Kearny and his troops, headed for Mexico and the conflict that would bring California into the Union and Zachary Taylor into the White House. Out of this migration a prodigious literature grew, and Parkman's The Oregon Trail is an acknowledged classic of its genre. At Westport, Missouri, Parkman found emigrant trains waiting to "jump off," a ragged crowd of Indians and vagabonds, and a few men capable of assisting him in his grand design. Among the latter were Pierre Chouteau, who could describe Pontiac from life, and Henry

FRANCIS PARKMAN / 593 Chatillon, Parkman's guide and hunter, in whom he saw signs of "that race of restless and intrepid pioneers whose axes and rifles have opened a path from the Alleghenies to the western prairies." Parkman came to the West as a sportsman and ethnologist, not to witness the great movement of a people but to observe the race that would inevitably be destroyed by it. A Federalist and a Brahmin, he was partially cut off from the emigrants by his social background and wealth; he shared their miseries and met most of the notable parties on the trail, but failed to understand the spirit that moved them: "I have often perplexed myself to divine the various motives that give impulse to this migration; but whatever they may be, whether an insane hope of a better condition in life, or a desire of shaking off restraints of law and society, or mere restlessness, certain it is that multitudes bitterly repent the journey, and, after they have reached the land of promise, are happy enough to escape from it." The emigrants understood him no better. A month after leaving Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where he met Colonel Stephen Kearny, Parkman and his small band, including Chatillon and the Canadian muleteer Deslauriers, rode into Fort Laramie, Wyoming. The opening stages of the journey did not savor of pure adventure. Joining a rather ridiculous set of English sportsmen, the travelers were lost within hours of their departure. By the time they reached the main trail near the Big Blue River, Parkman had become thoroughly disgusted with the Englishmen, who welcomed the prospect of traveling in company with a wagon train. After days of chasing stray stock and enduring the slow progress of heavily laden wagons on muddy trails, the small party from Boston took "French leave" of the Englishmen and emigrants in order to travel at their own pace. They soon encountered a band of Oglala Sioux Indians whose chief was Old Smoke, a

friend of Henry Chatillon. There, on the western plains, Parkman made his first true contact with the race he had dreamed about for years and had met only in a degenerate state in the Old Northwest and New England. Warriors, women, and children swarmed like bees; hundreds of dogs, of all sizes and colors, ran restlessly about; and, close at hand, the wide shallow stream was alive with boys, girls, and young squaws, splashing, screaming, and laughing in the water. At the same time a long train of emigrants with their heavy wagons was crossing the creek, and dragging on in slow procession by the encampment of the people whom they and their descendants, in the space of a century, are to sweep from the face of the earth. Among Old Smoke's people Parkman was offered an Indian bride. Because of the dysentery and eye fatigue that plagued Parkman throughout his trip, the landscape of what is now Nebraska and Wyoming took on a darker meaning, but its charm was stronger than any other he had seen. I used to lie languid and dreamy before our tent, musing on the past and the future, and when most overcome with lassitude, my eyes turned always towards the distant Black Hills. There is a spirit of energy in mountains, and they impart it to all who approach them. At that time I did not know how many dark superstitions and gloomy legends are associated with the Black Hills in the minds of the Indians, but I felt an eager desire to penetrate their hidden recesses, and explore the chasms and precipices, black torrents and silent forests, that I fancied were concealed there. For Parkman the wilderness was always the final proving ground of a man; it was so for Robert Cavelier de La Salle and it would be so for the young Brahmin. He was occasionally foolhardy, but displayed remarkable stamina

594 I AMERICAN and courage during the middle portion of his western trip. After waiting nearly a month for a rendezvous with the Indians, he set out through extremely dangerous country, accompanied only by a newly hired Canadian named Raymond, in search of the Oglala, hoping to join them as they moved toward a tribal meeting that he assumed would be the final preliminary to war with the Snakes. Coming through a gap near the Medicine Bow range in Wyoming after a painful ride, Parkman could see the plains through which Laramie Creek flows and, spread out there, "the tall lodges of the Ogillallah. Never did the heart of wanderer more gladden at the sight of home than did mine at the sight of that Indian camp." From July 15 until August 2, 1846, he followed this village, living in the lodge of its principal chief, Kongra Tonga, or Big Crow. Without exaggeration, those eighteen days formed the central episode of Parkman's life, an oasis of savagery to which he mentally returned when he wished to escape the nineteenth century, and to which he owed the peculiar force and insight of much of his later writing. Restrained only by the course of his illness, Parkman entered without hesitation into the life of the village: he provided a feast of "dog, tea, and bread"; joined the buffalo hunters in the kill and in devouring the raw liver of their prey; earned great esteem for his "fire-medicine" by making fireworks from the pages of John C. Fremont's Expedition; and provoked his own social conscience by informing the Indians, in their own rhetoric, that where he came from, "The squaws were far more beautiful than any they had ever seen, and all the men were brave warriors." The tribe moved from the plains, where it performed several "surrounds" to obtain buffalo meat and hides, up into the Black Hills (really a part of the Laramie Mountains), where they gathered lodgepoles in the forest. A war party was discussed by a brave named

WRITERS

White Shield, but to Parkman's disgust it was called off because of White Shield's "inflammation of the throat." (Accounting for his desire to see the Indians at war, Parkman sagely observed, "No man is a philanthropist on the prairie.") On the eve of his departure, he rode up above camp for a final look about him before returning to Fort Laramie. In spite of his disillusionment with the Indians, his disgust at their unromantic nature, Parkman felt a strong regret at what he knew must be a final parting from a disappearing race. Evening approached at last; the crests of the mountains were still bright in sunshine, while our deep glen was completely shadowed. I left the camp, and climbed a neighboring hill. The sun was still glaring through the stiff pines on the ridge of the western mountain. In a moment he was gone, and, as the landscape darkened, I turned again towards the village. As I descended, the howling of wolves and the barking of foxes came up out of the dim woods from far and near. The camp was glowing with a multitude of fires, and alive with dusky naked figures, whose tall shadows flitted, weird and ghost-like, among the surrounding crags. Parkman rejoined Shaw and Chatillon, and the men traveled down to Bent's Fort, Colorado, and caught the northern section of the Santa Fe Trail, where they met scattered soldiers from the military units that had passed up and down it during the summer. By the middle of September they had ridden onto "the prairies of the poet and novelist," amazed at their fertile beauty. On September 26, after having traversed the eastern half of the Oregon Trail and the northern half of the Santa Fe, they reentered Westport, savages in appearance. After a shave and change of clothes, the two cousins bid farewell to the man of whom Parkman said, "I have never, in the city or in the wilderness, met

FRANCIS PARKMAN / 595 a better man than my truehearted friend, Henry Chatillon." The Oregon Trail was written under the worst of circumstances. Back in Boston, Parkman's dysentery cleared up; but with the need for absolute mastery of his ills removed, the long-delayed collapse soon followed. In a thirdperson autobiographical letter written in 1868, he later described his state: "To the maladies of the prairie succeeded a suite of exhausting disorders, so reducing him that circulation at the extremities ceased, the light of the sun became insupportable, and a wild whirl possessed his brain.... All collapsed, in short, but the tenacious strength of muscles hardened by long activity." Along with arthritis, which crippled him in 1851, this was the "enemy" he would battle for the rest of his life. As always, he compensated as best he could, and learned to write by dictation. Installments of The Oregon Trail began to appear in the Knickerbocker magazine in February 1847, and in 1849 it was published in book form. The Oregon Trail has been a consistent favorite of Western literature ever since its publication. Historians have lamented that it does not provide an adequate analysis of the emigration of 1846—Bernard DeVoto's "year of decision"—and critical readers, often writing with tense social piety, have complained again and again that Parkman misunderstood the West, the Indians, the pioneers, that he was in fact unfitted for his experience by the very nature of his Brahmin background. The Oregon Trail is autobiography, a trial of the spirit judged not in terms of inwardness but in the language of the wilderness, of external warfare, of survival. One need not expect from Parkman the self-analytical suppleness of Henry Adams or the metaphysical voyaging of Herman Melville. His autobiographical impulses seem crude in comparison, but they are nonetheless vital. History and autobiography are closely linked

in Parkman's mind: each measures conflict. The Oregon Trail assesses the degree of his adaptation to the wilderness and its native inhabitants, and his conflict with an ideal of heroism threatened by assault from within. For Parkman history and autobiography record man's efforts to prevail against a harsh external world; his enduring metaphor for the conditions of reality against which all men struggle is the wilderness. His insistence on evaluating himself and his historical heroes against a primitive and alien terrain accounts for the inevitable bleeding of autobiographical impulses into his historical works (as in La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West), and it explains the utter failure of his autobiographical work of fiction, Vassall Morton, in which the hero's final triumph is a foregone conclusion. The West, the mountains, the village of Kongra Tonga are the places where Parkman met his values face to face. That he was nearly delirious with illness much of the time is not merely an incidental matter of fact, but a metaphorical validation of the experience through which he was passing. It was his equivalent of the initiatory fasts and dream visions undergone by Indian boys on the verge of manhood, a dark unveiling of impossible romance and inevitable disillusionment. The Oregon Trail begins and ends exactly where it should, on the borders of civilization—and, for Parkman, on the edge of achievement. While The Oregon Trail appeared at intervals (its publication caused even his father to understand the intensity of his purpose) Parkman began mentally to recast the notes, manuscripts, and books he had gathered over the past five years in preparation for writing The Conspiracy of Pontiac. Like his fellow historian W. H. Prescott, he learned to use a ruled grid for writing. His sisters, cousins, and eventually his wife, Catherine Scollay Bigelow, whom he married on May 13, 1850, did his reading for

596 I AMERICAN WRITERS him. He felt that the awkward process of composing in his head, dictating, and having his words read back to him strengthened his work. The effort of writing also buoyed Parkman's spirits. "His health improved under the process," he later wrote, "and the remainder of the volume—in other words, nearly the whole of it—was composed in Boston, while pacing in the twilight of a large garret." Beginning with the episode he knew best, the siege of Detroit, he discovered that his book progressed more quickly than he had anticipated. The opening chapters of Pontiac, those that describe the Indians and the preliminary history of the struggle between New France and New England, were written last. Published in 1851, The Conspiracy of Pontiac is at once prologue and epilogue to Parkman's vast history, France and England in North America. The seven volumes that appeared between 1865 and 1892 narrate the exploration and settlement of New France, or Canada, between the first voyage of John Cabot in 1497 and the final negotiations in 1763 that followed the collapse of Canada. Pontiac straddles these volumes; it begins with an account of the eastern Indian nations, the race for whom "the black and withering future must have stood revealed in all its desolation," and closes with their defeat and the death of Pontiac. As a result it is a curiously divided work. Before beginning his tale of the multitribal onslaught led by the Ottawa war chief Pontiac in a desperate attempt to ward off English possession of the territory they had won from the French by the Treaty of Paris, Parkman recapitulates the development of New France and New England and the history of their wilderness wars. In three chapters he surveys the terrain it would later take him seven volumes to explore in detail. The heroes of his full-scale history appear here in miniature: the Jesuit martyrs Jean de Brebeuf, Gabriel Lalemant, and Isaac Jogues;

the explorer La Salle, Louis Frontenac, George Washington, and Major Robert Rogers; and the two doomed warriors Louis de Montcalm and James Wolfe. Chronologically, the main section of The Conspiracy of Pontiac comes last in Parkman's works, for the story it tells about the years 1763-1769 follows the fall of New France, the event that closes Montcalm and Wolfe. As Parkman had originally conceived the history of the forest, it had more affinities with the novels of Cooper or Scott than with traditional historical literature. He did not envision the full scope of his later work until after Pontiac was well under way; and in a certain sense the historicity of this book was incidental to its original design. Parkman wrote in the preface: The history of that epoch, crowded as it is with scenes of tragic interest, with marvels of suffering and vicissitude, of heroism and endurance, has been, as yet, unwritten, buried in the archives of governments, or among the obscurer records of private adventure. To rescue it from oblivion is the object of the following work. It aims to portray the American forest and the American Indian at the period when both received their final doom. In 1854, when his historical goals had become more defined, he confided to Charles Scribner that Pontiac "was designed as a tableau of forest life and Indian character. The subject was chosen with this view, and not on account of any peculiar historic importance attaching to it. Great pains were however taken to secure fullness and accuracy of historic detail." One cannot escape the conclusion that Parkman's depiction of the Indians is harsh and unsympathetic. He was praised for rejecting the romantic notion of the "noble savage," but the frequent severity of his comments on the Indians did not pass unnoticed. Herman Melville attacked Parkman's uncharitable characterization of the Sioux in his review of The Oregon

FRANCIS PARKMAN / 597 Trail (published in Literary World, 1849) and Theodore Parker faulted Pontiac for the same offense in a letter to Parkman of December 22, 1851. Parker, though, also observed the ambivalence of Parkman's feelings about the Indians: "You evidently have a fondness for the Indians—not a romantic fondness, but one that has been tempered by the sight of the fact." The structure of Pontiac fully reflects this ambivalence. The opening chapter presents in summary form Parkman's "objective" conclusions about Indian society and psychology; with extensive revisions and a somewhat broader range of subject it appeared in the North American Review for July 1865 and July 1866 and as the introduction to The Jesuits in North America (1867), the second volume of his series. Parkman casts his thoughts in neutral prose appropriate to the ethnological task he sets himself. "Among all savages," he reasons, "the powers of perception preponderate over those of reason and analysis; but this is more especially the case with the Indian." Within the narrative of his histories, though, the Indians appear in a different guise. They become romantic figures—not Fenimore Cooper's noble savages to be sure, but actors in a primitive romance, the kind closest to Parkman's heart. Describing life in an Indian village, he adapts his own experiences; and his prose reflects emotional qualities that lie beneath the surface, qualities that have nothing to do with ethnology or objectivity: Night has now closed in; and the rough clearing is illumined by the blaze of fires and burning pine-knots, casting their deep red glare upon the dusky boughs of the surrounding forest, and upon the wild multitude who, fluttering with feathers and bedaubed with paint, have gathered for the celebration of the war-dance. Quite simply, the Indians are more mysteriously evocative (an appropriate literary virtue

in a tale "more worthy the pen of the dramatist than that of the historian") when perceived as "weird and ghost-like figures" than when brought into a historical foreground of detached analysis. To Parkman, Pontiac and his confederates seemed to lend an additional romance to the forest, for Pontiac was the hero of a distant drama of high proportions: "His faults were the faults of his race; and they cannot eclipse his nobler qualities." The remission from pain brought by the writing of Pontiac came to an end shortly after its publication in 1851. Severe arthritis confined Parkman to a wheelchair or to walking with canes; and his mental "enemy" returned in full force in 1853. During the next few years writing was usually prohibited by his doctors, so, with the same enthusiasm he brought to his historical research, he turned for relief to the culture of roses. (This hobby culminated in The Book of Roses [1866], which for years remained one of the standard books on the subject.) In his few painfree moments Parkman also worked on a minor project, a loosely autobiographical novel that was published in 1856. Vassall Morton was the only book that Parkman repudiated in later life. The plot concerns the trials that young Vassall Morton, a duplicate of Parkman with the added gift of strong health, undergoes in his effort to win Miss Edith Leslie and to defeat his archenemy, an anemic and diabolical villain. Like Parkman, Morton is interested in history and ethnology, and he spends fully as much time in the White Mountains persuading his hesitant friends of the virtues of outdoor life as Parkman did. A major section of the book concerns his imprisonment in Europe (engineered, of course, by his enemy) and his eventual escape. A patchwork of autobiographical fragments drawn from his journals, the only merit of Vassall Morton is an infrequent glimpse of Parkman's reactions to Boston society. The emotional situations are so vapid, the narrative line

598 I AMERICAN so abruptly maneuvered, that it is hard to perceive any resemblance between this work and Parkman's historical writings. Wilbur Schramm has stated that Vassall Morton "expresses the personal philosophy which its author rigidly excluded from his other published work." But this personal philosophy rides like flotsam on the surface of the novel; it has not been given the artistically valid shape that distinguishes Parkman's historical works. Vassall Morton is completely static, an autobiographical parable of Parkman's illness, which was told more truthfully and with far greater power in The Oregon Trail and La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West. In spite of his unrelenting physical torment and its mental reflection, which he described as "an iron band, secured around the head and contracting with an extreme force," Parkman enjoyed a domestic happiness during the mid18 50's that did much to assuage the evils of his condition. His wife bore him a son, Francis, and two daughters, Grace and Katherine. After the death of Parkman's father in 1852, the family divided the year between Boston and a summer home in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, which Parkman called his "box in the suburbs." There, when he could, he rowed and fished on Jamaica Pond, tended his proliferating gardens and greenhouses, and kept the cottage filled with flowers. Preparations for the work that would fill the rest of his life had begun as soon as Pontiac was sent to the publisher, and by the autumn of 1856 Parkman was well enough to make a brief excursion to Quebec and Montreal. The peaceful domestic interlude of these years was soon ruptured, though; in 1856 he discovered that Benjamin Perley Poore, whom he had employed as a copyist for almost seven years, had relied on his blindness to defraud him by charging him for the copying of useless manuscripts. A far more serious crisis occurred when his son

WRITERS

died of scarlet fever in 1857; and when his wife died the following year, the tragedy was complete. His health collapsed entirely. Leaving his daughters in the care of his sister-in-law, he went to Paris to seek the treatment of specialists. It seems to have taken nothing less than the Civil War to pull Parkman out of this slump. For a man as obsessed with action as he was, it was a bitter blow to be forcibly withdrawn by illness, in the prime of his life, from a struggle in which friends and kinsmen were dying. After visiting the Forty-Fourth Massachusetts Infantry in September 1862, he wrote to his most trusted correspondent, Mary Dwight Parkman: "When I left them, I was sick of life." In his fine biography of Parkman, Mason Wade observed that the "Civil War brought out the best qualities of the Brahmin type; the emergency and the principles at stake enabled them to forget their fastidiousness and play public roles." With his pen Parkman did what little he could: between 1861 and 1864 he wrote eleven letters to the Boston Daily Advertiser on various aspects of the war. With three articles written between 1878 and 1880 on the "Woman Question" and the issue of universal suffrage, they represent the core of his political philosophy. Parkman's Civil War letters are primarily the rhetorically turgid cries of a class forcibly removed by Populist politics—the triumph of Jacksonian democracy—from the leading role it had occupied during the early years of the republic. No word occurs in these letters so often as "culture." The idea of culture takes many analogical forms in Parkman's political, intellectual, and botanical works; it is an all-encompassing theory for him, perhaps most simply expressed in The Book of Roses, completed just after the war: "That [culture] which is founded in the laws of Nature, and aims at a universal development, produces for its results not only increased beauty, but increased symmetry,

FRANCIS PARKMAN / 599 strength, and vitality." In La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West he stated the corollary: "The culture that enervates instead of strengthening is always a false or partial one." This was the principle that led Parkman to the woods from Harvard, a belief in the balance of mind and body acquired through discipline and conflict. In a letter to the Daily Advertiser dated September 4, 1861, he developed the political form of this idea and applied it to the Union: There is close analogy between the life of nations and of individuals. Conflict and endurance are necessary to both, and without them both become emasculate.... A too exclusive pursuit of material success has notoriously cramped and vitiated our growth. In the absence of a high interest or ruling idea, a superficial though widespread culture has found expression and aliment in a popular literature commonly frivolous and often corrupt. In the absence of any exigency to urge or any great reward to tempt it, the best character and culture of the nation has remained for the most part in privacy, while a scum of reckless politicians has choked all the avenues of power. Though Parkman believed that "the vigorous life of the nation springs from the deep rich soil at the bottom of society" (as he wrote in his extremely important review of Cooper's works in 1852), he also felt that only the leadership of a cultured oligarchy could draw forth from that soil the fruit it was capable of bearing: "No expansion of territory, no accumulation of wealth, no growth of population, can compensate for the decline of individual greatness." Parkman perceived the Civil War as a struggle for ascendancy between two forms of society: the North, in which "our material growth so greatly exceeds our other growth that the body politic suffers from diseases of repletion," and the South, the culture of which "has long been the heart and focus of its political life,

while that of the North has been rather an excrescence upon the vital system than a part of it." The Civil War came down to this: "A head full of fire, a body ill-jointed, starved, attenuated, is matched against a muscular colossus, a Titan in energy and force—full of blood, full of courage, prompt for fight, and confident of victory. Strong head and weak body [the South] against strong body and weak head [the North]; oligarchy against democracy." Though Parkman despised the South for its "treacherous" secession, his were the principles of oligarchy and culture, the active role of the most cultured men in the country, versus uncultured democracy and mediocrity, the triumph of the marketplace, and "the reign of shopkeepers." The true reward of Parkman's early training and the preliminary survey of his subject in Pontiac was the engendering of a coherent vision of an entire historical period, stretching from the first landfall of the French in the New World to their irrevocable cession of New France to the English in 1763. In a time of grandiose historical projects, when history by its very nature seemed to imply monumental scope and, in Henry Adams' phrase, "nothing but mass tells," Parkman's theme was one of the best. Recalling his first cursory glance at The Conspiracy of Pontiac, the philosopher and historian John Fiske remarked on his own typical ignorance of its subject: "Had that conspiracy been an event in Merovingian Gaul or in Borgia's Italy, I should have felt a twinge of conscience at not knowing about it; but the deeds of feathered and painted red men on the Great Lakes and the Alleghenies, only a century old, seemed remote and trivial." The historical epoch closed by Pontiac's conspiracy soon seemed neither remote nor trivial. Over a span of twenty-seven years, between the appearance of Pioneers of France in the New

600 I AMERICAN WRITERS World in 1865 and A Half-Century of Conflict in 1892, Parkman brought before an increasingly appreciative public his vivid interpretation of a largely forgotten but overwhelmingly significant period in American history. He gave shape to an era and, as Frederick Jackson Turner observed, even more remarkably turned the "raw product" of unwritten history into a "great work of art." When Pioneers of France in the New World was published in 1865, Parkman had already begun writing the next two volumes of his history and had collected many of the documents and manuscripts for still later volumes. His theme had acquired substance, and in the introduction to Pioneers he brought it forth in conceptual form. This introduction is not only a record of intent but also an index to his historical motivations. "The subject," Parkman wrote, "to which the proposed series will be devoted is that of Trance in the New World,'— the attempt of Feudalism, Monarchy, and Rome to master a continent where, at this hour, half a million of bayonets are vindicating the ascendancy of a regulated freedom." Parkman's conception of the dynamic principle behind the battle for North America is a simple one, and one we have seen before: New France was all head. Under king, noble, and Jesuit, the lank, lean body would not thrive. Even commerce wore the sword, decked itself with badges of nobility, aspired to forest seigniories and hordes of savage retainers. Along the borders of the sea an adverse power was strengthening and widening, with slow but steadfast growth, full of blood and muscle,—a body without a head. Each had its strength, each its weakness, each its own modes of vigorous life: but the one was fruitful, the other barren; the one instinct with hope, the other darkening with shadows of despair. Here again, in Parkman's analysis, are the principles at stake in the Civil War. His persis-

tent metaphor of conflict between head and body is remarkable because, in his scheme of things, the conflict cannot be resolved satisfactorily. To develop the obvious analogy, the implication of "culture" in Parkman's sense is compromise, a reconciliation of competing claims. In roses one can graft together beauty and strength; between nations, though, the reconciliation of the metaphorical antagonism between head (the absolutism of New France) and body (New England's potential democracy) is harder still, for it results in war and the eventual triumph of one principle over another. Parkman's desire for balance between autocracy and democracy, between head and body, is thwarted by the inevitable tendency of a political system to drift toward one extreme or the other. It is thus a commonly repeated error to see in Parkman simply the conventional views of "Whig" historians who discover in the process of history the gradual triumph of the cause of liberty and who regard the past as a spiral moving steadily upward toward the present. This would be a naive reading of Parkman's pessimism. Neither absolutism nor democracy is a satisfactory solution, and any compromise between them is uneasy. "Extremes meet," Parkman wrote in The Old Regime, "and Autocracy and Democracy often touch hands, at least in their vices." Between New France and New England (and their political systems) his sympathies are clearly divided, as the terms of his metaphor for their conflict suggest they must be. This division of sympathies, as much as his desire for historical precision, makes France and England in North America as vivid and accurate a work as it is. One of the peculiar virtues of Parkman's subject was the fact that the "springs of American civilization, unlike those of the elder world, lie revealed in the clear light of History." The trials of Europeans exposed to the wilderness held the most intense interest, for "the wilder-

FRANCIS PARKMAN / 601 ness," he wrote in La Salle, "is a rude touchstone, which often reveals traits that would have lain buried and unsuspected in civilized life." Primitive America and its primitive inhabitants evoked two entirely different reactions from the people who settled on its eastern coast and those who settled along the St. Lawrence River. In spite of his strongly Puritan heritage, Parkman approved the more vigorous response of the French: "While New England was a solitude, and the settlers of Virginia scarcely dared venture inland beyond the sound of a cannonshot, Champlain was planting on shores and islands the emblems of his faith." The economic forces that impelled the French to penetrate the forests led New England to "material progress" within its established confines. "Assiduity in pursuit of gain was promoted to the rank of a duty, and thrift and godliness were linked in equivocal wedlock." English relations with the Indians were contemptuous and fearful; a recurring error in policy that had disastrous effects. "As a whole," Parkman concluded, "[New England] grew upon the gaze of the world, a signal example of expansive energy; but she has not been fruitful in those salient and striking forms of character which often give a dramatic life to the annals of nations far less prosperous." He would have applied the same analysis to the North during the Civil War. But New France was utterly different. Few families had settled there; rather, mainly priests, soldiers, and fur traders, none of them likely to foster the growth necessary to shore up the new colony. Yet these "banded powers, pushing into the wilderness their indomitable soldiers and devoted priests, unveiled the secrets of the barbarous continent, pierced the forests, traced and mapped out the streams, planted their emblems, built their forts, and claimed all as their own." However different in political and religious attitudes from Parkman, these were the men who embodied most fully his somewhat medi-

eval ideal of manhood pitted against an unyielding country. Furthermore, theirs was not a policy of destruction. The French infiltrated the forests, learned to live easily in the wilds, and sought to convert the Indians, not through force and an austere religion but through brotherhood and a sensual creed that they could wonder at if they could not understand. Moreover, the "scheme of English colonization made no account of the Indian tribes. In the scheme of French colonization they were all in all." In the abstract struggle between Liberty and Absolutism, Parkman defers to the "destined" victory of the former, but this overarching conceit is partially an accretion to his basic decision to write the history of the forest. It provides cultural and ethical validation for a history of the French explorers, missionaries, and coureurs de bois whom Parkman understood with deep sympathy, and whom he brought back to life in the early volumes of France and England in North America. His historical method and his theory of history, such as they are, receive their fullest expression in the introduction to Pioneers. Faithfulness to the truth of history involves far more than a research, however patient and scrupulous, into special facts. Such facts may be detailed with the most minute exactness, and yet the narrative, taken as a whole, may be unmeaning or untrue. The narrator must seek to imbue himself with the life and spirit of the time. He must study events in their bearings near and remote; in the character, habits, and manners of those who took part in them. He must himself be, as it were, a sharer or spectator of the action he describes. This may be taken as a credo of what was called the "literary" school of historical writing, exemplified at its best by Parkman and by W. H. Prescott and John Lothrop Motley, whose major works appeared at midcentury. To this "literary" desire Parkman also brought ex-

602 I AMERICAN acting research characteristic of the later "scientific" school of history. As in Pontiac, though, his first priority was narrative, not the marshaling of evidence or the analysis of historical forces, or, as Jared Sparks expected, the indignation of a moral historian. What he gives us in place of these things, which have dated so rapidly in the works of his peers, is a superb reading and retelling of the past. In the second part of Pioneers of France in the New World, where his proper theme truly opens, Parkman's historical method is brilliantly displayed in an overt manner. At one point his source, Samuel de Champlain's journal, reveals a world that is filled in by Parkman's practiced eye for natural detail. The historian and explorer seem to meet in an unchanging landscape. As we turn the ancient, worm-eaten page which preserves the simple record of his fortunes, a wild and dreary scene rises before the mind,— a chill November air, a murky sky, a cold lake, bare and shivering forests, the earth strewn with crisp brown leaves, and, by the water-side, the bark sheds and smoking camp-fires of a band of Indian hunters. Parkman is no less capable of interpolating action from the sketchy details of his sources. To be a "sharer or spectator of the action he describes" meant placing his subjects in a fully realized setting. In Pontiac, where he had first attempted this, the descriptive passages frequently had no apparent connection to the narrative; they often were merely indulgent excursions based on Parkman's own experiences. But in Pioneers the relationship between description and narration is much closer: for Champlain the wilderness was a mysterious, all-pervasive element, and Parkman's abundant use of scenic description becomes an extension of his theme, the exploratory penetration of the forest. Describing Champlain's progress up the

WRITERS

Richelieu River toward the lake to which he gave his name, Parkman achieved a synthesis of narrative action and natural description that is typical of him at his best in these early volumes. Walls of verdure stretched on left and right. Now, aloft in the lonely air rose the cliffs of Beloeil, and now, before them, framed in circling forests, the Basin of Chambly spread its tranquil mirror, glittering in the sun. The shallop outsailed the canoes. Champlain, leaving his allies behind, crossed the basin and tried to pursue his course; but, as he listened in the stillness, the unwelcome noise of rapids reached his ear, and, by glimpses through the dark foliage of the Islets of St. John he could see the gleam of snowy foam and the flash of hurrying waters. Leaving the boat by the shore in charge of four men, he went with Marais, La Routte, and five others, to explore the wild before him. They pushed their way through the damps and shadows of the wood, through thickets and tangled vines, over mossy rocks and mouldering logs. Still the hoarse surging of the rapids followed them; and when, parting the screen of foliage, they looked out upon the river, they saw it thick set with rocks where, plunging over ledges, gurgling under drift-logs, darting along clefts, and boiling in chasms, the angry waters filled the solitude with monotonous ravings. If we have any doubts about the accuracy of Parkman's perceptions or the tangibility of his narrative, he satisfies us with an apt footnote: "In spite of the changes of civilization, the tourist, with Champlain's journal in his hand, can easily trace each stage of his progress." The extraordinary balance of Parkman's use of historical sources and his own firsthand observation of the sites in question improves throughout France and England in North America. He was a master of the amalgamation of personal impressions with what James Russell Lowell called "the rights of facts, however disconcert-

FRANCIS PARKMAN / 603 ing, as at least sleeping-partners in the business of history." Quite simply, it is the basis of his literary reputation. Champlain is the first of Parkman's heroic explorers and the most attractive. Following Jacques Cartier, who first sailed up the St. Lawrence River, in 1608 Champlain founded a settlement at Quebec, which he then used as a base to explore the upper reaches of the Ottawa River, Lake Champlain, and Lake Huron. It was he who began the Canadian policy of supporting the Huron Indians in their warfare against the Iroquois. Describing Champlain's progress toward the future site of Quebec, Parkman clearly adumbrates his importance in the history of New France. A lonely ship sailed up the St. Lawrence. The white whales floundering in the Bay of Tadoussac, and the wild duck diving as the foaming prow drew near,—there was no life but these in all that watery solitude, twenty miles from shore to shore. The ship was from Honfleur, and was commanded by Samuel de Champlain. He was the Aeneas of a destined people, and in her womb lay the embryo life of Canada. Like Aeneas (and like Parkman), Champlain was caught between two traditions. According to the historian, he belonged "rather to the Middle Age than to the seventeenth century," yet the spirit of discovery was strong within him, a sure sign for Parkman that modernity was stirring. Champlain belonged to a type of epic different from that of Aeneas. When he wandered into the forest in pursuit of a bird, he did not discover, as Aeneas did, that it was the dove of Venus; and, instead of gaining access to his forefathers in the underworld, Champlain was simply lost on a virgin continent: "He had found paths in the wilderness, but they were not made by human feet." Champlain had not planned to found a new empire; like most of the early explorers, he was

searching for a northwestern route to the Indies. Yet his character was formed for the paternal role the new colony required; he administered a firm justice and at the same time displayed considerable patience with the men who surrounded him; and he won Parkman's further praise for his interest in horticulture. The heroes of Parkman's later works are almost all flawed in various ways; and of all the explorers who appear in France and England in North America, only Champlain resembles his medieval ideal of piety and manliness, what he once called "Religion towards God, devotion towards women." He was the "faithful soldier," the "preux chevalier, the crusader, the romanceloving explorer," who died in 1635 in the village of Quebec. Jesuit influence predominated in Quebec when Champlain died. The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century (1867) examines the fragile web of missions they established across hundreds of miles of wilderness. Parkman's interest in this religious order pervades his works, for he perceived it as a particularly insidious force in Canadian history. Yet, whatever he makes of their failings in other volumes, the Jesuits of this book are Christian heroes. Even in Pioneers his enchantment with their missionary activities bursts forth: "Who can define the Jesuits? The story of their missions is marvellous as a tale of chivalry, or legends of the lives of saints." Romance, as much as historical importance, was the basis of his interest. But Parkman was a connoisseur of the romantic, and he distinguished carefully between a tale of chivalry and the lives of saints, for he felt the latter were in large part the results of credulous and overwrought imaginations. For the corporeal warfare of the Jesuits he had just and ample praise; but he wrote, as he often said, as a heretic, and he viewed their spiritual fantasies with a scorn exceeded only by his con-

604 I AMERICAN WRITERS tempt for Indian mythology and religion. His brief stay with the Passionists in Rome in 1844 had not gone far toward revealing the inner motions of the Catholic spirit; and for the Jesuits, who, he claimed, "had revived in Europe the mediaeval type of Christianity, with all its attendant superstitions," he felt little spiritual sympathy. Parkman's attitudes toward the Jesuits are part of a larger feeling of anticlericalism and reflect the coolness of his own religious beliefs. His Unitarian upbringing resulted in a poorly concealed dislike for the Puritans and the strictures of New England orthodoxy, a dislike conceived, no doubt, when Sundays came and he was brought home from his grandfather's farm to attend church. In one respect the Jesuits were distinctly preferable to the clergy of Parkman's New England: though they employed an "equivocal system of morality," and though their spiritual exercises did "horrible violence to the noblest qualities of manhood," yet "action is the end of [their] existence." In contrast, the "pope" of nineteenth-century Unitarianism seemed pale: "I remember to have had a special aversion for the Rev. Dr. Channing, not for his heresies, but for his meager proportions, sedentary habits, environment of close air and female parishioners...." For Parkman the clergy of New England, seventeenth-century and nineteenth-century alike, were too often emasculate, though there were remarkable exceptions, his great-grandfather among them. Against this background the Jesuit missions, built among the Huron tribes and torn apart by the Iroquois, seemed an amazing work of unlikely heroism. Parkman's primary objection to the Jesuits was their effect on the young colony of New France. Quebec wore an aspect half military, half monastic. At sunrise and sunset, a squad of soldiers in the pay of the Company paraded in the fort; and, as in Champlain's time, the bells of the

church rang morning, noon, and night. Confessions, masses, and penances were punctiliously observed; and, from the governor to the meanest laborer, the Jesuit watched and guided all. The social atmosphere of New England itself was not more suffocating. To Canada's secular heroes—explorers, soldiers, and woodsmen—the Jesuit presence was a deterrent and an unconscionable (for Parkman) violation of intellectual independence. In the following volume he described La Salle's reason for leaving the Society of Jesus, surely an extension of his own reaction to its principles: to find himself "the passive instrument of another's will, taught to walk in prescribed paths, to renounce his individuality and become a component atom of a vast whole,—would have been intolerable to him." Yet the same creed made heroes out of the strangest raw material. At one point in The Jesuits, Parkman supposes a Lenten meeting of the missionaries still alive in 1649. Here was Bressani, scarred with firebrand and knife; Chabanel, once a professor of rhetoric in France, now a missionary, bound by a self-imposed vow to a life from which his nature recoiled; the fanatical Chaumonot, whose character savored of his peasant birth,—for the grossest fungus of superstition that ever grew under the shadow of Rome was not too much for his omnivorous credulity, and miracles and mysteries were his daily food; yet, such as his faith was, he was ready to die for it. Gamier, beardless like a woman, was of a far finer nature. His religion was of the affections and the sentiments; and his imagination, warmed with the ardor of his faith, shaped the ideal forms of his worship into visible realities. Brebeuf sat conspicuous among his brethren, portly and tall, his short moustache and beard grizzled with time,—for he was fifty-six years old. If he seemed impassive, it was because one overmastering principle had merged and absorbed all

FRANCIS PARKMAN / 605 the impulses of his nature and all the faculties of his mind. From this account one man, Isaac Jogues, is conspicuously absent. His story is typical of the heroism displayed by all these men. Captured by the Iroquois in 1642, he endured their incredibly brutal tortures, and baptized and instructed their children during intervals of peace. Two years after his capture he escaped, and after a long and difficult journey, returned to France, where he was summoned before the queen. She "kissed his mutilated hands, while the ladies of the Court thronged around to do him homage." Almost immediately he sailed again for the mission in Canada, where he was murdered by the Iroquois in 1646. The Iroquois warriors made martyrs of most of these men (and the Catholic Church has sanctified them), but before they died, the Jesuit missionaries had demonstrated their effect on the Hurons: an Indian from one of the mission tribes was "a savage still, but not so often a devil." In spite of the perpetual terror caused by hostile Indians and in spite of the somber influence of the Jesuits, the spiritual atmosphere of New France had about it a picturesqueness and charm that could not be discovered in iron-clad New England. The founding of Montreal in 1642 by Paul de Maisonneuve and his associates (mainly from the Sulpitian prder) is a fine example of these qualities, and Parkman's account deserves to be quoted at length, for it is one of the most admirably conceived passages in the early volumes of France and England in North America. Sailing upriver from the comparative safety of Quebec, Maisonneuve and his companions came in sight of the shoreline that had first been considered for settlement by Champlain. Maisonneuve sprang ashore, and fell on his knees. His followers imitated his example; and all joined their voices in enthusiastic songs of thanksgiving. Tents, baggage, arms, and stores

were landed. An altar was raised on a pleasant spot near at hand; and Mademoiselle Mance, with Madame de la Peltrie, aided by her servant, Charlotte Barre, decorated it with a taste which was the admiration of the beholders. Now all the company gathered before the shrine. Here stood Vimont, in the rich vestments of his office. Here were the two ladies, with their servant; Montmagny, no very willing spectator; and Maisonneuve, a warlike figure, erect and tall, his men clustering around him,— soldiers, sailors, artisans, and laborers,—all alike soldiers at need. They kneeled in reverent silence as the Host was raised aloft; and when the rite was over, the priest turned and addressed them:— "You are a grain of mustard-seed, that shall rise and grow till its branches overshadow the earth. You are few, but your work is the work of God. His smile is on you, and your children shall fill the land." The afternoon waned; the sun sank behind the westeri) forest, and twilight came on. Fireflies were twinkling over the darkened meadow. They caught them, tied them with threads into seining festoons, and hung them before the altar, where the Host remained exposed. Then they pitched their tents, lighted their bivouac fires, stationed their guards, and lay down to rest. Such was the birth-night of Montreal. Is this true history, or a romance of Christian chivalry? It is both. From this Parkman turned to a darker romance of secular errantry. Long one of his most popular books, La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West (originally published in 1869 as The Discovery of the Great West), is also one of the most flawed historically. A strong, dramatic narrative of the discovery of the Ohio and Illinois rivers and the navigation of the Mississippi, the effectiveness of La Salle depends on the telescopic isolation of its hero, who, in his determined way, holds center stage in the wilder-

606 I AMERICAN ness. Recent scholarship on La Salle and the documentary sources for his life, though biased in its own ways, has shown that the great body of material assembled by Pierre Margry, which Parkman used in the revision of La Salle, was presented by its editor in a manner betraying his extreme prejudice on behalf of the explorer. The effect of Margry's editorial bias is easily overemphasized, for Parkman's revision of La Salle in 1879 only makes more evident the fact that he, too, had something at stake in bringing La Salle forward as the greatest explorer of New France. In portraying his hero, Parkman permitted himself an unaccustomed latitude in the use of obviously questionable documents and in the interpretation of evidence. The reader of La Salle finds it impossible to escape the conclusion that he also put more of himself into this characterization than into any other. La Salle is an oblique reflection of The Oregon Trail and the subsequent course of Parkman's life, the historian and the explorer protagonists in a valiant struggle against all odds. "The wild and mournful story of the explorers of the Mississippi" begins in the mid-1660's with La Salle's rejection of the Jesuits, with whom he had been associated in youth. For Parkman this had dual significance, and it forms the basis for two predominant strains in his portrait of La Salle: the explorer's battle against an unseen host of enemies (mainly Jesuits and government officials) and his spiritual kinship with the modern world. Claims for the latter are somewhat exaggerated. Virtually by fiat Parkman declares the modernity of La Salle's temperament in comparison with that of other explorers. He portrays Jacques Marquette, who with Louis Jolliet discovered the Mississippi in 1673, as a spiritual brother to the Jesuit missionaries, enshrouded by romance, led on by his devotion to the Virgin Mary. On the other hand "stands the

WRITERS

masculine form of Cavelier de la Salle. Prodigious was the contrast between the two discoverers: the one, with clasped hands and upturned eyes, seems a figure evoked from some dim legend of mediaevel saintship; the other, with feet firm planted on the hard earth, breathes the self-relying energies of modern practical enterprise." Needless to say, this comparison begs any number of questions. Marquette did not seem so ethereal in Parkman's account of his adventures on the Mississippi. Nor does Champlain come off well in comparison. The enthusiasm of the disinterested and chivalrous Champlain was not the enthusiasm of La Salle.... He belonged not to the age of the knight-errant and the saint, but to the modern world of practical study and practical action. He was the hero not of a principle nor of a faith, but simply of a fixed idea and a determined purpose. In his fine article on La Salle, William R. Taylor has pointed out the depth of Parkman's interest in the motivation of his hero. It seems clear that what Parkman heralds as the dawning of the modern sensibility is the emergence of individual will (and, one might add, of neurosis). It is less important for him that La Salle discovered the Illinois and Ohio rivers and explored the Mississippi to its mouth, crossing back and forth to Canada to perform each of these feats, than that he did so against almost insuperable obstacles. In comparison with the blind determination of La Salle, the deeds of Champlain, Marquette, and the Jesuits seemingly have less value because they were performed with some dedication to a higher cause. This interpretation indicates the central flaw that runs throughout La Salle. Without entering into the substantial claims of his enemies (and, what is worse, allowing La Salle to defend himself in his letters), Parkman presents the ex-

FRANCIS PARKMAN / 607 plorer as a beleaguered hero beset by hostility. Again and again La Salle emerges unscathed from a thicket of persecution and is typified as a man in whom "an unconquerable mind held at its service a frame of iron, and tasked it to the utmost of its endurance." In the face of "disasters, sorrows, and deferred hopes; time, strength, and wealth spent in vain; a ruinous past and a doubtful future; slander, obloquy, and hate," La Salle becomes "the patient voyager" with "unmoved heart," breathing the calm spirit of heroism. La Salle is the dark hero, and his story the dark heart of Parkman's entire historical work. One searches for irony or a sense of balance in his portrait, but there is little of either. The weakness of the rhetoric he uses to characterize the explorer signifies the intensity of his desire to create a hero of heroes, a "pioneer of Western pioneers." Unquestionably, La Salle was a great explorer; just as certainly, though, the grandiose nature of his plans was more than a mere "chimera." His final work of exploration on the desolate coast of Texas, four hundred miles from the mouth of the Mississippi, where he wished to be, ended in dismal failure, his assassination, and the death of almost all his fellow settlers. Overshadowing Parkman's portrait of La Salle is his personal myth of masculine heroism. The reflections of the historian in his image of La Salle have often been commented upon, and for good reason. With the same determination he attributes to the explorer, Parkman struggled against his infirmities, completing against all odds the work he undertook at the age of eighteen. The myth of masculine heroism, which was fully embodied in his own life, unfortunately warped his estimate of La Salle. Although it sustained him in the worst of his painful circumstances, his romantic reverence for masculinity, determination, and unyielding perseverance in the pursuit of a "fixed idea" led

Parkman in La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West into an unintended parody of his most cherished ideals. The first three volumes of France and England in North America primarily concern the periphery of Canadian society. The exploits of Champlain, the Jesuit missionaries, and La Salle unfold in the interior of the continent, removed by weeks and months of travel from the lower St. Lawrence; behind them only a fragmentary image of the settlements at Quebec and Montreal emerges. In the next two volumes, The Old Regime in Canada (1874) and Count Frontenac and New France Under Louis A/K(1877), Parkman reverses the proportions. The political and religious turmoil in Montreal and Quebec, the economic life of Canada, and the character of its people and institutions are all brought forward, while the explorers move about on a very remote stage. The plan for both The Old Regime and Frontenac is laid out in the preface to the earlier of these works: "In the present book we examine the political and social machine; in the next volume of the series we shall see this machine in action." The organization and subject of The Old Regime necessitated a loss of dramatic effectiveness. The book is divided into three parts: "The Feudal Chiefs of Acadia" (added in the revised edition of 1893), "Canada a Mission" (in which Parkman's account of Francois de Laval and the Jesuits provoked a considerable controversy among Canadian readers), and, most important by far, "The Colony and the King." As in A Half-Century of Conflict, completed almost twenty years later, Parkman tries to compensate for the miscellaneous nature of his subject matter by resorting to an unusual number of overt, manipulative rhetorical devices. He replaces strong narrative with a strong narrator; indeed, the overriding structure of the work is highly artificial. The necessary flatness of much

608 I AMERICAN WRITERS of his subject also leads him to compensate with excessive descriptive detail. In the previous volumes Parkman occasionally tried to draw the past forward by commenting on the present appearance of many historical sites. In The Old Regime one is continually led back and forth from past to present to past, with very little subtlety: "Above all," Parkman recommends, "do not fail to make your pilgrimage to the shrine of St. Anne." Even when his topographical detail is confined to one tense, his prose grows florid in a way it had not done since Pontiac: "October had begun, and the romantic wilds breathed the buoyant life of the most inspiring of American seasons." One could describe this volume as he describes the annual fair at Montreal: "not always edifying, but always picturesque." In an attempt to reveal the organic flaw of New France, the cause of its defeat by the British, Parkman describes in "The Colony and the King" various components of Canadian society—"Paternal Government," "Canadian Feudalism," "Trade and Industry," and "Morals and Manners." The purpose that links this episodic, anecdotal history of New France between 1661 and 1763 surfaces most visibly in the final chapter, "Canadian Absolutism." Here, Parkman presents in barest form his explanation of the failure of France to create a vital, proliferating colony in the New World. In spite of his love for the martial vigor of New France, it is largely a one-sided account, argued with the best imperative tone of New England. In his opinion three things contributed to the fall of French Canada: the character of its institutions, the "historical antecedents" of its people, and the racial temperament of the French. The people of Canada were pinioned between oppressive "paternal" and "maternal" authorities (state and church) on the one hand, and the unrestrained freedom of the forest on the other. They were, he argues, neither historically nor

racially equipped to create the conditions necessary for growth and cultural development. In contrast, New England appears to offer all that New France lacked. Parkman seldom yields to the moralizing tendencies so prevalent in the historical writing of his time, and he is usually pessimistic in the extreme about the actual political conditions of any government; but in his account of "Canadian Absolutism" he hesitates neither to moralize nor to present the political systems of the New England colonies (usually described in highly critical terms) in a generalized and extremely favorable light. "In the building up of colonies," Parkman says, "England succeeded and France failed. The cause lies chiefly in the vast advantage drawn by England from the historical training of her people in habits of reflection, forecast, industry, and self-reliance." A similar strain of argument occurs when he turns to the problem of race: The Germanic race, and especially the AngloSaxon branch of it, is peculiarly masculine, and, therefore, peculiarly fitted for self-government. It submits its action habitually to the guidance of reason, and has the judicial faculty of seeing both sides of a question. The French Celt is cast in a different mould He delights in abstractions and generalizations, cuts loose from unpleasing facts, and roams through an ocean of desires and theories. Parkman concludes that a "man, to be a man, must feel that he holds his fate, in some good measure, in his own hands," and that "freedom is for those who are fit for it." Whatever else one may say about the truth of these arguments and conclusions, they do not conform to modern notions of historical argument or of historical causation. These arguments and conclusions have dated more than any other element of Parkman's work. Near the end of The Old Regime, Parkman

FRANCIS PARKMAN / 609 writes this farewell: "And now we, too, will leave Canada.... The ship sails in the morning; and before the old towers of Rochelle rise in sight there will be time to smoke many a pipe, and ponder what we have seen on the banks of the St. Lawrence." This is not merely an audacious rhetorical gesture and a feat of historical imagination; it is, in a sense, a literal leavetaking of part of his subject. Turning away from the exploration of North America, in which the French played an obviously superior role, he prepares us for a struggle between political systems in which English liberty, adapted to the conditions of the New World, eventually triumphs. The Old Regime marks the transition from an exploratory to a military phase of Parkman's history, and it inaugurates the shift in perspective from the French to the English that takes place in the rest of the series. Between 1672 and 1682, and again from 1689 to 1698, Canada was governed by Count Louis de Frontenac, a domineering figure, a soldier, and a courtier. Having come to New France partly to repair his fortunes and partly to escape his wife, he became a friend and supporter of La Salle. "There was between them," Parkman wrote, "the sympathetic attraction of two bold and energetic spirits; and though Cavelier de la Salle had neither the irritable vanity of the Count nor his Gallic vivacity of passion, he had in full measure the same unconquerable pride and hardy resolution." Though there are similarities in his portraits of the two men— Frontenac's "whole career was one of conflict"—Parkman's account of the governor is far more balanced and temperate. Frontenac was a civil leader with military prowess, capable of exacting duty, if not affection, from the Canadians and admiration from the Indians. Parkman has often been accused of writing a "great man" version of history, but his narrative of Frontenac's administration belies that charge. If, as he asserts, Frontenac is a "re-

markable figure" characterized by "bold and salient individuality and sharply marked light and shadow," he nevertheless concludes that "greatness must be denied him." Frontenac was simply the most compelling governor of seventeenth-century Canada, possessing the truest vision of its needs. "His policy was to protect the Indian allies at all risks; to repel by force, if necessary, every attempt of the English to encroach on the territory in dispute; and to occupy it by forts which should be at once posts of war and commerce and places of rendezvous for traders and voyageurs." Frontenac was published thirty years after The Oregon Trail first appeared. In the intervening time Parkman's style had strengthened considerably. Among American historians he is without question the greatest prose artist; but his abilities, though entirely evident from the first, grew slowly. Each volume of France and England in North America represents a stylistic advance over its predecessors; and in Frontenac, Parkman for the first time achieves a consistently mature prose style. As a product of the rhetorical academic training common in early nineteenth-century American colleges, he displayed at first a natural love for cumulative periods and a rolling syntax that occasionally seems more structurally dependent on rhetorical splendor than on any inner logic. With time, though, he learned to economize. Excepting those passages that concern the Old World, about which Parkman never writes without excess, Frontenac contains some of his most effective writing. The improvements in style in France and England in North America are not merely the result of shortening sentences, using less obvious rhetorical constructions, and moving toward an increased dependence on the simple strength of noun clusters. Parkman's greatest gain, not complete until Montcalm and Wolfe, is a remarkably heightened awareness of the re-

610 I AMERICAN lationship between the natural tensions of his story and the available tensions of his prose. His talent for description is a powerful tool, the resources as well as the limitations of which he did not always recognize. His enchantment with his subject occasionally calls forth reveries of descriptive writing that are not always in sequence with the demands of his narrative. This leads to a strange oscillation. When the emotional crescendo of his tale would seem to require the emphasis of a descriptive excursion, it is not always forthcoming; similarly, in obedience to the demands of his personal enthusiasm, Parkman occasionally wanders away from the immediate concerns of his narrative in pursuit of some scenic reward. In Frontenac this discrepancy between the two emotional rhythms of his work—one called up by the story, the other called up by his own experiences—begins to disappear; and as the rhythms begin to coincide, his writing and the overall shape of his work improve dramatically. In the preface to Frontenac, Parkman commented on the extent of his preparations for the final two books of his series: "The accumulation is now rather formidable; and, if it is to be used at all, it had better be used at once." Fearing for his health, he abandoned the chronological order of his history, skipped "an intervening period of less decisive importance," and wrote Montcalm and Wolfe, published in 1884. The postponed volume, A Half-Century of Conflict, appeared in 1892. It is a relatively inconsequential work that attempts, not quite successfully, to integrate events in the years between Frontenac's death, in 1698, and 1748. Though it recounts some important occurrences—Queen Anne's War, the massacre at Deerfield, and the siege of Louisbourg chief among them—A Half-Century of Conflict adds little to the design of Parkman's larger work; it merely extends the portrayal of the antagonism between the French and the English begun in Frontenac and concluded in Montcalm and Wolfe.

WRITERS

The years during which he wrote his last two volumes were full of recognition for Parkman's extraordinary achievement as a historian. He served as an overseer of Harvard, became a fellow of the Harvard Corporation, and received honorary doctorates from Williams College, McGill, and his alma mater; he also became a member of the Royal Historical Society in London and an honorary member of the London Society of Antiquarians. The habits of a scholar did not impede his love of society, though; he helped to organize the St. Botolph Club in Boston, becoming its first president, and was active in many other social organizations. But for the most part his family and his work occupied the center of his attention. Parkman's life during this time was quiet, spent largely on research and his extensive correspondence. He had always withdrawn from Boston in the summer, and he gradually began to seek a more distant retirement than Jamaica Plain. Beginning in 1888 he spent the summers with his daughter and son-in-law at Portsmouth, New Hampshire. There, his neighbor Barrett Wendell, a professor at Harvard, knew him, and he recalled the impression Parkman made as an old man. When one met Mr. Parkman thus taking his ease, one grew aware of a certain boyish freshness of feeling and nature in him . .. the vigor with which he would send his boat through the water, paying scant respect to the swift tidal currents of the Piscataqua, won the instant, lasting admiration of athletic boys. You felt instinctively that the man was enjoying this simple open-air pleasure as keenly as if he were a child of ten. Wendell seized on the vital element of Parkman's work in portraying him thus, for it is exactly that boyish enthusiasm, that love discovered in youth for the historical atmosphere of New England, that transforms the matter of history into the matter of high literary art.

FRANCIS PARKMAN / 611 Years after his doctors had predicted his death, and after completing a work that few thought he would live to begin, Parkman died on November 8, 1893. One may say of him what he said of James Wolfe: "An immense moral force bore up his own frail body and forced it to its work." Montcalm and Wolfe survives as Parkman's supreme achievement, the greatest monument of American historical writing in the nineteenth century. With the authority of more than forty years of study, he sets forth the inevitable drift toward a final conflict between the two colonies. In Louis Joseph de Montcalm and the "gallant invalid" James Wolfe he found the heroic warriors whose concluding battle on the Plains of Abraham in 1759 provided an appropriately epic summation to the work of a lifetime. Though it covers fewer years than other volumes, the scope of Montcalm and Wolfe is the broadest of any of Parkman's works: in America it ranges from Virginia and the Pennsylvania border settlements to Acadia and the St. Lawrence Valley; in Europe, Parkman follows the progress of the Seven Years' War and observes in some detail the administrative shifts in the English government between 1748 and 1763. Finally, he presents in action a remarkable succession of heroes and near-heroes: Wolfe, Montcalm, George Washington, Louis de Bougainville, Francois de Levis, Jeffrey Amherst, Lord William Howe, Robert Rogers, John Forbes, and Sir William Johnson, as well as a lesser host of villains and scoundrels. The Old French War, as it was once called, was waged along the axes of two great waterways, the junction of which was Lac St. Pierre, roughly equidistant from Quebec and Montreal. Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence River formed one axis, running roughly east and west; the Richelieu River, Lake Champlain, Lake George, and the Hudson River formed the other, running north and south. The extreme

flanks of action were Louisbourg, in what is now Nova Scotia and was then Acadia, and Fort Niagara, at the falls between Lake Erie and Lake Ontario, as well as Fort Duquesne (now Pittsburgh), south and west of Niagara. Because the Lake George-Lake Champlain waterway was the only convenient means of communication between the two colonies, it formed the central corridor of military action. Forts William Henry, Ticonderoga, and Crown Point all lay on its shores, and each was the site of at least one important battle. While the French maintained an almost exclusively defensive war (excepting, of course, the continual harassment of the borders by Canadians and Indians), the English tried to push up Lake George and Lake Champlain and toward Quebec from both flanks along the St. Lawrence. The denouement—Wolfe's successful assault on Quebec itself—was a surprise to everyone, for he was outmanned by an enemy ensconced in one of the greatest natural fortresses in the world. In Montcalm and Wolfe, Parkman's shift in perspective from the French to the English is completed. He maintains a consistent parallel between the opposing camps and colonies, but the emotional weight of the book falls squarely on the English side. A change of character had come over both colonies and their parent countries. Louis XIV and his strong colonial ministers had given way to Louis XV and the marquise de Pompadour, whose "fatuity" "made the conquest of Canada possible." Always plagued by abuses of power, New France had become "the prey of official jackals" who vitiated the economy and demoralized the people. Moreover, Canada was at this time governed by the vainglorious Pierre de Vaudreuil, who hampered Montcalm's efforts to wage an effective campaign. What Parkman had once said of New England was now true of its foe: "She has not been fruitful . . . in salient and striking forms of character."

612 I AMERICAN WRITERS But it was not merely the decay of New France that led Parkman to focus on the English side of the war. It was the change that had taken place within the British colonies, particularly New England. Though Parkman respected the foundation upon which the colonies were established—the search for religious liberty—he detested the actual political form they assumed. In The Old Regime he bitterly attacked the assumption that the early settlers had cherished a broader freedom: 'Their mission was to build up a western Canaan, ruled by the law of God; to keep it pure from error, and, if need were, purge it of heresy by persecution,—to which ends they set up one of the most detestable theocracies on record." This fact, and the timidity with which the English colonists faced the wilderness at their borders, rendered them highly repugnant to Parkman. By the middle of the eighteenth century, though, the Puritan ardor of New England had abated, a new secularism was visible in many of the colonies, and the only sectaries still repellent in Parkman's eyes were the Quakers of Philadelphia, whose passivity during Indian raids on the Pennsylvania border prolonged the agony of the settlers. A new energy animated the populace; traders, backwoodsmen, and eventually families began to penetrate the forest; and Massachusetts, New York, and Virginia produced a generation of heroes that had no contemporary counterpart in New France. The history of the forest is first and foremost a history of forest heroes. While New France had been bold and active in the wilderness, Parkman told its story; but now that the British colonies had taken the lead, he would tell theirs. To the episodic richness of the Old French War, Parkman brings a depth of emotion that is unsurpassed in any of his other works. He quietly weights his account of the war by subtly intensifying his picture of the English forces while he undermines our sympathies with the

French. Early in Montcalm and Wolfe, Montcalm and Vaudreuil emerge as principal spokesmen for the French; both are represented by their abundant personal and official correspondence. The use of their letters was inevitable, for Vaudreuil held the highest civil position, and Montcalm the highest military command, in New France, yet it has important implications for Parkman's characterization of the plight of Canada. Writing to his family and to his superiors in France, Montcalm appears in a flattering light. As befits the Canadian heroic counterpart to Wolfe, he is described more fully than any other French officer, and we feel a natural sympathy for a man capable of such evident affection and courage. With Vaudreuil, it is quite another matter. Boastful and ineffective, he is revealed in his letters as an agent of the moral degradation at the heart of French colonial bureaucracy. Different as these two men are, they both represent the same echelon of Canadian society; and in this work Parkman's perspective on the Canadian social structure descends only slightly lower. Literacy did not extend very far through the ranks of the Canadian people and French soldiers: below the highest level of society, firsthand accounts of the war, in the form of letters and diaries, simply were not available. Thus, we see Canada almost entirely from a perspective (in Vaudreuil's letters) that emphasizes corruption and personal vanity or from one (in Montcalm's letters) that provides a reflection of social and official excesses and an ironic commentary on them. In Montcalm and Wolfe the only man in New France with whom we fully sympathize also serves as one of the harshest critics of that country. The picture that emerges of New England and the English forces in general is created in an entirely different manner. There is no single English or colonial source that prevails throughout the book; instead, Parkman draws on the

FRANCIS PARKMAN / 613 correspondence and diaries of nearly all the important officers and government officials. Furthermore, he employs in a brilliant manner the records left by humbler members of the army and the provincial populace. On the whole, literacy was more prevalent in the English and American force than in its French and Canadian counterpart. Parkman makes effective use of this difference, for he portrays a far broader range of society. By quoting numerous sermons, letters, diaries, and reported conversations, he bestows on the men and women of New England a visible life that he denies the people of New France. The fullness of his delineation carries with it a strong emotional impact. Against the narrow, corrupt world of Quebec and Montreal, New England seems fertile and resilient. The depth of Parkman's feeling for New England and its people, as well as the breadth of his social vision in this work, nowhere appears more forcefully than in this passage, which describes the men of Sir William Johnson's army: The soldiers were no soldiers, but farmers and farmers' sons who had volunteered for the summer campaign. One of the corps had a blue uniform faced with red. The rest wore their daily clothing. Blankets had been served out to them by the several provinces, but the greater part brought their own guns. . . . They had no bayonets, but carried hatchets in their belts as a sort of substitute. At their sides were slung powder-horns, on which, in the leisure of the camp, they carved quaint devices with the points of their jack-knives. They came chiefly from plain New England homesteads,—rustic abodes, unpainted and dingy, with long well-sweeps, capacious barns, rough fields of pumpkins and corn, and vast kitchen chimneys, above which in winter hung squashes to keep them from frost, and guns to keep them from rust.

Simple as these nouns and their cadences are, they resonate with emotional intensity. In similar passages throughout Montcalm and Wolfe, Parkman quietly vindicates the goodness and strength of the American heritage. This emotional vindication has a moral dimension as well, one that is directly linked to Parkman's purpose in writing history. Though the history of the forest was initially conceived in his mind largely without ethical connotations, it was written in a spirit of moral exemplification. Like the rest of France and England in North America, Montcalm and Wolfe balances two contrasting historical motions. The one most commonly recognized is the familiar nineteenth-century conception of the transition from the medieval mind to the modern, from "barren absolutism" to "a liberty, crude, incoherent, and chaotic, yet full of prolific vitality." This view of history is inherently optimistic, for it implies a belief in progress, in the improvement of the human condition. But France and England in North America also asserts a deeply pessimistic conclusion about historical development. Parkman's conservative history provides a series of moral exempla against which we may measure the extent of our decay. Placed against the grander dimensions of the past, Parkman concludes, the vaunted aggregate advance of the American people appears as individual decline. America, he writes, .. . has tamed the savage continent, peopled the solitude, gathered wealth untold, waxed potent, imposing, redoubtable; and now it remains for her to prove, if she can, that the rule of the masses is consistent with the highest growth of the individual; that democracy can give the world a civilization as mature and pregnant, ideas as energetic and vitalizing, and types of manhood as lofty and strong, as any of the systems which it boasts to supplant.

614 I AMERICAN The millennial language in the first clause of this sentence ironically echoes the claims of a booming nation; but Parkman's true conclusion to Montcalm and Wolfe and to his work as a whole is the hesitant, doubtful challenge that follows. America's history is somehow larger and nobler than its destiny, he suggests; only by studying its history well can we correct this imbalance between past and future, between promise and fulfillment.

Selected Bibliography WORKS OF FRANCIS PARKMAN BOOKS

The California and Oregon Trail. New York: Putnam, 1849. First published serially in Knickerbocker magazine (1847-49) as The Oregon Trail. History of the Conspiracy of Pontiac.... Boston: Little, Brown, 1851. Published after 1870 as The Conspiracy of Pontiac.... Vassall Morton: A Novel. Boston: Phillips, Sampson, 1856. Pioneers of France in the New World. Boston: Little, Brown, 1865. The Book of Roses. Boston: J. E. Tilton, 1866. The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century. Boston: Little, Brown, 1867. The Discovery of the Great West. Boston: Little, Brown, 1869. Extensively revised in the eleventh edition (1879) and subsequently published as La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West. The Old Regime in Canada. Boston: Little, Brown, 1874. Count Frontenac and New France Under Louis XIV. Boston: Little, Brown, 1877. Some of the Reasons Against Woman Suffrage. N.p., n.d. (1883). Montcalm and Wolfe. Boston: Little, Brown, 1884. An Open Letter to a Temperance Friend. N.p., n.d. (ca. 1885).

WRITERS

Our Common Schools N.p., n.d. (1890). A Half-Century of Conflict. Boston: Little, Brown, 1892. The Journals of Francis Parkman, edited by Mason Wade. New York: Harper, 1947. Letters of Francis Parkman, edited by Wilbur R. Jacobs. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1960. ARTICLES

"The New Hampshire Ranger." Knickerbocker Magazine, 26:146-48 (August 1845). "Satan and Dr. Carver." Knickerbocker Magazine, 26:515-25 (December 1845). "The Works of James Fenimore Cooper." North American Review, 74:147-61 (January 1852). "Exploring the Magalloway." Harper's Magazine, 29:735-41 (November 1864). "Manners and Customs of Primitive Indian Tribes." North American Review, 101:28-64 (July 1865). "Indian Superstitions." North American Review, 103:1-18 (July 1866). "The Tale of the Ripe Scholar." Nation, 9:558-60 (December 23, 1869). "The Failure of Universal Suffrage." North American Review, 127:1-20 (July-August 1878). "Mr. Parkman and His Canadian Critics." Nation, 27:66-67 (August 1, 1878). "The Woman Question." North American Review, 129:303-21 (October 1879). "The Woman Question Again." North American Review, 130:16-30 (January 1880). "Francis Parkman on the Indians." The Critic, n.s. 5:248 (May 1886). "A Convent at Rome." Harper's Magazine, 81:44854 (August 1890). COLLECTED AND SELECTED EDITIONS

Francis Parkman s Works. 12 (later 13) vols. Boston: Little, Brown, 1898. New Library edition. Francis Parkman: Representative Selections, edited by Wilbur L. Schramm. New York: American Book Co., 1938. The Parkman Reader, edited by Samuel Eliot Morison. Boston: Little, Brown, 1955. MODERN REPRINTS

Montcalm and Wolfe. Introduction by Samuel Eliot Morison. New York: Collier, 1962.

FRANCIS PARKMAN / 615 The Oregon Trail edited by E. N. Feltskog. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969.

BIBLIOGRAPHIES Blanck, Jacob. "Francis Parkman." In Bibliography of American Literature, vol. VI. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973. Pp. 541-56. Spiller, Robert, et al. Literary History of the United States of America. 2 vols. 4th ed. New York: Macmillan, 1974. See also bibliographies in Schramm, Francis Parkman: Representative Selections (1938), and Wade, Francis Parkman: Heroic Historian (1942), above.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL STUDIES Adams, Henry. "Review of The Old Regime." North American Review, 120:175-79 (1875). Alvord, Clarence W. "Francis Parkman." Nation, 117:394-96(1923). Bassett, J. S., ed. "Letters of Francis Parkman to Pierre Margry." Smith College Studies in History, 8:123-208(1923). Brooks, Van Wyck. New England: Indian Summer. New York: Dutton, 1940. DeVoto, Bernard. The Year of Decision 1846. Boston: Little, Brown, 1943. Doughty, Howard. Francis Parkman. New York: Macmillan, 1962. Eccles, W. J. "The History of New France According to Francis Parkman." William and Mary Quarterly, 18:163-75 (1961). Farnham, Charles Haight. A Life of Francis Parkman. Boston: Little, Brown, 1900. Fiske, John. A Century of Science and Other Essays. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1899. Frothingham, O. B. "Memoir of Francis Parkman, LL.D." Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 2nd sen, 8:520-62 (1894). Gale, Robert L. Francis Parkman. New York: Twayne, 1973. Jacobs, Wilbur R. "Some Social Ideas of Francis Parkman." American Quarterly, 9:387-97 (1957).

. "Highlights of Parkman's Formative Period." Pacific Historical Review, 27:149-58 (1958). . "Francis Parkman's Oration 'Romance in America.'" American Historical Review, 68:69297 (1963). Jennings, F. P. "A Vanishing Indian: Francis Parkman Versus His Sources." Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 87:306-23 (1963). Jordy, William. "Henry Adams and Francis Parkman." American Quarterly, 3:52-68 (1951). Levin, David. History as Romantic Art: Bancroft, Prescott, Motley, and Parkman. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1959. Lewis, R. W. B. The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955. Nevins, Allan. "Prescott, Motley, Parkman." In American Writers on American Literature, edited by John Macy. New York: Dutton, 1931. Pp. 226-42. Nye, Russell B. "Parkman, Red Fate, and White Civilization." In Essays on American Literature in Honor of Jay B. Hubbell, edited by Clarence Gohdes. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1967. Pp. 152-63. Pease, Otis A. Parkman s History: The Historian as Literary Artist. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953. Peckham, Howard H. "The Sources and Revisions of Parkman's Pontiac." Publications of the Bibliographical Society of America, 37:293-307 (1943). Schramm, Wilbur L. "Parkman's Novel." American Literature, 9:218-27 (1937). Sedgwick, Henry Dwight. Francis Parkman. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1904. Sullivan, James. "Sectionalism in Writing History." Journal of the New York State Historical Association, 2:73-88 (1921). Taylor, William R. "That Way Madness Lies: Nature and Human Nature in Parkman's La Salle." In In Defense of Reading, edited by Reuben A. Brower and Richard Poirier. New York: Dutton, 1962. Pp. 256-81. Thompson, Richard A. "Francis Parkman on the Nature of Man." Mid-America, 42:3-17 (1960). Vitzthum, Richard C. "The Historian as Editor: Francis Parkman's Reconstruction of Sources in Montcalm and Wolfe." Journal of American History, 53:471 -86 (1966).

616 I AMERICAN . The American Compromise: Theme and Method in the Histories of Bancroft, Parkman, and Adams. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1974. Wade, Mason. Francis Parkman: Heroic Historian. New York: Viking, 1942. Walsh, James E. "The California and Oregon Trail: A Bibliographical Study." New Colophon, 3:27985 (1950). Wendell, Barrett. "Francis Parkman." Proceedings

WRITERS

of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 29:435-47 (1893-1894). Wheelwright, Edward. "Memoir of Francis Parkman." Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 1:304-50 (1894). Wrong, George M. "Francis Parkman." Canadian Historical Review, 4:289-303 (1923). — VERLYN

KLINKENBORG

Thomas Pynchon r

'937-

ADR _ OR Henry Adams at the turn of the twentieth century, history was like a cannonball coming directly toward him, and he could trace its fivethousand-year curve. Its momentum increased just before Constantine set up the cross; it swerved as Johann Gutenberg printed the Bible and Christopher Columbus discovered a new world; it was given a new curve by Galileo and Francis Bacon. But in 1900 "the continuity snapped." And Adams conveyed the dislocation, in The Education of Henry Adams (1918), not only in his metaphors but also by picturing himself in the third person:

that goes beyond Adams' prediction. "A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now." For Pirate Prentice "It is too late.... No light anywhere He's afraid of the way the glass will fall—soon—it will be a spectacle: the fall of a crystal palace." But Pirate Prentice is only dreaming; and when he wakes up, we enter a nightmare that makes his dream and Adams' vision nostalgic interludes. For the V-2 rocket that appears as a brilliant point of light in the pink morning sky does not scream. "It travels faster than the speed of sound. The first news you get of it is the blast. Then, if you're still around, you hear the sound of it coming i n . . . . You couldn't adjust to the bastards. No way." Worse than the nightmare experience of an ordinary air raid is anticipating the new rocket—which travels with unprecedented speed, confuses direction through time and space, and denies the logic of common sense. It not only snaps continuity, it explodes virtually before it arrives. It indeed signals that fall of a crystal palace—the rational, orderly world that had been the dream of nineteenth-century science and that, Henry Adams notwithstanding, had continued into the middle of the twentieth century as an ideal of progress in America. The experience culminating in Pynchon's third novel is of more than the terror that pervaded England toward the end of World War

Power leaped from every atom, and enough of it to supply the stellar universe showed itself running to waste at every pore of matter. Man could no longer hold it off. Forces grasped his wrists and flung him about as though he had hold of a live wire or a runaway automobile; which was very nearly the exact truth for the purposes of an elderly and timid single gentleman in Paris, who never drove down the Champs Elysees without expecting an accident, and commonly witnessing one; or found himself in the neighborhood of an official without calculating the chances of a bomb. So long as the rates of progress held good, these bombs would double in force and number every ten years. Thomas Pynchon opens Gravity's Rainbow (1973) with the experience of a rocket-bomb

617

618 I AMERICAN WRITERS II. It is of the acceleration of unprecedented events that followed, especially as they affected the American psyche: the explosion of an atomic bomb that threatened a holocaust, a "cold war" that created worldwide tension and paranoia, a Korean war few people could understand, and then the Vietnam war—which showed that what Walt Whitman once heralded as "Nature without check," the "original energy" of America, had been channeled into forms of exploitation and imperialism, giving rise to riots in the ghettos, factionalism in major institutions, and a revolution in taste and manners. The acceleration also gathered its impetus from new forms of electronic communication, computerization, space exploration, and the growth of multinational industries; it would continue to gain momentum in the experience of Watergate and the energy crisis. On the one hand, we are living with the results of unchecked energy—and Whitman's metaphor has become frighteningly literal. On the other hand, we are living with the results of a gathering rationalism that has sped up communications and made more information available as it has overloaded our circuits and subjected us to the possibility of total if undefinable control. Henry Adams had also foreseen this paradox: The child born in 1900 would . . . be born into a new world which would not be a unity but a multiple. Adams tried to imagine it, and an education that would fit it. He found himself in a land where no one had ever penetrated before; where order was an accidental relation obnoxious to nature; artificial compulsion imposed on motion; against which every free energy of the universe revolted; and which, being merely occasional, resolved itself back into anarchy at last. He could not deny that the law of the new multiverse explained much that had been most obscure, especially the persistently fiendish treatment of man by man; the perpetual effort

of society to establish law, and the perpetual revolt of society against the law it had established; the perpetual building up of authority by force, and the perpetual appeal to force to overthrow it; the perpetual symbolism of a higher law, and the perpetual relapse to a lower one; the perpetual victory of the principles of freedom, and the perpetual conversion into principles of power; but the staggering problem was the outlook ahead into the despotism of artificial order which nature abhorred. Pynchon gives palpable shape to the "new world" Adams tried to imagine—in his fictional landscapes and the very form of his novels, which are at once multiple and monolithic, anarchic and ominously patterned. The landscape of V. (1963) is vast and inanimate. Called "Baedeker Land" by William Plater, it is populated by tourists (explorers, agents, hedonists, pursuers, sailors, wanderers, refugees, outcasts) and governed by an inescapable illusion of reality. If we find it difficult to keep track of the characters in V. (of Benny Profane as he aimlessly yo-yos, Herbert Stencil as he ceaselessly searches for V., V. as she continually transforms herself into new guises, and a host of cartoon characters who are always on the move), we also sense that they are moving in obedience to some universal but unnatural law. In The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) the "new world" is a megalopolis, sprawling incoherently but likened to a printed circuit. It is either an accidental conglomeration or a network of freeways, motels, used-car lots, suburban lounges, television stations, corporate industries, and communications systems. The novel develops through a series of similar and intricate plots that may be real or imagined, connected or disconnected, actually or apparently related to a series of events originating in the early days of modern history and involving the official mail service and its revolutionary counterpart. In Gravity's Rainbow the "new world" be-

THOMAS PYNCHON / 619 comes "the Zone" through which Tyrone Slothrop travels, trying to escape pursuers of both the allies and axis, who may all be knowing or unknowing agents of the multinational synthetics industry that burgeoned as a result of World War II. Now the very life force of the universe is also the force of death, manifesting itself in the shape of both Slothrop's erection and the V2 rocket. But, though Slothrop draws us into "the Zone," he disappears two-thirds of the way through a formless novel that is populated by hundreds of major and minor characters, that shifts its locus from one country to another, leaps from scientific formulas to the comics, from myth to Tin Pan Alley, from terror to slapstick—and yet ends where it began, with the nightmare of an approaching rocket. In the dark Orpheus movie theater we are addressed in the second person—it is our senseless nightmare and inescapable reality. And we are enjoined to sing along as the rocket "reaches its last unmeasurable gap above the roof.... Now everybody—" History, for both Adams and Pynchon, is accelerating out of control and yet is governed by an impersonal force. And both are obsessed with history at least partly because of their personal stake in it. Like Adams', Pynchon's ancestors played a distinguished, if not central, role in American history. William Pynchon, who becomes William Slothrop in Gravity's Rainbow, was a patent holder and treasurer of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, helped found both Roxbury and Springfield, and served as a magistrate at the witchcraft trials of Hugh and Mary Parsons. But he also wrote The Meritorious Price of Our Redemption (1650), a heretic tract correcting the "common Errors" of the New England Puritans, who condemned the book to be burned in the Boston marketplace. His descendants included Joseph Pynchon, who was in line for the governorship of Connecticut until he supported the British in the Revolution; the Reverend Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, president

of Trinity College, who corresponded with Nathaniel Hawthorne to protest his characterization of the Pynchon family in The House of Seven Gables (1851); a surgeon, Dr. Edwin Pynchon, who invented the kind of instruments that Dr. Schoenmaker would use for Esther's nose job in K; and a stockbroker, George M. Pynchon, who contributed to the military-industrial complex prior to World War II. But while Pynchon has a personal stake in American history, he does not view the past from a personal, let alone official, perspective— indeed, in "Entropy" and K he parodies Adams' speaking of himself in the third person. Quite on the contrary, Pynchon strives for anonymity, as if he were trying to become one of the dropouts of The Crying of Lot 49 or the preterite of Gravity's Rainbow, and searching for clues to his life is like entering one of his novels. Matthew Winston (to whose "Quest for Pynchon" I am indebted for the biographical information I have found) discovered that there is no picture of him on his book jackets or in the freshman register of his class at Cornell, that his transcript mysteriously vanished from the university, and that his service record was burned after an explosion at the navy office in St. Louis. The only facts Winston could uncover are the following. Pynchon was born in Glen Cove, New York, in 1937. In 1953 he accepted a scholarship to Cornell University. He entered in the Engineering Physics division of the College of Engineering, transferred to the College of Arts and Sciences as an English major, dropped out for two years to serve in the navy, and then returned to Cornell in 1957. During his last two years he was remembered as "the type to read books on mathematics for fun . . . one who started the day at 1 P.M. with spaghetti and a soft drink . . . and . . . read and worked on until 3 the next morning." He was a member of the editorial staff of the Cornell Writer. And it was during 1957-1959 that he wrote "The Small

620 I AMERICAN Rain," "Morality and Mercy in Vienna," "Low-Lands," "Entropy," and "Under the Rose" (later revised as a chapter in K). When he graduated in 1959, he turned down several fellowships, including a Woodrow Wilson, as well as the chance to teach creative writing at Cornell. Pynchon considered becoming a disk jockey (like Mucho Maas, in The Crying of Lot 49) and was a candidate for the position of film critic at Esquire, but decided to work on V. while living with friends in Manhattan. Within a few months he accepted a job as a technical writer with Boeing in Seattle. Two years later he left to complete K, which was published in 1963 and received the William Faulkner Award for the best first novel of the year. And that is all we know of Pynchon's personal life. Indeed, Winston—whose search is more interesting than the facts he uncovered—ends "not with a revelation of Thomas Pynchon, but with a fresh sense of my own preterite spirit." Nor is Pynchon's publisher any more privileged. On March 30, 1973, Viking Press took out a full-page ad in the New York Times with a picture of Gravity's Rainbow between excerpts from ten reviews. Across the top, in felt-pen script, is the message: "Dear Thomas Pynchon, we thought you'd like to see the first reviews for your book." Like Adams, Pynchon studied science. But Adams grasped only the outlines of what he read—admitting that he "greedily devoured" Henri Poincare "without understanding a single consecutive page," and insisting that a student of history has no need to understand the scientific ideas of great men. Moreover, if he was stirred by the revolutionary impact of modern science, he could not fully accept the loss of unity or break the hold of mechanistic explanation. The law of acceleration, by which he explained the dynamic of history, is classically mechanistic: it allows for neither discontinuity nor a change in the material properties of the

WRITERS

moving object. In contrast, Pynchon studied engineering science and worked at Boeing. Moreover, he was born well into the century that astonished Adams, and seems to see nothing but discontinuity. That is, he not only understands but also has fully assimilated the concepts of modern science—where unity gives way to multiplicity, order to disorder, progress to entropy, continuity to discontinuity, the law of causeeffect to the rule of probability, the ideal of certainty to the necessity of uncertainty. And, as I will try to show, Pynchon confronts the paradox that Adams only began to glimpse: of a "new world" that is absolutely anarchic and yet totally governed by an impersonal order. But first let me outline some fundamental concepts that underlie Pynchon's imaginative construction of the "new land." According to the classical Newtonian view, the physical universe was like a machine; its movement was continuous, and it could be completely explained in terms of matter and force. That is, through systematic investigation it would be possible to know all of its parts, formulate its laws with certainty, and harness its power for the benefit of man. At the end of the eighteenth century, Pierre Laplace postulated the ideal: An intellect which at a given instant knew all the forces acting in nature, and the position of all things of which the world consists . . . would embrace in the same formula the motions of the greatest bodies in the universe and those of the slightest atoms; nothing would be uncertain for it, and the future, like the past, would be present to its eyes. And the novel developed toward the same end—as the omniscient narrator, knowing the situation of all his characters and the laws of human motivation, embraced his world in a formula called the plot. By the end of the nineteenth century, devel-

THOMAS PYNCHON / 621 opments in thermodynamics were beginning to undermine the classical view. And Adams was no more ambivalent about the challenge than were some of the scientists who contributed to it. The first challenge arose from changing the model for the physical universe from a machine to a cylinder of gas. Alan Friedman, who is both a physicist and an illuminating reader of Pynchon, elucidates the consequences of this change in his useful "Science and Technology in Gravity's Rainbow.''' He points out that a cylinder no bigger than a can of hair spray contains a trillion atoms bouncing off one another trillions of trillions of times a second. And since it would be impossible to apply Sir Isaac Newton's laws directly to all of them, the scientist applies statistical law, computes the typical path of an atom, and predicts the total pressure with extreme accuracy. Sacrificed in this approach, though, is the ability and even the attempt to predict the behavior of any particular atom. Indeed, a particular atom may behave unpredictably—subject only to chance or accident. As a result, the scientist no longer thinks in terms of certainty but only of probability, which, however high, can never reach 100 percent. And while statistics are applied within the framework of Newton's laws, the framework is threatened by the shift in strategy and the acceptance of chance even as a practical convenience. Pynchon plays with the image of the unpredictable atom in The Crying of Lot 49 when Oedipa, preparing for a game of Strip Botticelli, accidentally knocks over a can of hair spray and cowers on the bathroom floor as it caroms off the walls. Still thinking in conventional terms, though, she imagines that God or a "digital machine" might have computed its path. Indeed, her search for order throughout the novel reflects her refusal to accept the law of the "new world." In Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon works with the image more seriously: Roger Mexico

can predict the striking pattern of the V-2 rockets with extreme accuracy, but never where a single rocket will land; and in this novel the antagonist Pointsman, rather than the protagonist, refuses to accept the limits of probability. Moreover, as Pynchon develops his singular form—or formlessness—from K to The Crying of Lot 49 to Gravity's Rainbow—the paths of his characters become less easy to plot. Alan Friedman also points out that the model of thermodynamics does not in itself challenge classical physics; it only leads to the application of statistics and probability. In fact, the first law of thermodynamics is a statement of classical unity, for it asserts the conservation of energy— that energy cannot be created or lost, but only transformed. But the second law, as Adams recognized, threatened the ideal of a perfect machine, the power of which could be harnessed for the benefit of man. It states that systems tend to run down in time, for processes tend toward disorder. "Entropy," the measure of disorder, is the title of an early Pynchon story that schematizes a theme developed imaginatively in all of his novels. Indeed, he recognizes that entropy is a measure not only of energy but also of information. According to Norbert Weiner, whose ideas were still being hotly discussed when Pynchon was in college, information is order; but, like energy, it is subject to disorganization in transit. Moreover, the very gathering of information (which, it was thought, enabled Maxwell's hypothetical demon to maintain order and to counter entropy) takes energy out of the system and contributes to the disorder. Anne Mangel argues that this is the ironic consequence of Oedipa's heroic quest: the more meanings and connections she finds, the more she contributes to the disorder of her world. But Pynchon also seems to have recognized that information may be defined as disorder rather than as order. In information theory, the

622 / AMERICAN more uncertain a message, the more information it can convey. And entropy, being a measure of increasing information, becomes a positive tendency. In this light, as Thomas Schaub points out, Oedipa's search offers the possibility of hope—although the more she, and the reader, learn about the Tristero, the more we are overwhelmed by the amount of information and its uncertainty. Indeed, in each of his novels Pynchon draws us into a search for order, where the information and uncertainty become overwhelming, and where the search itself, while necessary and even ennobling, tends toward disorder. But a key word in the second law of thermodynamics is "tends." A system tends to run down. We are back to probability. There is always a small chance of a system not running down—or of a force that counteracts thermodynamic entropy. The possibility of such a force is embodied in Pynchon's characters who search for order—Herbert Stencil in V.9 Oedipa Maas in The Crying of Lot 49, Slothrop in Gravity's Rainbow—as well as in the reader, whom Pynchon compels to join in the search. As I have pointed out, the search may contribute to the disorder. Moreover, the very intimation of order may be a form of paranoia—and in each of his novels Pynchon taps the power of this pervasive modern phenomenon. But he may be discovering a positive as well as a negative source in paranoia, for it leads not only to solipsism but also to genuine community. And if it becomes a form of modern religion, it is also shown to be a fundamental religious impulse throughout Western history. While thermodynamics threatened the classical view that scientists share with historians and artists, quantum mechanics demolished it. The science of elementary particles was just being formulated as Adams wrote The Education of Henry Adams (1918); in fact, the breakthrough was made by a man who anticipated

WRITERS

Adams' mentor, Josiah Gibbs, in recognizing the importance of thermodynamics. In 1900, Max Planck solved what had been an unsolvable problem by upsetting a fundamental assumption of classical physics: the continuity of nature. Although he struggled against having to accept it, he finally proved that light energy does not flow in a continuous stream but in bursts, jumps, discontinuous portions, or quanta. And in 1913, Niels Bohr used Planck's formula to show that electrons—considered one of the elementary particles of nature—jumped discontinuously from one orbit or level of energy to another. Werner Heisenberg went even further than Planck, establishing the principle of indeterminacy. Since elementary particles are extremely small and travel at extremely high speeds, to observe one with accuracy would be to disturb it. Moreover, the more certain one becomes of its location, the less certain the velocity; and the more certain the velocity, the less certain the location. And the indeterminacy can be measured by Planck's minute but absolutely constant proportion. The very act of observation causes uncertainty—as Pynchon shows in the failures of Herbert Stencil and Oedipa Maas. But Heisenberg—and Pynchon—go further, and show that indeterminacy inheres in nature itself. (Heisenberg's theory is borne out by a phenomenon well known to physicists and described by Milic Capek. When radioactive alpha particles with sufficient velocity are directed at an electrical barrier, they should mount it; with insufficient velocity they should be deflected. But if we are almost certain of their velocity, their position becomes uncertain. And there is a small probability—determined by Planck's constant—that some fast particles will be deflected and some slow particles will mount the wall. Which is exactly what happens.) If V. and The Crying of Lot 49 dramatize the uncertainty produced by a central character in

THOMAS PYNCHON / 623 the act of observation and investigation, Gravity's Rainbow shows that indeterminacy is inherent in Pynchon's world. For it lacks a central or unified observer even in the role of narrator. That is, the narrative voice and vantage shift so often, so discontinuously, and so disconcertingly that the narrator is never more than another indeterminate element in the field of the novel. The "new world" that Adams tried to imagine and that Pynchon invokes is like the world of modern physics. It is discontinuous and uncertain, acting not like a machine but like a cylinder of gas, and governed not by the laws of cause-effect but by the rule of probability. Since it consists of elements in continual motion and individually unpredictable, and since the motion tends toward disorder, the "new world" appears anarchic. But since probability rules, it is also governed by an impersonal and despotic order that may result from either accident or design. Still, uncertainty is both a threat and a promise. Indeed, an unofficial axiom—known paradoxically as "the totalitarian law of physics"—states that "anything not forbidden is compulsory." It is this principle that led imaginative scientists to predict the existence of such improbable objects as quarks and neutrinos. And it can also explain the imaginative possibilities Pynchon discovers even as he pictures the modern condition in its darkest light. I have attempted to explain {he conceptual basis of what Pynchon turns into the landscape and form of his fiction—which is not to say that Pynchon's fiction is abstract. For it is loaded, indeed overloaded, with precisely rendered physical detail and accurate facts. As a result, his most fantastic scenes are palpably credible. If they do not mirror, they magnify social, psychological, and historical reality. As Esther submits to a nose job in K, Pynchon not only provides a clinical account of the entire procedure: he also reveals the psychosexual needs of a young Jewish woman brought up on movies and

advertisements, the affluence of American society in the 1950's, the deftness and power of a surgeon, the technological terror barely suppressed by ordinary appearances, the Faustian drive culminating in the displacement of nature by plastics, and the alignment of the human with the inanimate. In The Crying of Lot 49, Pynchon draws us into the plastic megalopolis of the West Coast. When Oedipa prepares for a game of Strip Botticelli with Pierce Inverarity's agent in the Echo Courts Motel, she puts on enough of a wardrobe to satisfy a latter-day anthropologist: six pairs of panties in assorted colors, girdle, three pairs of nylons, three brassieres, two pairs stretch slacks, four half-slips, one black sheath, two summer dresses, half dozen A-line skirts, three sweaters, two blouses, quilted wrapper, baby blue peignoir and old Orion muu-muu. Bracelets then, scatterpins, earrings, a pendant. When Oedipa thinks about how Metzger discovered her in the motel she chose at random, when Metzger appears as Baby Igor on the television show they are watching, and when the commercials advertise the products of Inverarity's interlocking corporations, she begins to wonder "if it's all part of a plot." Thus Pynchon infects us with the paranoia of the 1960's. And in Gravity's Rainbow we are made to feel the cloying atmosphere of an English rooming house and the desperation of a hard-up American soldier as Slothrop enters the sitting room of Darlene's landlady and is compelled not only to stifle his desire but also to sample her prewar wine jellies: the safe-looking ribbed licorice drop that tastes like mayonnaise and orange peels, the stylized raspberry filled with what must be pure nitric acid, the miniature hand grenade with its tamarind glaze and center of cubeb berries and camphor gum, the sour gooseberry shell yielding to glutinous chunks saturated with powdered cloves. But, with the

624 I AMERICAN WRITERS V-2 rocket on its way, this episode also reveals the ambiguous fortitude of the English middle class. Moreover, it parodically reflects the sensuous taste of death that General Pudding developed in the World War I trenches and relishes in his masochistic rituals, and it foreshadows the dark playfulness of Captain Blicero's fairy-tale sadism as he oversees the development of the ultimate rocket. Indeed, Pynchon overwhelms us with concrete details, which critics continue to verify, not only of London during the rocket raids but also of the English intelligence operation, a general's memories of the Great War, the events leading to the development of the V-2, the Herero wars in South-West Africa, the reformation of the Turkic alphabet, American popular culture, the German film industry, the discpvery of synthetics, the multinational corporations that thrived and burgeoned during World War II. The physicality of Pynchon's world and the concrete facts that, as Edward Mendelson says, place him in the tradition of encyclopedic novelists, make his improbable stories frighteningly credible, and magnify social and psychological reality. But, presented with such incongruity, they are also the source of his comedy and, hence, of his affirmation. Pynchon may reveal the modern world as a wasteland but, unlike T. S. Eliot, he revels in the waste and disorder. In an early story called "Low-Lands," Dennis Flange leaves his home overlooking Long Island Sound for a garbage dump—where he can drink muscatel with his buddies and follow a beautiful gypsy through an old refrigerator, into a grotto of delight. This becomes the sewer in K, where Benny Profane hunts blind, albino alligators; the night world of Lot 49, where Oedipa discovers hundreds of people who have dropped out of the Republic and communicate by depositing letters in containers marked W.A.S.T.E.; and the underground of the Zone, where Tyrone Slothrop escapes by disappearing from Gravity's Rainbow.

Which is to say that while Pynchon, more than any other modern novelist, makes us feel the tangible threat of disorder, disorder also excites his imagination. In the short story "The Secret Integration," written after K and before The Crying of Lot 49, he focuses on a gang of children led by a boy genius. Grover Snodd's inventions do not always work, and his plans always go awry, creating problems that require new plans. But "it tickled Grover any time he could interfere with the scheming of grownups." And the elaborate, though continually unsuccessful, schemes of the boys shed light on the Tristero of Lot 49 and the preterite of Gravity's Rainbow. Pynchon, like Grover Snodd (who must be the nascent novelist, unless it was Grover Snodd who invented him) sees that the only way to fight the adult world—or the forces of waste, disorder, and death—is through a more creative mode of disordering. Pynchon's creativity, then, has its own demonic dimension. His impulse, like that of the devils in the medieval sotie plays, is to excite us—or bring us to life—through acts of sheer annihilation. And, if dangerous, this impulse is also moral. While still an undergraduate at Cornell, Pynchon wrote "Morality and Mercy in Vienna." The story centers on Cleanth Siegel, who finds himself becoming a confessor to the wild crew he meets at a party in Washington, D. C. He is exhilarated by the "still small Jesuit voice" inside him, which had inspired him once to set five hundred freshmen in motion, advancing on the women's dorms. Now it inspired him to make use of what he had learned in an anthropology course about Ojibwa lore—and goad a lonely Indian into massacring the guests. It would be a "moment of truth," a "miracle." And then the other, "gentle part of him" would sing kaddish for the dead and mourn "over the Jesuit's happiness, realizing however that this kind of penance was as good as any other." Pynchon has come a long way from his early short story. Still, Josephine

THOMAS PYNCHON / 625 Hendin concludes that he "is the genius of his generation . . . the Antichrist who offered up his own destructiveness to illuminate yours . . . the one man who realized that the moralist of our time would have to be the devil." Let us examine Pynchon's novels as they lead to the vision of Gravity's Rainbow, first, to see how he gives shape to the destructive power that governs his "new world"—whether by chance or by design—and, second, to grasp the singular morality of his demonic impulse. I will begin by placing Pynchon in the line of American writers who, like Adams, were aroused by the experience of acceleration, unchecked energy, or, as I will call it, senseless and ungovernable motion. Walt Whitman, sounding his "barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world," invokes his persona, his subject, and the form of his poem as "Nature without check with original energy." Pynchon, whose Gravity's Rainbow opens with "a screaming" that "comes across the sky," sounds a yawp that makes Whitman seem like the corresponding secretary of a 4-H club. And he invokes the world of his novel with an epigraph by Wernher von Braun: "Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation. ..." In the century between "Song of Myself" (1855) and Gravity's Rainbow, a signal feature of American literature had been "Nature without check with original energy"—in works that strain at the seams, that defy critical description and judgment, that succeed out of their sheer bravado and power. The barbaric yawp issues from such brilliant failures as Hart Crane's The Bridge (1930) and William Carlos Williams' Paterson (1946-1958), from the monumental exuberance of Thomas Wolfe, from the kaleidoscope of John Dos Passos' U.S.A. (1937), from the page-long sentences of William Faulkner's narrators as they try to grasp the ungraspable, from the "grun-tu-molani" of Saul Bellow's Henderson the Rain King (1959), from the lyric obscenity of Norman

Mailer's "disk jockey" evoking the myths and misdirected energy that brought America to Vietnam. The barbaric yawp gets louder and more dissonant. The unchecked energy becomes more potent and more destructive. And the writers deal with this energy in a much more ambivalent fashion. But our experience of this energy, or its dynamic, also undergoes a change that is reflected in the difference between Whitman's view of "Nature without check" and Pynchon's view of nature that knows only transformation. I will try to describe this change and develop an approach to Gravity's Rainbow, first, by distinguishing two forms that have given expression to the unchecked energy of America—the novel of movement and the novel of motion—and, then, by describing Pynchon's encounters with unchecked energy in his three novels. Let me begin by trying to define my key terms. Energy is the capacity to do work and the power to move. When energy is harnessed, controlled, purposeful, I will call it movement. When it is actualized toward no particular end, I will call it motion. Literary energy is the power to move a reader to laughter, pity, and fear. It is also the power to move language, images, characters, and action toward a climax, a conclusion, and a meaning. All good literature, of course, is endowed with energy. But it is interesting that we become aware of the energy, or speak of the energy, when the power of a literary work begins to exceed its form. Doesn't the fastidious critic commend the energy just before deriding the style of, say, Theodore Dreiser's American Tragedy (1925), or Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night (1956)? We begin to sense the energy of Whitman's "Song of Myself in the gaps between its discontinuous sections, stanzas, lines, or phrases, and in the discontinuities of its grammar. His typical stanza is an incomplete sentence—a series of subjects with no predicate, noun phrases with no verb. We may even de-

626 I AMERICAN WRITERS scribe it as a series of substantives with the potency of verbs, in which, as the substantives accumulate, the potency increases. It is in this sense that we recognize the energy of a work as it exceeds its form. And it is in this sense that the poem is "Nature without check with original energy." When we speak of movement in a literary work, we refer to a controlled energy and therefore can be more precise. For we can focus on what is going, as well as on the direction and pattern of its progress—and plot the movement of characters through time and space. F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925) and Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust (1939) both deal with the energy that Whitman glorified and that, undirected or misdirected, has become destructive. Both writers show the destructive energy just barely suppressed, and masked by the shimmering surfaces and tasteless facades. Both writers connect this energy with their particular visions of the American wasteland. Nevertheless, their visions are different in ways that go beyond the details of locale or history. And we can describe this difference in terms of movement or, specifically, in terms of goals, vehicles, motive power, and ends. The goal in The Great Gatsby is "the green light at the end of Daisy's dock," which Fitzgerald compares to the "green breast of the new world" that "flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes." The goal of West's characters is Hollywood, with its "Mexican ranch houses, Samoan huts, Mediterranean villas, Egyptian and Japanese temples, Swiss chalets, Tudor cottages, and every possible combination of these styles that lined the slopes of the canyon"—and, of course, Faye Greener. The vehicle for Fitzgerald is Gatsby, with his "heightened sensitivity to the promises of life," as seen through the eyes of Nick Carraway, a sensitive outsider rooted in the topsoil of American society. West's novel

contains a similar observer in Tod Hackett, but it is important to note that there is no sharply defined vehicle upon which he is focusing. The motive power for Gatsby, and for Nick, is a romantic striving; the motive power for West's characters is a vague but powerful momentum, sometimes described as the need to escape, sometimes as the drive to succeed. The end of The Great Gatsby is the destruction of the vehicle, the romantic protagonist, and the recognition of lost values—but the world remains intact. The end of The Day of the Locust is apocalypse, the destruction of the characters and the world of the novel. Fitzgerald, whose vision of life conformed to the conventions of historical evolution and the mechanics of cause-effect, makes the dynamics of movement in the traditional novel graphically clear, for he so clearly defines the goal, the vehicle, the motive power, and the end. Fitzgerald's 1920's may be symbolized in Gatsby's yellow roadster speeding toward Daisy's home under the eyes of T. J. Eckleburg. The vehicle progresses and accelerates along a straight line until it goes out of control and causes destruction. West's 1930's may be symbolized in the riot that concludes The Day of the Locust—the characters swirling irrationally, with increasing violence. West has experienced the loss of control and the destruction evoked by Fitzgerald, and has at least sensed that history does not progress and that effect does not so simply follow from cause. As a result, he creates a pattern of movement that is less easy to define. There is no vehicle. And while the novel is ostensibly linear (in that we follow the development of Tod Hackett from day to day), there is no direction, no meaningful pattern from point to point in the space and time of the novel. To put it another way, the apocalyptic ending is not caused by any choice or event in the novel. The Day of the Locust focuses on the motive

THOMAS PYNCHON / 627 energy rather than on a vehicle and its pattern of movement toward a goal; to describe the novel, therefore, we should speak not of movement but of motion. Motion is the process of movement without regard to what is moving. Its dynamic structure cannot be plotted in a linear, purposeful, or causal pattern; it can only be described as a process of transformations. When the transformations are irrational, when linking gives way to discontinuity and direction to aimlessness, we encounter the experience of "Nature without check with original energy." Whitman's "Song of Myself is designed to give the illusion of motion rather than of movement. Although the movement of the poem lacks any apparent direction, the poem does have a coherence; indeed, it is about relationship. It does have a center, the mind of the poet. And it does have an associative, if not logical, pattern of motion. Whitman could glorify "Nature without check with original energy" because he was incapable of imagining nature without check, because he believed in an ultimate coherence. Fitzgerald could see and even plot the effects of nature without check or misdirected energy, but he could not focus on the energy itself. West could focus on the energy lyrically or symbolically, but he knew of no other way to handle it than within the framework of a linear novel. As Pynchon approaches Gravity's Rainbow, he realizes all the implications of "the original energy" that early writers either could not accept or could not reflect in a literary form. He finally evolves a novel of motion rather than of movement—a novel that abrogates direction, that focuses on the senseless pattern of transformations that governs contemporary life. "'Where we going,' Profane said. The way we're heading,' said Pig. 'Move your ass.'" Benny Profane, Pig Bodine, Pappy Hod, Herbert Stencil, Sidney Stencil, Evan Godolphin,

Hugh Godolphin, Paola Maijstral, Victoria Wren, Vera Meroving, and Veronica Manganese move their asses all over the place in Pynchon's first novel—continually going, or seeming to go, in no other direction than the way they're heading. Indeed, K is about three kinds of movement that, when interconnected— or intercut—come together as unfocused, undirected, and ungovernable motion. Benny Profane—a schlemiel but not a coward, capable of feeling but not of attachment, disturbed by the inanimate but not prepared to act against it—rejects modern society by becoming a "yo-yo." He rides the shuttle back and forth, accepting whatever comes his way— a job, a drink, a woman, a fight, a trip to Malta. But he is always ready to cut loose when the connection becomes too secure. In a threatening world he maintains his equilibrium and a minimal identity by being constantly and aimlessly on the move. That the pattern of his movement is like a yo-yo suggests its psychological, if not its geographical, limits. Opposed to Benny is Herbert Stencil, whose movement since 1945 has been constant but purposeful. "His random movements before the war had given way to a great single movement from inertness to—if not vitality, then at least activity. Work, the chase—for it was V. he hunted . . . for no other reason than that V. was there to track down." The chase after V., with its ever-changing direction and elusive goal, allows Herbert Stencil to maintain his equilibrium in a world of space and time that reaches far beyond Benny's, and to maintain a minimal identity—as a stencil. The third kind of movement in K is manifest in the elder generation. Hugh Godolphin is an explorer. Sidney Stencil is a foreign agent, who goes wherever Whitehall tells him, and who "with no element to be out of" is "at home everywhere"—except, finally, in Malta. Victoria Wren, Vera Meroving, Veronica Manganese—

628 I AMERICAN WRITERS or V.—ends up as an agent for Mussolini. Even more than Stencil, she has no element to be out of and is at home everywhere. Her movement comes to be defined as "tourism": V. at the age of thirty-three (Stencil's calculation) had found love at last in her peregrinations through (let us be honest) a world if not created then at least described to its fullest by Karl Baedeker of Leipzig. This is a curious country, populated only by a breed called "tourists." Its landscape is one of inanimate monuments and buildings; near-inanimate barmen, taxi-drivers, bellhops, guides.... More than this it is two-dimensional, as is the Street, as are the pages and maps of those little red handbooks. As long as the Cook's, Travellers' Clubs and banks are open, the Distribution of Time section followed scrupulously,... the tourist may wander anywhere in this coordinate system without fear.... Tourism thus is supranational, like the Catholic Church, and perhaps the most absolute communion we know on earth: for be its members American, German, Italian, whatever, the Tour Eiffel, Pyramids, and Campanile all evoke identical responses from them; their Bible is clearly written and does not admit of private interpretation; they share the same landscapes, suffer the same inconveniences; live by the same pellucid time-scale. They are the Street's own. "Tourism," as we find it implicitly amplified in V., is a constant movement with constantly changing direction. But it differs from Profane's yo-yoism and from young Stencil's chase of or search for V. in that it is not volitional, in that the motive energy does not come from within. Tourism is not a choice to escape or to pursue, but to abdicate choice. It is an acknowledged or unacknowledged obedience—or following of some authoritative and unquestionable set of directions. Such obedience may be judged harmless, if mindless, when the tourist follows

a Baedeker. It may be judged benign if the agent as tourist follows the instructions of a "friendly" government. But it becomes suspect when we begin to recognize the colonialist objectives of the "friendly" government. And it becomes fully malign when the agent's instructions come from Mussolini. The destructive potential, indeed proclivity, of tourism is implied by the identification of Karl Baedeker with his fellow Leipziger, Kurt Mondaugen. For Mondaugen, who obediently travels to South-West Africa in pursuit of atmospheric radio disturbances, is associated with the most explicit colonialism and the most frightening impulses of fascism. Abdication of choice and of control lead to the loss of direction: we don't know where the characters are going, we can't tell the past from the present, we can't judge the political right from the political left, good from bad, comic from tragic. How are we, indeed, to judge the climax of the novel, in which Sidney Stencil (serving a government that will soon become an ally of Britain in the fight for freedom) and his former lover Veronica Manganese (serving an Italian faction not yet prepared to open a second front in the fight for total control) are both plotting to keep Malta free? And in which they join forces to compel the double agent Fausto Maijstral to leave their respective services and rejoin his pregnant wife? And how are we to judge the ending of the novel, in which Fausto's daughter Paola decides to rejoin her husband, Pappy Hod? For we can never understand the motivation of V., or of Paola, who continues to wear V.'s ivory comb. That is, we can never understand what moves them or where they are moving. By the end of V. there is a total confusion, or merging, of all moral directions, and we come to sense that the three different kinds of movement are one motion: the motion of unchecked energy. There is no difference among the choice

THOMAS PYNCHON / 629 of escape, the choice of pursuit, and the choice of giving up choices. To become a human yo-yo is as mindless as to pursue an elusive goal or to become a tourist, or to become an agent. Each choice is as mechanical or aimless or menacing as that of SHROUD or SHOCK, or Esther as she submits to a nose job, or V. as she displays her glass eye with the clock iris—or the children who leave their games to undress the wounded priest and discover V., dig the star sapphire from her bleeding navel with a rusty bayonet, and run off with the clock iris. Yet while V. is about motion, it is not in motion. It follows the capricious string of Benny's yo-yo and the trail of a woman whose name and shape are constantly transformed. We never know where we're going, except that it's the way we're heading, and we're heading from place to place and time to time in ways that are often bewildering. Nonetheless, the novel is not without check; and in the end we know where we have been. For V. is governed by an omniscient narrator, who tells the story by intercutting one strand of the complex plot with another—but all along he holds the story together in his mind and can tie up the loose ends in an epilogue. The first intercutting, of Rachel Owlglass and her MG into the story of Benny and Paola, is soon recognized to be a simple, associative flashback: "the sinister vision of Pig and that Harley Davidson alone in an alley at three in the morning" reminds Benny of Rachel and her MG. And by the epilogue we discover that all the disturbing jumps in the multistranded narratives have been simple flashbacks, or intercutting from one plot line to another. The intercutting has been the narrator's way of reinforcing the enigma of V. and the confusion of moral direction. It has also been a technique designed to maintain suspense throughout the chase, or to keep the story moving. It is important to recognize that the narrative crosscutting employed by Pynchon in V. creates

the illusion of discontinuity while holding the novel in check, or together. Indeed, it is like the crosscutting of the early movie chase scenes, which undoubtedly influenced Pynchon. Crosscutting is what effected the experience of the chase. Suspense is created as D.W.Griffith cuts back and forth between the helpless victim and her rescuer, but in the scene of the last-minute rescue, the two lines of action are drawn together. And while planning the crosscutting of four very different stories in Intolerance, each of which culminates in a last-minute rescue, he declared the .. .stories will begin like four currents looked at from a hilltop. At first the four currents will flow apart, slowly and quietly. But as they flow, they grow nearer and nearer together, and faster and faster, until in the end . . . they mingle in one mighty river of expressed emotion. Narrative crosscutting, therefore, derives from a sense of purpose, from a goal, and, in the novel, from the stable perspective of the narrator. At the end of Pynchon's first novel, V. remains an enigma; but what happens in the life of Herbert Stencil as he pursues her becomes clear, and the pattern of his movement secures the pattern of Benny Profane's. Moreover, the goal—where the crosscut plot lines are drawn together—and the sense of purpose implied in the narrator's design give coherence to the purposeless motion of the characters and constrain the runaway energy. The main characters have been going in no other direction than the way they've been heading, but their paths culminate in a pattern that the reader can finally plot. In Pynchon's second novel, he abandons the stable, omniscient perspective to focus on Oedipa Maas's developing consciousness; the narrator knows only what Oedipa knows at each step in her quest. And the narrative proceeds not by the intercutting of plot lines but by the addition—indeed overloading—of information

630 I AMERICAN into a simple linear plot line. Oedipa's quest, her movement and goal throughout the novel, is purposeful—as she tries to piece together and comprehend the limits of Pierce Inverarity's estate. But as the information accumulates, it undermines the purposeful movement of the plot line and evokes an experience closer to the dynamic of motion that Pynchon will achieve in Gravity's Rainbow. The steps in Oedipa's quest can be laid out in a chronological, continuous pattern. One day she receives a letter naming her executor of Pierce Inverarity's estate. She drives from her home to the Echo Courts in San Narciso, where she unexpectedly meets Pierce's lawyer. Then she goes to The Scope, a bar near Yoyodyne (Pierce's aerospace empire), where she learns about the Tristero; to the Fangoso Lagoons, where she learns about Pierce's investment in bone charcoal; to a performance of The Courier's Tragedy, where she discovers the fictional or historical connections or parallels with the Tristero and the uses of bone charcoal; to Yoyodyne, where she learns about the Tristero's current operations; through the city to discover a large but inconspicuous community that communicates through the Tristero's system of W.A.S.T.E. containers; to the home of Emory Bortz to learn about the Tristero's ancient struggle against Thurn and Taxis; and finally to Ghengis Cohen's stamp auction to await the crying of lot 49—and what she hopes will be the ultimate piece in the wild jigsaw puzzle of Pierce's estate, Western civilization, and her own identity. More important than the linearity of action is the linear development of Oedipa Maas from a flat caricature to a sympathetic and heroic character, and the development of her mechanical responses to a series of choices involving feeling and thought. She begins as a stereotype housewife returning from a Tupperware party where the hostess had put too much kirsch in

WRITERS

the fondue, develops into a businesswoman bent on executing Pierce's estate, then into a woman driven by the need to know and, finally, by the need to connect. At the climax of her search, having discovered countless pieces of information, she comes upon a derelict sailor and is "overcome all at once by the need to touch him.... Exhausted, hardly knowing what she was doing, she came the last three steps and sat, took the man in her arms, actually held him, gazing out of her smudged eyes down the stairs, back into the morning." The crying she awaits at the end of the novel, as critics have noted, reflects her compassion as well as her need to understand. But the linear development of the plot—of the action of the novel and of the protagonist— is only one dimension of The Crying of Lot 49, for as Oedipa discovers more information in her quest, she encounters kinds of plotting that are neither continuous nor progressive, and that defy the plotting of epistemological, ideological, or moral direction. Arriving in San Narciso and choosing a motel at random, she is surprised by the entrance of Pierce's lawyer, Metzger, who claims to have found her by scouring the motels all day. Her television set is showing Baby Igor, an old film that Metzger claims to have starred in as a child. "Either he made up the whole thing, Oedipa thought suddenly, or he bribed the engineer over at the local station to run this, it's all part of a plot, an elaborate, seduction, plot." And the commercials involve a plot with far wider scope than Metzger's seduction of Oedipa. Fangoso Lagoons and Beaconsfield Cigarettes are two of Pierce's interests. Beaconsfield Cigarettes use a filter made from bone charcoal. Much of the bone charcoal, we later learn, came via the Cosa Nostra from a lake in Italy, where a company of American troops had lost a battle of attrition to the Nazis in 1943. We also learn that a group of Wells Fargo riders

THOMAS PYNCHON / 631 had been massacred at one of the Fangoso lakes; the charcoal from their bones was used to blacken the faces of the killers in subsequent raids. Moreover, the bones of the ambushed battalion in The Courier's Tragedy had been fished up and turned into charcoal, which the duke used for his perfidious correspondence. At this point we might reflect on two kinds of plotting that are ingeniously confused in The Crying of Lot 49. First is the simple plotting of the action and the protagonist's development— the rational plan, chronological sequence, progressive development of Oedipa's quest—to which is added the more rational but incredibly complicated plot of The Courier's Tragedy. Second is the plotting for salacious, commercial, and political ends—the rational planning and steps calculated to seduce Oedipa, sell products, secure markets, and establish empires. To these we might add a third kind of plotting, which is historical. As Oedipa picks up fragments of information that lead from her present to the past, she is driven by a stronger and stronger compulsion to connect the fragments into a rational order—to plot a causal sequence of events that would explain the present in terms of the past. But the more Oedipa learns, the more difficult it is for her, and for us, to make connections. The main reasons for this difficulty are the increasing amount of data and their increasing similarity. If we could only discriminate and define the opposing forces, we could discover what led to what. But the central problem for Oedipa, and for the reader who is limited to her perspective, is in defining—or plotting—direction. And we come to discover that historical or causal direction depends upon our ability to define values—or to plot ideological direction. Throughout Western history, Oedipa learns, consolidation and system have given rise to individualistic rebellion, but we can never determine whether the rebellion is to the right or the

left. The Peter Pinguid Society, which is so conservative that it considers the John Birch Society left-wing, was founded by a man who opposed industrial capitalism—because it led to Marxism and was, therefore, part of the same "creeping horror." Moreover, the struggle for freedom requires consolidation and system, but we can never tell whether the ultimate goal is liberty or tyranny. The novel focuses on what is central to both liberty and tyranny: the history of communication, or courier systems. The Tristero was a rebellious underground courier system that opposed the Thurn and Taxis (the established European mail service from 1300 to 1867); when it appeared in America, it fought the established Pony Express and Wells Fargo disguised as blackfaced outlaws or Indians. But in the middle of the seventeenth century, the Tristero faced a major decision. The conservatives wanted to keep the Tristero radical, as the opposition to the established central mail service. The militant radicals wanted to join the Thurn and Taxis, to make all of Europe dependent on them: "We, who have so long been disinherited, could be the heirs of Europe." From this point on, we cannot tell who is plotting against whom. Nor can we plot the ideological direction of the plotters. As a result, we can make no causal links—nor fix the fragments of information into a graspable pattern. When Oedipa encounters the community of silent dropouts, who communicate secretly and independently by subverting the interoffice delivery system of Yoyodyne, we are led to wonder if this is a comic triumph of the underground, or if W.A.S.T.E. is not finally the product of the giant aerospace corporation itself. While one view leads us to a Utopia of political, psychological, and sexual anarchism, the other leads us to a frighteningly successful totalitarianism. When we remember that the unpredictable Pierce Inverarity held a large block

632 I AMERICAN WRITERS of shares in Yoyodyne, we are led to see the whole affair as a hoax on the part of a man rich enough to buy a cast of thousands—and the threat becomes diabolical. Pierce Inverarity is like V., except that he is not the goal of the chase, nor do we ever even see him. All we know of him is the disembodied voice that Oedipa recalls having awakened her at three in the morning a year before the action begins: ... a voice beginning in heavy Slavic tones as second secretary at the Transylvanian Consulate, looking for an escaped bat; modulated to comic-Negro, then on into hostile Pachuco dialect, full of chingas and maricones; then a Gestapo officer asking her in shrieks did she have any relatives in Germany and finally his Lamont Cranston voice, the one he'd talked in all the way down to Mazatlan. Lamont Cranston was the "Shadow" of radio fame, an invisible agent capable of appearing anywhere, anytime. Pierce Inverarity is introduced as a shadow undergoing continual transformation. Throughout the rest of the novel he is identified only with San Narciso—the place to which Oedipa drives to begin her quest. San Narciso "had been Pierce's domicile, and headquarters: the place he'd begun his land speculating in ten years ago, and so put down the plinth course of capital on which everything afterward had been built, however rickety or grotesque, toward the sky...." It was "less an identifiable city than a grouping of concepts— census tracts, special purpose bond-issue districts, shopping nuclei, all overlaid with access roads to its own freeway." And, as the novel develops, Oedipa learns that San Narciso has "no boundaries" in space or time. Pierce Inverarity is shadowy and gratuitously protean; San Narciso is not only the locus of the action but also the bewildering field of its plot-

less plotting. It is also the shifting ground of the developing figure of the novel—the simple linear plot line that identifies Oedipa Maas. As Oedipa pursues her quest—to comprehend San Narciso—and gathers more information, an agon develops between the figure and ground of the novel. The figure is continually threatened by the ground: the plot line is continually in danger of being absorbed by the plotless plotting. And Oedipa herself is in continual danger of giving in. If she could only give in: "She had only to drift tonight, at random, and watch nothing happen, to be convinced it was purely nervous, a little something for her shrink to fix." But if she did give in and drift at random—like Mucho with his drugs, Hilarius with his paranoia, Metzger with his opportunism, Jesus Arrabal with his political persistence, or dropouts who rebel against the system that may be coopting them—if she did give up her purposeful pursuit, she would become part of the cast of aimless caricatures that form the ground of the novel. Oedipa continues her pursuit: her mechanical response has developed into curiosity, and then into the humanistic need to know and connect; we follow the evolution of a self, or a self-consciousness that ultimately needs others to find the limits of its identity. In the end, Oedipa's purposeful movement remains distinguished from the senseless motion of society and history. The figure of the plot stands out against the plotless plotting of its ground. But the overall experience is not so simple or hopeful. Stanley Koteks has introduced Oedipa to the concept of Maxwell's Demon, who by sorting molecules was supposed to sustain order and maintain the purposeful movement of the system. The Demon, that is, was supposed to counteract entropy, the inevitable development of disorder and exhaustion of energy. But Maxwell's successors discovered that the new energy added to the system—the mental energy re-

THOMAS PYNCHON / 633 quired for gathering, sorting, and piecing together information—would only contribute to the mounting disorder, and thus to the entropy. And, as Anne Mangel points out in her instructive discussion of Maxwell's Demon in the novel, Oedipa, in pursuing information and order, only contributes to the disorder and entropy of her world. By the end of the novel, Mucho has turned from Oedipa's disk jockey husband into a solipsistic drug addict, Dr. Hilarius from her psychoanalyst into a madman, and Oedipa herself from a suburban housewife into an isolated fanatic driven by her vision of disconnection. In the end, that is, Oedipa stands out clearly against Pierce's formless San Narciso, as does the path of her movement from the senseless motion that threatens to absorb it. But as the figure stands out against the ground, it is also disconnected from it. And the system as a whole is composed of disconnected fragments moving at different speeds in different directions—like the "anarchist miracle" of the deaf mutes dancing. The story line of Gravity's Rainbow, unlike that in K and The Crying of Lot 49, is unplottable, for it lacks a central subject (vehicle) or even a hierarchy of subjects, and it moves from place to place without any apparent reason or purpose. First we center on Pirate Prentice, then shift to Roger Mexico, then to Tyrone Slothrop, whose love affairs take place in a pattern identical to that of the V-2 explosions. Now we think we have the protagonist, and we watch him being pursued by the agents of Pointsman in the name of the war effort. But, as Slothrop's pursuers multiply and he escapes them (or thinks he does) in a white zoot suit, our frame of reference begins to shift. It shifts completely when he changes to a Wagnerian costume—a helmet with horns, a pair of buckskin trousers, a green cape emblazoned with a red R—to become Rocketman, and when he later disguises himself in a pig costume. Rock-

etman—pursued by agents of the right and of the left, and pursuing not only what will become the ultimate rocket of the future but also the genesis of his own past—becomes the center of our attention for most of the novel. Then he disappears from sight, and our attention is centered now on the Russian Tchitcherine; now on the Nazi Captain Blicero (code name for Lieutenant Weissmann), who controls the ultimate rocket; now on the African Enzian, half brother of Tchitcherine and former lover of Weissmann. And, as if this is not sufficiently confusing, we attend at one time or another to a cast of characters that takes up four doublecolumned pages in Scott Simmon's useful index. Moreover, we are taken suddenly and erratically from London to Holland, back to London, to France, to Switzerland, and to "the Zone" of occupied Germany—which, despite the enormous number and authenticity of details, loses its geographical locus and becomes as abstract as its designation. Now we are in Germany, then back to London, and suddenly in a California movie theater. This does not take into account the innumerable dislocations as we are shuttled into the pasts of hundreds of characters—or to Africa, where black history seems to be developing to mirror the white history of northern Europe. Nor does it take into account the dislocations in style—which shifts without signal, reason, or pattern, from involved to detached, from scientific to slang, from suspenseful narrative to popular song, from scrupulous realism to antic cartooning. Dislocation, discontinuity, and confusion characterize our large impressions of the plot, characterization, and style. But so do speed, directionless motion, and transformation. Let me develop this point by focusing on the deceptively simple opening of the novel. Gravity's Rainbow begins with a serious, realistic description of an evacuation.

634 I AMERICAN A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now. ... No light anywhere He's afraid of the way the glass will fall—soon—it will be a spectacle: the fall of a crystal palace. The "he" who has been afraid of the way the glass will fall is absorbed into a "they" who travel by train through a dark countryside and stop at an unnamed city. They are taken up in a building filled with "thousands of ... hushed rooms without light." There is nothing to do but lie and wait, listening to the screaming of missiles that have already exploded, wondering whether one of them will come in the darkness or bring its own light. Soon the "he" is again in focus and given a name, Captain Geoffrey ("Pirate") Prentice. And we witness a scene where Teddy Bloat, hooked onto an ebony baluster by an empty champagne split in his hip pocket, begins to fall; and where Pirate "leaps off of the cot and kicks it rolling on its casters" so that "Bloat, plummeting, hits square amidships with a great strum of bedsprings." Before we follow Pirate to his rooftop banana garden, we may turn back to see how we got from "they" to "he" and from the hushed room, waiting in terror, to Pirate's antic maisonette. We must have missed something. But there's the link; it is italicized for us. The anonymous "they" are wondering and waiting for the light. And the next paragraph begins: "But it is already light." As we sit looking at the italicized link, though, we discover that the transition is only syntactical—that the daylight came offstage, or offpage; that without our realizing it, we have been transported in time and space. That, indeed, we have made what the physicist might call a quantum jump. A quantum jump is the discontinuous movement of an electron from one ring of an atom to

WRITERS

another, or the discontinuous transformation of an electron from one level of energy to another. And the model of the quantum jump illuminates three important features of the opening pages, which Pynchon elaborates with even more imagination and daring in the course of his novel. First is the discontinuity: a quantum jump is a discontinuous motion or a discontinuous development. The novel, as we have seen, is discontinuous in terms of character focus, plot movement, and stylistic development. Second is the abrogation of direction: just as the rocket explodes before it arrives, defying the directions of time and space, so the novel moves from one place to another and from one time to another in all possible directions. Third, and perhaps most important, is transformation. Whether we describe the electron as circling on a new ring at a new speed or as endowed with a new amount of energy, the electron—which is nothing but speed and energy—has been transformed. And our primary experience in the novel is of subjects and subject matter that can be defined only in terms of speed and energy, undergoing constant and inexplicable transformation. Gravity's Rainbow is about speed and energy, which Pynchon, like the modern physicist, sees as the basic reality. Like the modern physicist, Pynchon forces us to discard those categories of thought that have mentally secured us, and accept a world where there are no links, no directions, but only continual transformation. Where Pynchon differs from the physicist is that he brings into his world the reality of politics and human values. He denies us the security of traditional forms, categories, directions, links— but forces us to sympathize, judge, and choose. There seem to be no direction, no links, just random events. As Roger Mexico would have it, the world obeys only the law of probability. But, following the most disturbing transformation,

THOMAS PYNCHON / 635 lines come together, everything seems interconnected and to follow Pointsman's laws of cause and effect: Slothrop swings the long keychain of his zoot, in some agitation. A few things are immediately obvious. There is even more being zeroed in on him from out there than he'd thought, even in his most paranoid spells. Imipolex G shows up on a mysterious "insulation device" on a rocket being fired with the help of a transmitter on the roof of the headquarters of Dutch Shell, who is co-licensee for marketing the Imipolex—a rocket whose propulsion system bears an uncanny resemblance to that developed by British Shell at around the same time . . . and oh, oh boy, it just occurs to Slothrop now where all the rocket information is being gathered—into the office of who but Mr. Duncan Sandys, Churchill's own son-in-law, who works out of the Ministry of Supply located where but at Shell Mex House, for Christ's sake.... But if so much is being zeroed in, who is zeroing in on whom? What is the ultimate source? Where does it all come together? Who's on what side? What's the ultimate goal? Where are they at, where are they going? Escaping, perhaps, in Switzerland, Slothrop asks, "Why are all you folks helping me like this? For free and all?" "Who knows?" comes the answer. "We have to play patterns. There must be a pattern you're in, right now." Gravity's Rainbow draws us into a world of symmetrical, repetitive, but undefinable and unnavigable dynamic patterns. There is always a pattern that we are in, but the patterns are transformed, even when they seem to repeat themselves, and we never know how to evaluate the pattern we are in or how we have gotten from one to the other. The major pattern, of course, is the V-2 rocket, which, when it loses its thrust, goes "pure ballistic" and becomes

that "purified shape latent in the sky." The shape is like the distribution curve of the explosions, and throughout the novel we sense the threat of death and ultimate destruction, of inevitability, but also of random distribution or pure chance. On the other hand, the dominant pattern is also the shape of the rainbow, the shape of Rocketman's helmet and horns, of Slothrop's erection; and we also sense throughout the novel the promise of sexual potency. The promise is sometimes perverted; most of the sexual force is associated with sadism, masochism, and destructive escalation. But the perverted sex is countered by the love of Roger Mexico and Jessica Swanlake, however ephemeral that may be. It is also countered by the vitality of Tyrone Slothrop, not only in the joys and frustrations of his sexual encounters but also in his pursuit of freedom and justice—just as the darkness and despair of the novel are countered by its fecundity and comic spirit. We have become accustomed to ambiguity in literature. Why, then, are we so disoriented by the ambiguity of Gravity's Rainbowl Perhaps because the novel is not ambiguous, or because we must reexamine the experience of ambiguity. Ambiguous derives from ambi, meaning "both," and agere, meaning "to drive." The root meaning forms an illuminating metaphor: to drive in both directions. Jay Gatsby is ambiguous because his energy has been misdirected; in that sense we see him driving in both directions. Ambiguity, then, belongs to the novel of movement, where the choices, actions, and destinies of characters can be plotted; where the subject, or vehicle, is clearly delineated; and where it moves from point to point in a continuous direction. But in the novel of motion there is no fixed subject, continuity, or direction. The patterns are all there are: now absolutely random, now exercising total control,

636 I AMERICAN WRITERS now threatening, now promising; ultimately undefinable, unmeasurable, discontinuous, and unnavigable. And we have to learn to play the patterns. The subject of Gravity's Rainbow, like that of The Great Gatsby and The Day of the Locust, is the "original energy"—unchecked, directionless, and accelerating. Fitzgerald plots the effects of this energy in terms of classical movement. West evokes an experience of motion, but he contains the energy of the novel in the form of the traditional novel of movement. With Pynchon we can say the energy exceeds the form—that is, if we consider form as a container. But Pynchon has finally developed a form, the characteristic of which is not to contain. In K he generated the experience of unchecked energy in the mindless movement of his characters. In The Crying of Lot 49 he thwarted the purposeful movement of his developing heroine by overloading information onto a simple plot line, or by undermining the plot line with a senselessly shifting ground. In Gravity's Rainbow he has composed a novel in terms of energy and motion and patterns undergoing constant, alogical transformation. Slothrop learns that the . . . War has been reconfiguring time and space into its own image. The track runs in different networks now. What appears to be destruction is really the shaping of railroad spaces to other purposes, intentions he can only, riding through it for the first time, begin to feel the leading edges o f . . . . In the 1970's we learned the same lesson. We may also have learned that the conventional ways of grasping history—including that of Henry Adams—are inadequate and false, because history cannot be grasped, or contained. The experience of reading Gravity's Rainbow is like riding through modern history for the first

time, without maps and seat belts that have given us a false sense of direction and security. And we can begin to feel the leading edges. Pynchon has subjected us to the experience of unchecked energy, of history moving without sense or direction. And, with a kind of demonic glee, he seems to have reveled in the destruction of factitious order. Having undermined our security, he leaves us precarious but free, as well as responsible for our judgments and choices of direction.

Selected Bibliography WORKS OF THOMAS PYNCHON BOOKS

K Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1963. The Crying of Lot 49. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1966. Gravity's Rainbow. New York: Viking Press, 1973. Slow Learner. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1984. STORIES AND ARTICLES

"Morality and Mercy in Vienna." Epoch, 9:195-213 (Spring 1959). "The Small Rain." Cornell Writer, 6:14-32 (March 1959). "Entropy." Kenyan Review, 22:277-92 (1960). "Low-Lands." New World Writing, 16:85-108 (1960). "Under the Rose." Noble Savage, 3:223-51 (1961). "The Secret Integration." Saturday Evening Post, 237:36-37, 39, 42-44, 46-49, 51 (December 19, 1964). "The World (This One), the Flesh (Mrs. Oedipa Maas) and the Testament of Pierce Inverarity." Esquire, 64:170-73, 296, 298-303 (December 1965). "The Shrink Flips." Cavalier, 16:32-33, 88-92 (March 1966). "A Journey into the Mind of Watts." New York Times Magazine, June 12, 1966, pp. 34-35, 78, 80-82, 84.

THOMAS PYNCHON / 637 "Pros and Cohns." New York Times Book Review, July 17, 1966, pp. 22, 24. (Letter to the editor on the origin of the name Genghis Cohen.) BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL STUDIES (Many of the essays published in the three collections listed below were first published elsewhere.) Fowler, Douglas. Reader's Guide to "Gravity's Rainbow." Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1979. Friedman, Alan J. "Science and Technology in Gravity's Rainbow" (To be published.) Kolodny, Annette, and Daniel James Peters. "Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49: The Novel as Subversive Experience." Modern Fiction Studies, 19:79-87 (Spring 1973). Levine, George, and David Leverenz, eds. Mindful Pleasures: Essays on Thomas Pynchon. Boston: Little, Brown, 1976. (Contains Richard Poirier, "The Importance of Thomas Pynchon"; Catharine R. Stimpson, "Pre-Apocalyptic Atavism: Thomas Pynchon's Early Fiction"; Tony Tanner, "Caries and Cabals"; W. T. Lhamon, Jr., "Pentecost, Promiscuity, and Pynchon's V.\ From the Scaffold to the Impulsive"; Anne Mangel, "Maxwell's Demon, Entropy, Information: The Crying of Lot 49"; William Vesterman, "Pynchon's Poetry"; George Levine, "Risking the Moment: Anarchy and Possibility in Pynchon's Fiction"; Scott Sanders, "Pynchon's Paranoid History"; Edward Mendelson, "Gravity's Encyclopedia"; Marjorie Kaufman, "Briinnhilde and the Chemists: Women in Gravity's Rainbow"', David Leverenz, "On Trying to Read Gravity's Rainbow"; Mathew Winston, "The Quest for Pynchon.") Mendelson, Edward, ed. Pynchon: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: PrenticeHall, 1978. (Contains Tony Tanner, "V. and V2"; F. S. Schwarzbach, "A Matter of Gravity," and a reply by Joseph Rosenbaum; Joseph W. Slade, "'Entropy' and Other Calamities"; Robert Sklar, "An Anarchist Miracle: The Novels of Thomas Pynchon"; Roger B. Henkle, "Pynchon's Tapestries on the Western Wall"; Edward Mendelson, "The Sacred, the Profane, and The Crying of Lot 49" \ James Nohrnberg, "Pynchon's Pdraclete"; Frank Kermode, "Decoding the Trystero"; Richard Poirier, "Rocket Power"; George Levine,

"V-2"; Philip Morrison, review for Scientific American-, Michael Seidel, "The Satiric Plots of Gravity's Rainbow" \ Paul Fussell, "The Brigadier Remembers.") McConnell, Frank. "Thomas Pynchon and the Abreaction of the Lord of Night." Four Postwar American Novelists. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977. Pp. 159-97. Ozier, Lance W. "The Calculus of Transformation: More Mathematical Imagery in Gravity's Rainbow" Twentieth Century Literature, 21:193-210 (May 1975). Pearce, Richard, ed. Critical Essays on Thomas Pynchon. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980. (Contains Richard Wasson, "Notes on a New Sensibility: Pynchon's K"; Richard Patteson, "What Stencil Knew: Structure and Certitude in Pynchon's K"; John Hunt, "Comic Escape and Antivision: K and The Crying of Lot 49"\ Josephine Hendin, "What Is Thomas Pynchon Telling Us?"; Thomas Schaub, "A Gentle Chill, an Ambiguity: The Crying of Lot 49" \ Speer Morgan, "Gravity's Rainbow: What's the Big Idea?"; Lawrence C. Wolfley, "Repression's Rainbow: The Presence of Norman O. Brown"; Steven Weisenburger, "The End of History? Thomas Pynchon and the Uses of the Past"; Scott Simmon, "Beyond the Theater of War: Gravity's Rainbow as Film"; Alan J. Friedman and Manfred Puetz, "Science as Metaphor in Gravity's Rainbow" \ Elaine B. Safer, "The Allusive Mode and Black Humor in Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow"', Marcus Smith and Khachig Tololyan, "The New Jeremiad: Gravity's Rainbow"] Maureen Quilligan, "Thomas Pynchon and the Language of Allegory"; Richard Pearce, "Where're They Going, Where're They at? Thomas Pynchon and the American Novel in Motion"; Beverly Clark and Caryn Fuoroli, "A Review of Major Pynchon Criticism.") Plater, William M. The Grim Phoenix: Reconstructing Thomas Pynchon. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978. Puetz, Manfred. "Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49: "The World Is a Tristero System." Mosaic, 7:125-37 (1974). Redfield, Robert, and Peter L. Hays. "Fugue as a Structure in Pynchon's 'Entropy.'" Pacific Coast Philology, 12:50-55 (October 1977). Richardson, Robert O. "The Absurd Animate in

638 I AMERICAN Thomas Pynchon's V.: A Novel." Studies in the Twentieth Century, 9:35-58 (1972). Schaub, Thomas. Pynchon: The Voice of Ambiguity. Champaign: University of Illinois Press. (To be published.) Siegel, Mark Richard. Pynchon: Creative Paranoia in "Gravity's Rainbow." Port Washington, N. Y.: Kennikat, 1978. Simmon, Scott. "A Character Index: Gravity's Rainbow" Critique, 16:54-67 (December 1974). Slade, Joseph W. Thomas Pynchon. New York: Warner, 1974. . "Escaping Rationalization: Options for the Self in Gravity's Rainbow" Critique, 18:27-38 (1977). Stark, John. "The Arts and Sciences of Thomas Pynchon." Hollins Critic, 12:1-13 (1975).

WRITERS

Young, James Dean. "The Enigma Variations of Thomas Pynchon." Critique, 10:69-77 (1968). SCIENTIFIC

BACKGROUND

Capek, Milic. The Philosophical Impact of Contemporary Physics. New York: Van Nostrand, 1961. Cline, Barbara Lovett. Men Who Made a New Physics. New York: New American Library, 1965. Ostriker, Jeremiah P. "The Nature of Pulsars." Scientific American, 224:49 (January 1971). (For "totalitarian principle of physics.") Wiener, Norbert. The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society. Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, 1956. —RICHARD PEARCE

Delmore Schwartz

1913—1966

A better known through Saul Bellow's fictional

One cannot discuss Schwartz's work without also discussing his life, for he was an obsessively autobiographical writer. When one recalls that he came to prominence in the 1930's and 1940's, and that some of his most ardent admirers were New Critics such as Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom, this autobiographical emphasis seems a little surprising. It was fashionable at the time, among the poets Schwartz most valued, to insist on the impersonality of poetry. Although Ransom, Tate, and T. S. Eliot were sometimes more personal than they cared to admit, one must look ahead to the work of Robert Lowell, John Berryman, and Sylvia Plath in the 1960's to find poems that are personal to the same degree and in the same sense as many of Schwartz's. Whatever our conclusions about the artistic value of his poetry, Schwartz has a historical importance as the first confessional poet. In his autobiographical fiction he had the precedent of James Joyce and Marcel Proust. It is significant that Lowell, in his famous Paris Review interview of 1961, credited Schwartz with some influence on his change of style. Like Schwartz, Lowell had come to value "experience" more than "polish," and he wanted to reclaim for poetry the narrative complexity it had ceded to the novel. One might say that Lowell's Life Studies (1959) accomplishes what Schwartz had attempted, less successfully,

T present, Delmore Schwartz is probably

portrait in Humboldt's Gift than through his own writing. Many who have not read Schwartz know of him as the brilliant poet acclaimed as a genius in his early twenties, but doomed to decline into madness and early death. He is remembered more for his life than for his writing. Nonetheless, during the 1970's there was a modest increase of interest in Schwartz's work. In 1974, Richard McDougall published a short critical study of Schwartz in Twayne's United States Authors series. The excellent biography by James Atlas came out in 1977; since then we have had a selection of the stories, edited by Atlas, and a selection of "last and late poems," edited by Robert Phillips. There have been a number of articles, most of them by friends and contemporaries: William Barrett, Dwight Macdonald, Philip Rahv, Sidney Hook, Alfred Kazin, and Irving Howe. These essays contain some sharp insights that are informed by vivid firsthand memories of the man and the milieu behind the work. As the memory of Schwartz recedes into the past, his work will have to stand or fall on its own. Its revaluation, by a generation to whom he is "Schwartz" and not "Delmore," has barely begun. In tracing the course of his career, this essay will also attempt to contribute to such a revaluation. 639

640 I AMERICAN in Genesis: Book One (1943): an autobiographical poetry that revisits childhood, not to rekindle a Wordsworthian capacity for joy but to inquire into the historical and personal origins of present unhappiness. Schwartz's unhappiness began, in a sense, even before he was born on December 8, 1913. His parents both came from Rumania in the great wave of Jewish emigration from Eastern Europe. His father, Harry Schwartz, met Rose Nathanson on the Lower East Side of New York City in 1909, and married her after a brief and stormy courtship. Harry had prospered in real estate, so the couple was able to move to a more fashionable neighborhood in Brooklyn. For a few years they were childless, for Rose Schwartz had a congenital condition that prevented her from conceiving. When Harry began to take up with other women, she thought that perhaps the arrival of a child would restore his sense of domestic responsibility. While he was away on business, she sold a bond given to her by an uncle and had the operation needed to correct her infertility. Even in the circumstances of his conception, Schwartz was a pawn in the struggle between his parents. Then there was the matter of his first name, about which Schwartz was so sensitive that he devoted an entire play, Shenandoah (1941), to a family's quarrel over the naming of a son. The name they finally choose, Shenandoah Fish, is obviously analogous to Delmore Schwartz; it was also assigned to the protagonists of the autobiographical stories "America! America!," "New Year's Eve," and "A Bitter Farce." Schwartz thought of his name as a telling reminder that he was caught between two cultures. He had a traditional Jewish middle name—David. But his first name, which his parents apparently thought of as something sophisticated and "American," was an outlandish concoction, anomalous in both the Jewish context and the American.

WRITERS

The marriage of Schwartz's parents continued to deteriorate. A second child, Kenneth, was born in 1916, but the Schwartzes were legally separated in 1923 and divorced in 1927. Despite his unhappy childhood, Schwartz at least had the consolation of looking ahead to a large inheritance. This hope was disappointed. Harry Schwartz was able to salvage much of his fortune during the crash of 1929, but he died less than a year later. An unscrupulous executor drained away most of the estate, and what remained was tied up in litigation for years. Schwartz later thought of his father's death and the stock market crash as fatally linked, the private and public manifestations of some complex, inscrutable force. Indeed, he thought of his life in general as the product of dark determinisms: the persecution that drove the Jews of Eastern Europe to the New World; the economic collapse that made the loss of his inheritance even more bitter; the unconscious compulsions that set his parents against each other. In his fiction and poetry he usually viewed his story as a representative tragedy. He scarcely dared to desire freedom from suffering, but sought instead the tragic hero's understanding of his own suffering. The turmoil of his family may explain Schwartz's erratic performance in school; he did well in English and other classes that engaged his imagination, but very poorly in everything else. Nonetheless, he showed early signs of literary ambition, and some of his teachers recognized his brilliance. Some of his juvenilia is preserved in The Poet's Pack of George Washington High School (1932). These poems are awkward and overdone in the usual way of adolescent verse, but they show a complexity of language and an awareness of modern styles (especially those of T. S. Eliot and Hart Crane) that set them apart from the neighboring contributions. Schwartz spent the academic year 1931-

DELMORE SCHWARTZ / 641 1932 at the University of Wisconsin. A temporary lack of money kept him out of school for the first half of the following academic year, but he was able to enroll at New York University in February 1933. By the time he graduated in June 1935, Schwartz was a published poet; a month later he wrote the short story "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities," which remains among his finest work. When it was published in December 1937, as the lead item in the first issue of the newly revived Partisan Review, it made his reputation. "In Dreams" gave him the title for his first book, and it touched upon themes, symbols, and techniques that were to become characteristic of his writing. Both for its own excellence and for its prophecy of things to come, the story deserves close attention. Although "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities" takes its title from one of the two epigraphs to William Butler Yeats's Responsibilities, Schwartz's "dream" is no Yeatsian vision of a spiritual world, but a reenactment of the date on which his father proposed to his mother, shown as a silent movie in a theater. The metaphor of the movie eloquently expresses Schwartz's fatalism: what we see in a movie seems to be happening in the present, but it is in fact the record of actions already completed and, therefore, unalterable. The actions in the film are described in the present tense, and although the movie is silent, the narrator can infer his parents' feelings at every moment. The present tense and omniscient narration tend to shift our attention from the narrator to the parents; we experience the action as present, except when the narrator disrupts the events with his responses. One therefore begins to apply the metaphor of the movie not only to the past as the narrator reconstructs it in his mind, but also to the courtship itself at the time it actually occurred. The parents are not free; the marriage will be a disaster, but they cannot help choosing each other.

The handling of detail reinforces our sense that the present is a repetition of the past, that the pattern of life is futile recurrence. We follow the father's walk to the mother's house; then both parents "walk down the same quiet streets once more." During this sequence the movie is interrupted, and when it resumes, "the film has been returned to a portion just shown." In another scene the parents ride on a merrygo-round. To the narrator, "it seems that they will never get off the merry-go-round because it will never stop." If the present is a repetition of the past, it is also, by the same logic, an adumbration of the future. Toward the end of the story, the couple visits a portrait photographer and a fortune-teller. In these scenes the outcome of the marriage reveals itself as already contained in its beginning, for the portrait will not come out right; and the mother's insistence on a consultation with the fortune-teller provokes a violent quarrel, itself an ominous prediction of the strife to come. At first the narrator manages to lose himself in the action of the movie. But as his parents stroll by the sea at Coney Island, with the inevitable proposal of marriage drawing uncomfortably close, he becomes uneasy and leaves the theater for a moment. He has been disturbed by "the terrible sun which breaks up sight, and the fatal, merciless, passionate ocean." His parents also look upon the sunlit water, but remain blind to its frightening symbolic implications. In this section the language of the story has shifted from deliberately flat, matter-of-fact narrative to lyrical evocation. The image of his parents, poised at the beginning of their lives, looking uncomprehendingly at the dazzling blankness of the sea, belongs to a class of images that recurs throughout Schwartz's work. It is, for that matter, parallel to the image of the narrator, at the end of the story, looking out at the snow on his twenty-first birthday.

642 I AMERICAN The sea and the snow both stand in opposition to the darkness of the theater, and to the corresponding darkness of the photographer's studio and the fortune-teller's booth, theaters in which the parents try to look at themselves. The dark theater is regressive and womblike. Within it, one can only be the spectator of one's own dreams and memories. To some extent it simply represents the state of dreaming, but there are others watching the movie besides the narrator. To them the events are interesting but not charged with personal significance. This situation represents the plight of the autobiographical artist: What happens when one shows home movies in a public theater? It also represents the plight of anyone with a burdensome past: One can't possibly expect others to share one's own obsession with it; and in order to live in a world with others, one must win some measure of detachment from it. The moment his mother accepts his father's proposal, the narrator loses all detachment, forgetting that the past is past. He stands up and cries to the figures on the screen: "Don't do it. It's not too late to change your minds, both of you. Nothing good will come of it, only remorse, hatred, scandal, and two children whose characters are monstrous." He is moved, at this point, by several motives: a real sympathy for his parents' suffering, but also the child's irrational, guilty sense that this suffering is all his fault, and with that guilt, the suicidal wish never to have been born. This outburst angers the rest of the audience, and the usher, a sort of superego figure, arrives, "flashing his searchlight" and threatening to evict the narrator. When, upon witnessing his parents' quarrel, the narrator bursts forth again, the usher makes good his threat and drags him "through the lobby of the theatre into the cold light," where he wakes up "into the bleak winter morning of [his] 21st birthday, the windowsill shining with its lip of snow, and the morning already begun."

WRITERS

While dragging him outside, the usher has warned him: "You can't act like this even if other people aren't around!" Coming out of the dark theater into the lobby means waking from the dream, but also the coming of age traditionally associated with twenty-first birthdays. At the end of the story, the narrator must turn aside from his origins and begin his own life. The bright blankness of the snow, the morning with its prospect of unused time, and the inviting world glimpsed through the window are appropriate emblems of beginning. In later years, as he sank gradually into despair, Schwartz used his imagery of beginning more and more mechanically, with an increasingly strident and unconvincing optimism. But what a beginning he made! Three and a half years after his graduation from NYU Schwartz was famous. In the fall of 1935, he began graduate study in philosophy at Harvard. As a first-year student he placed work in Poetry and New Caravan, and won the Bowdoin Prize for the best essay by a graduate student in the humanities. When, in his second year of study, his mother declared herself unable to support him further, he returned to New York. Turning his full attention to his writing, Schwartz quickly made a name for himself, publishing poems, essays, verse plays, and fiction in prestigious literary quarterlies. By the spring of 1938 he felt sufficiently established to marry Gertrude Buckman, an old high school acquaintance who caught his attention when she turned up as a fellow student at NYU. At the end of the year, just after his twenty-fifth birthday, New Directions published In Dreams Begin Responsibilities. Even as a young man, Schwartz was fond of the scheming and plotting that would degenerate into paranoid manipulation toward the end of his life. He lined up influential friends to secure praise for his book, working himself into

DELMORE SCHWARTZ / 643 acute anxiety over its reception. But his fears proved totally unfounded. In Dreams Begin Responsibilities succeeded beyond his fondest hopes. Allen Tate called its style "the first real innovation that we've had since Eliot and Pound"; Mark Van Doren, writing in Kenyan Review, found it "as good as any poetry has been for a long while, say at least a literary generation." Other high compliments arrived from Wallace Stevens, F. W. Dupee, R. P. Blackmur, and John Crowe Ransom; W. H. Auden, though more restrained in his praise, admired the book also. In November 1939, Schwartz received a letter from T. S. Eliot, who was "much impressed by In Dreams Begin Responsibilities:' The praise both thrilled and terrified Schwartz. When fame was a vague and distant goal, it had seemed wholly desirable, but no sooner was it achieved than he began to wonder whether he deserved it. To some extent we may attribute this reaction to his insecurity, but it also demonstrates an instinctive honesty in judging his own accomplishment. To be sure, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities is a remarkable book for a man of twenty-five, and a distinguished book by all but the most Olympian standards. But fine as it is, many of Schwartz's contemporaries overpraised it. None of its poems belongs in a class with the best of Eliot, Ezra Pound, Hart Crane, or Auden, the poets with whom Schwartz was most frequently compared. Doubtless the extravagant acclaim for In Dreams Begin Responsibilities reflected the critical vogue of "the tragic view of life" and the bleak look of the world on the brink of war. In retrospect, Schwartz's unremitting gloom can seem monotonous, and some of his pronouncements on history and fate belong in a speech by Polonius. Nonetheless, in the title story, in parts of "Coriolanus and His Mother," and in perhaps seven or eight of the lyrics, he

added something permanent to modern literature—no small accomplishment for any writer, young or old. Schwartz's reputation must rest primarily on this book and the collection of stories, The World Is a Wedding (1948). These, with the best of the essays and a handful of later poems and stories, should secure him a place in American letters. His range was limited, and his early promise was never fulfilled, but he managed to produce a small body of minor masterworks— poems, stories, and essays that, despite their limitations, have a distinctive character of their own, not replaceable by the work of his greater contemporaries. In Dreams Begin Responsibilities opens with the title story, which has already been discussed. The second part is a long narrative poem "Coriolanus and His Mother." As in the story, Schwartz employs the metaphor of spectatorship, although the relationship of the spectacle to the observer's own circumstances is in this case more oblique. The narrator is watching a performance of Coriolanus; in a blank verse that by turns imitates and parodies William Shakespeare's, he summarizes the action as it unfolds before him, interpreting the story as he retells it. He shares his theater box with four great men who aid him in his interpretations: Aristotle, Ludwig van Beethoven, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud (Freud, although still alive when the poem was published, ascends in Schwartz's treatment to the lofty remoteness of his dead colleagues). There is also a fifth ghost, masked and unnamed, who remains ominously silent throughout. Between the acts the narrator is transported to the stage, where he delivers prose monologues that meditate, half seriously and half ironically, on such themes as pleasure, justice, choice, and identity, with oblique reference to the play. In deciding to recount the whole story of Coriolanus, Schwartz was exercising the narrative

644 / AMERICAN poet's prerogative of treating a traditional story in his own manner, just as Shakespeare had followed Plutarch. On the whole, Schwartz's account is fast-paced, and it achieves interesting effects at times by juxtaposing modern and Renaissance styles: "Noli me tangere! How large they shout, Each would partake of my world's championship, Each thinks himself myself and I am fucked By every craven knight vicarious there. —Yet what a sweetness is that roaring kiss Spreading in waves throughout the whorish air." In this passage the Latin injunction recalls Sir Thomas Wyatt's "Whoso List to Hunt"; the inversions of word order in the fourth and fifth lines sound archaic. But these pentameters also find room for the psychiatrist's "vicarious," the baseball fan's "world's championship," and the physicist's "Spreading in waves." The word "fucked," planted emphatically at the end of a line, belongs to both the old idiom and the new. In his essay "Ezra Pound's Very Useful Labors" (1938), Schwartz criticized the lack of narrative continuity in the Cantos, and in "The Isolation of Modern Poetry" (1941) he remarked on the absence of good narrative verse in the twentieth century, despite great accomplishment in lyric forms. "Coriolanus and His Mother" has many fine moments, but it finally confirms Schwartz's diagnosis of the problem: "Dramatic and narrative poetry require a grasp of the lives of other men, and it is precisely these lives ... that are outside the orbit of poetic style and poetic sensibility." To the extent that Schwartz's Coriolanus remains one of those "other men," we find him dull, for his story has been better told in Plutarch and Shakespeare. To the extent that he becomes an autobiographical persona, we find him interesting, but for this we do not require the narrative

WRITERS

structure. Allusions to the well-known incidents of his story would suffice, woven into a much shorter, primarily meditative poem. It is not hard to see why Schwartz found the life of Coriolanus suggestive for his own art. To begin with, his inclusion of the hero's mother in the title hints at the autobiographical connection. William Barrett remarks on Schwartz's "constant closeness to his mother, who did everything she could to prolong his narcissism, exaggerate his ego with praise, and yet in her clever and poisonous way insinuate in the child, then the boy, and then the young man, that the love and trust of anybody was not to be believed." Every word of this description applies to Coriolanus as Schwartz interprets him. One can also see in Coriolanus' aristocratic contempt for his fellow Romans a parallel to the contempt of Eliot, Pound, and other writers for modern democratic culture, a contempt Schwartz partly shared and partly repudiated. The story also raises the question of whether one can reject one's origins and still retain one's identity. Schwartz encountered this question in several ways: as an "alienated" artist on the margin of society, as a second-generation American Jew on the brink of assimilation, and as a young man who owed his existence to a marriage that he could only regard as a terrible mistake. To some extent Schwartz reinterprets the story of Coriolanus in the way he retells it. He places Marxist rhetoric in the mouths of Brutus and the other spokesmen for the plebeians; he repeatedly compares Coriolanus with Narcissus and gives a Freudian turn to his contempt for the people by seizing on such details as his dislike of their "smell": "You stink!" he cries. "You scum!" he shouts, shocked by Their protest, offended by their being, Nursing in mind, older than any thought, A hatred of all who issue sweat, urine,

DELMORE SCHWARTZ Or excrement, the child's profound distaste Once for all smitten, never, alas! outworn. Schwartz also draws out the psychoanalytic implications of the hero's extreme need for his mother's approval. But most of the interpretation comes in the form of commentary by the four great men in the audience. Beethoven is present mainly to lend his Coriolan overture as background music. Aristotle speaks frequently, but too much of what he has to say sounds like a lecture to undergraduates on The Poetics. The most interesting part of the commentary comes from Marx and Freud, who engage in a running debate about the nature and causes of the hero's tragic flaw. To Marx, the hero's mother, Volumnia, is nothing but a living metaphor for the state. The real mother of Coriolanus is Rome and, more particularly, the patrician class. Coriolanus commits his fatal mistake in believing that he, or anyone else, exists completely as an individual. And yet the class pride that makes him "noble" contains, dialectically, the seed of this error; individual pride is but class pride carried to the extreme. Freud interprets the problem as personal rather than social, stemming from a regressive desire to return to the womb, or to the primary narcissism of the infant: "His mother's breast," intrudes the Viennese, "Delighted him too much, fixed his disease. The child misunderstood, blind animal: Dark Id rules all, and though impersonal, Fixed to the womb this individual: 4 O Mutter, Mutter, it is cold outside': So speaks his wish to die, such is his pride." Coriolanus finds the entire world wanting because nowhere within it can he regain the absolute gratification he enjoyed in infancy. It is curious that Coriolanus should be presented as an embodiment of the untamed id, for in his hatred of pleasure and of the body, he

/ 645

seems, on the contrary, a victim of a tyrannical superego. One recalls Freud's observation, in The Ego and the Id, that the moral demands of a harsh superego have the same unconscious, compelled quality as the libidinal demands of the id. Schwartz seems uncertain whether the denial of instinct is neurosis or nobility. More generally, he seems unable to decide whether his hero is reducible to Freudian and Marxist explanations, or whether there is an irreducible part that transcends explanation. He sometimes entertains the possibility that something—call it the soul, or what you will—can escape the determinisms that trouble him so deeply. Schwartz was finally more interested in interpreting the story of Coriolanus than in telling it. Although his anxious sense of unseen forces working behind outward events is typical of a good deal of modern literature, he drove the passion for explanation to extremes, as if the explanation could somehow undo the events or drain them of their power to harm. "Coriolanus and His Mother" struggles ponderously toward a kind of knowledge that is by its nature unattainable, since explanations must stop somewhere or lose themselves in infinite regress. Caught in his Sisyphean conception of his art, Schwartz produced poems more notable for their ambition, brilliance, and moral passion than for technical assurance or formal unity. Though he could produce felicitous lines, Schwartz was endowed but modestly with the auditory imagination. When he later turned away from the intellectualism of his early poetry to an art of lyrical celebration, he could not work the magic of a Dylan Thomas or a Theodore Roethke in that mode. But some of the short poems of In Dreams Begin Responsibilities show him at his best; only infrequently would he match their achievement afterward. Schwartz divided the lyrics of In Dreams Begin Responsibilities into two groups, the first (and less impressive) of which he called "The Repetitive Heart: Eleven Poems in Imitation of

646 I AMERICAN the Fugue Form." With a sobriety unusual in proponents of "musical form," he added in a note: "This suite of poems might perhaps be more exactly called poems in a form suggested by the fugue, since the contrapuntal effect is of course impossible in language." Schwartz's method of suggesting counterpoint depends mainly on the repetition of key words and phrases several times during each poem; these "fugues" might uncharitably be described as sestinas or villanelles, though the pattern of repetition is less regular. Sometimes a rhythmic pattern is repeated in several consecutive phrases, and sometimes the predominantly tetrameter lines are broken with a strong medial caesura, so that one hears an "entrance," an implied lineation within the line. Schwartz does not exploit self-interruption and fragmentation, as the German poet Paul Celan was to do in his famous "Todesfuge." There is, in short, no great technical innovation here. Nor is there, except in a few of the poems, very much substance with which the form can engage. The one poem of real distinction in "The Repetitive Heart" is the frequently anthologized "The Heavy Bear Who Goes with Me," a meditation on the dualism of body and soul. In "The Heavy Bear..." Schwartz's Freudian and Marxist explanations give way to a rhetoric of Platonic idealism. What looks in "Coriolanus and His Mother" like neurotic rejection of pleasure becomes a noble exaltation of the spirit over the senses. The "bear" of the title is the body itself, perceived not as the habitation of the soul but as an oafish doppelganger who mimics the soul's gestures, coarsening them even as he makes them manifest. He is "A caricature, a swollen shadow, / A stupid clown of the spirit's motive " Although he is an encumbrance, the bear can be pitied in his vulnerability. Enslaved to his desires and fears, he "Howls in his sleep for a world of sugar, / A sweetness intimate as the

WRITERS

water's clasp." He has "followed" the soul "since the black womb held," and remains perpetually dissatisfied (like Coriolanus) in the less obliging world outside, where he "Boxes his brother in the hate-ridden city" and competes in "The scrimmage of appetite everywhere." He fears death and "Trembles to think that his quivering meat / Must finally wince to nothing at all." Even in lovemaking, where one might suppose him welcome, the bear can do nothing right; instead, he Stretches to embrace the very dear With whom I would walk without him near, Touches her grossly, although a word Would bare my heart and make me clear In refusing to be ruled by spiritual love, the body frustrates its own desires, for the spirit's "word" would gain the woman's assent, whereas the bear, touching her "grossly," drives her away. Finally, the body is the enemy of all true selfhood. The speaker complains that the bear is "Dragging me with him in his mouthing care, / Amid the hundred million of his kind " Souls are unique; bodies are interchangeable. We encounter the Platonic Schwartz again in one of the best of the "Twenty-Four Poems" that follow "The Repetitive Heart." Its title, "In the Naked Bed, in Plato's Cave," refers to the famous parable in book 7 of Plato's Republic, in which prisoners, chained facing the rear wall of a cave, mistake their own shadows, and those of objects at the mouth of the cave, for the primary substance of reality. The poem reveals well the tension between Schwartz's interest in social causation and his desire to dismiss the entire time-bound world as inherently hopeless. The cave metaphor has been given a thisworldly twist, for, as Richard McDougall points out, "the world outside is the actual world and not a simile for a reality beyond it. According

DELMORE SCHWARTZ / 647 to this substitution of the literal for the symbolic, Schwartz's meaning seems to be the exact opposite of Plato's: the world in time (and of being in time) is reality itself." Yet the metaphor leads back toward its original significance as the poem progresses, McDougall's remark applies quite well to the opening lines: In the naked bed, in Plato's cave, Reflected headlights slowly slid the wall, Carpenters hammered under the shaded window, Wind troubled the window curtains all night long, A fleet of trucks strained uphill, grinding, Their freights covered, as usual. The ceiling lightened again, the slanting diagram Slid slowly forth. Hearing the milkman's chop, His striving up the stair, the bottle's chink, I rose from bed, lit a cigarette, And walked to the window. As the narrator of "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities" must leave the darkened theater to face the world outside his bedroom window, so here the speaker must move from isolated selfhood to relation with the world. The noises he hears just before dawn suggest the difficulties of that world: the trucks "strained uphill," the milkman was "striving up the stair." Like the unchained prisoner in Plato's allegory, the speaker turns to look at the world outside the cave. Imagery of change yields to imagery of stasis, though the objects remain very much of this world: ... The stony street Displayed the stillness in which buildings stand, The street-lamp's vigil and the horse's patience.

This passage is followed by two remarkable lines, in which the speaker does glimpse something beyond what McDougall calls "the world in time": The winter sky's pure capital Turned me back to bed with exhausted eyes. Just as Schwartz adapts Plato's idealist allegory to express a materialist idea, so in these lines he takes Marx's "capital" and makes it stand for an ideal transcendence. Like Plato's newly emancipated cave dweller, the speaker is blinded by the light, and returns to the "cave" of his bedroom. The sky is "pure capital" in the sense that its pure spirit has not been invested in any particular embodiment; it has not descended into the world in time. After the speaker's return from the window, the stillness is broken and the day begins. Although the world has not taken on the absolute purity of the sky, it has become more intelligible and substantial than it was in the opening lines: . . . Morning, softly Melting the air, lifted the half-covered chair From underseas, kindled the looking-glass, Distinguished the dresser and the white wall. The poem broadens at its close toward a general statement about the human condition: ... So, so, O son of man, the ignorant night, the travail Of early morning, the mystery of beginning Again and again, while History is unforgiven.

Despite this overblown ending, "In the Naked Bed, in Plato's Cave" is unforgettable. If one had to pick Schwartz's best poem, it would be among the three or four possibilities. "The Ballad of the Children of the Czar" also belongs on this short list. The poem begins

648 I AMERICAN with an image of sheltered innocence: "The children of the Czar / Played with a bouncing ball" one "May morning" in the palace gardens. But they lost control of the ball: "It fell among the flowerbeds / Or fled to the north gate." As Schwartz develops this metaphor, it comes to stand for the precariousness of life: sooner or later, someone is bound to make the fatal throwing error. In the second section the poet presents himself at the moment when the aristocratic game of catch was played:

WRITERS

guilt. Seeing "that history has no ruth / For the individual," the poet declares, "Let anger be general: / I hate an abstract thing." The problem lies in defining this "abstract thing" and representing it in a poem. Schwartz returns to the ball metaphor in the fourth section and generalizes it, in the fifth, to include the earth itself: "The ground on which the ball bounces / Is another bouncing ball." The world "makes no will glad"; it is "A pitiless, purposeless Thing...." The section ends in a curiously obsessive, flat string of declarations:

While I ate a baked potato, Six thousand miles apart,

The innocent are overtaken, They are not innocent.

In Brooklyn, in 1916, Aged two, irrational.

They are their father's fathers, The past is inevitable.

Although the focus has shifted to the poet, the year 1916 revises our understanding of the first section. It is the year before the Russian Revolution, and the children of the czar will soon perish with their father. The presence of the poet in Brooklyn has something to do with the czar also: the oppression of the Jews under Nicholas II resulted in his grandfather's immigration to America. The poet can hardly sympathize with Nicholas II, but he can pity the fate of the czar's children. The third section is a meditation on the transmission of guilt from generation to generation. As Aeneas carried his father from the ruins of Troy, so each child must carry the guilt of his parents in his own psyche. The poet, though he will not be killed for his father's crimes, will be burdened, perhaps even destroyed, by the suspicion and guilt his parents have inculcated in him. We can repudiate our parents, or revolt against the czar, but one's parents were once victims of their parents, and the czar was once a child playing in the palace garden. In some final sense the guilty may be innocent; revenge, therefore, only increases

This state of affairs, perhaps, is the "abstract thing" the poet hates. From this lofty plane of generality, the sixth and final section returns to the poet in his second year: I eat my baked potato. It is my buttered world, But, poked by my unlearned hand, It falls from the highchair down And I begin to howl. The infant, vulnerable and totally absorbed in the act of eating the potato (his "buttered world"), is in the same plight as the adult, absorbed in maintaining his fragile existence amid hostile forces. The poem closes with another string of defiantly flat assertions, as grim and heavy as the fate they announce: Even a bouncing ball Is uncontrollable, And is under the garden wall. I am overtaken by terror

DELMORE SCHWARTZ Thinking of my father's fathers And of my own will. The succession of rhymes and near rhymes reinforces the bluntness: "terror" and "fathers"; "ball," "-ble," "wall," and "will." It is possible that Schwartz has belabored the significance of his materials unduly. But here, for once, his search for grand historical themes within his own experience justifies itself. He locates himself within history, rather than appropriating history as a backdrop for a private melodrama. There are several more modest successes among the "Twenty-Four Poems." "Far Rockaway," in language reminiscent of Hart Crane's "Voyages" and the seaside passage of "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities," evokes the seductive brilliance of the ocean: The radiant soda of the seashore fashions Fun, foam, and freedom. The sea laves The shaven sand. And the light sways forward On the self-destroying waves. Vacationers lie "with the passionate sun," escaping "the rigor of the weekday," but here too the note of doom intrudes. "Time unheard moves," and a novelist, like a "nervous conscience amid the concessions," regards the scene distrustfully, reconstructing the private histories the sunbathers must carry within them. "Tired and Unhappy, You Think of Houses" presents a similar dichotomy of seductive comfort and harsh reality. The thought of "houses /Soft-carpeted and warm," where "servants bring the coffee" entices the "Tired and unhappy" speaker. There is even a young girl singing—but what is the piece? "That song of Gluck where Orpheus pleads with Death." Even in this "banal dream," mortality will out. Better to face the harshness of urban reality, with its "anger exact as a machine!"

/ 649

A more ambitious poem that similarly plays illusion against disillusionment is the "Prothalamion" Schwartz wrote to celebrate, if that is the word, his engagement to Gertrude Buckman. "Now I must betray myself," the poem begins; marriage is a "unity" but also a "bondage." Marriage means betrayal in a number of ways. The husband must not "wear masks or enigmatic clothes" before his wife; he must "betray" or reveal to her his "shocking nakedness." He must also at times "betray" or be disloyal to his own impulses in order to accommodate his wife. And his conduct in marriage will "betray" or reveal to himself the essence of his own character. As we have already seen, Schwartz feared that his character had been irrevocably ruined in his childhood. As if to arm himself against the danger that his past will undo his marriage, Schwartz invites Marx and Freud to the wedding; they can "mark out the masks that face us there" and free the lovers from "self-deception." In a flourish of extravagance, he invites "all / Who are our friends somehow," representatives of the various arts and professions, and, for good measure, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Athena, Robinson Crusoe, and Charlie Chaplin. Then suddenly, in a poignant reversal, he says: But this is fantastic and pitiful, And no one comes, none will, we are alone, And what is possible is my own voice, Speaking its wish, despite its lasting fear.... To marry is to take on the care of another's body and mysterious soul. "You are heavy," he tells his bride; "when I carry you / I lift upon my back time like a fate...." One remembers the "heavy bear" of the body, or the child carrying the father in "The Ballad of the Children of the Czar." The poem ends on a forced note of optimism, but not before running a diapason

650 I AMERICAN WRITERS of misgivings. Gertrude Buckman was to leave Schwartz after four years of marriage; no one can say she hadn't been warned. At least three other poems from In Dreams Begin Responsibilities deserve mention. "Father and Son," though flagrantly derivative of Yeats and occasionally marred by clumsy prosody, is nonetheless an interesting confrontation between the irresponsibility of a youth who "would be sudden now and rash in joy," and his father's intimations of guilt and mortality. The father sounds much more like the twenty-fiveyear-old poet than the son does. "A Young Child and His Pregnant Mother" might be considered a companion piece for "Father and Son," but it keeps the usual philosophizing in abeyance, aiming primarily at an evocation of the child's feelings: And now this newest of the mysteries, Confronts his honest and his studious eyes— His mother much too fat and absentminded, Gazing far past his face, careless of him, His fume, his charm, his bedtime, and warm milk, As soon the night will be too dark, the spring Too late, desire strange, and time too fast, This first estrangement is a gradual thing (His mother once so svelte, so often sick! Towering father did this: what a trick!) It is significant that Louise Bogan, one of the few reviewers with strong reservations about In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, admired this poem as more direct, less attitudinizing, than most of the others. One might also have expected her to like "The Ballet of the Fifth Year," which, despite momentary poaching from Crane's "To Brooklyn Bridge," is similarly straightforward. This poem also moves more deftly than any other in the volume. It contains only two sentences, the second of

which sweeps, without losing momentum, through fifteen lines. The closing image has a definite, externalized clarity unusual in Schwartz: . . . I skated, afraid of policemen, five years old, In the winter sunset, sorrowful and cold, Hardly attained to thought, but old enough to know Such grace, so self-contained, was the best escape to know. "The Ballet of the Fifth Year" is not an ambitious poem, but it has a "grace, so self-contained" that most of the weightier pieces lack. In Dreams Begin Responsibilities ends with "Dr. Bergen's Belief," a play in prose and verse that need not detain us long; even Schwartz's most admiring reviewers ignored it. Dr. Bergen has become the leader of a religious cult. He believes that the sky is the eye of God, and that problems may be solved "intuitively" by staring at the sky until illumination comes. His daughter, Eleanor, has recently committed suicide. Dr. Bergen has obtained "intuitive" assurance that the suicide was done in obedience to divine guidance; Eleanor is thus the first martyr to his cause. But Eleanor's psychiatrist produces a letter showing the cause to have been less ethereal: Eleanor killed herself because she was in love with a married man. Overcome with doubt, Dr. Bergen throws himself from the second-story balcony of his house, seeking in death the revelation that has eluded him in life. Written in Schwartz's worst grandiloquent manner, the play is interesting only for its theme: who has the truth, the psychiatrist who reduces all to mundane causes or the mystic who seeks transcendence in a world beyond this one? The success Schwartz achieved with his first book brought him other kinds of success as well. He became poetry editor of Partisan Review in 1939 and, in the fall of 1940, Briggs-Copeland

DELMORE SCHWARTZ / 651 instructor at Harvard. He won a Guggenheim fellowship for the academic year 1940-1941, which was renewed for the following year. During these years, he turned out a number of excellent articles and book reviews for Partisan Review, Poetry, Kenyan Review, and other literary magazines. As Philip Rahv observed, "While it is well-known that many poets have produced their best work in their early twenties, it is only very rarely that a critic has contributed anything memorable at that age." Schwartz's career appeared to be as solidly established as a man of his age could wish. And yet, his next ventures in poetry—a translation of Arthur Rimbaud's Une saison en enfer (1939) and Shenandoah (1941)—do not show him at his best; and the ambitious Genesis: Book One (1943), envisioned as the first part of a major autobiographical epic in verse and prose, shows him struggling with difficulties he could not resolve. The Rimbaud translation was badly received because of its numerous errors; Schwartz revised it for a second edition in 1940, but the damage had been done. Wallace Stevens defended it in a letter to Leonard C. van Geyzel, saying that "It might be sophomoric from the point of view of translating from one language into another and yet contain things that matter." But this defense requires us to regard the poem as a Lowellian "imitation" rather than a translation. Writing for the New York Review of Books in 1967, Roger Shattuck preferred Schwartz's version to those of Louise Varese and Wallace Fowlie, though he added: "Is it sheer perverseness that makes me find Schwartz's out-of-print version best?" Maybe it was "perverseness," or the sentiments aroused by Schwartz's death the year before; one might also add that neither the Varese nor the Fowlie is a really distinguished translation. Considered as an English poem, Schwartz's A Season in Hell is the liveliest of the three, but it does not

have the memorable felicity that makes one forgive the liberties in Pound's translations. Shenandoah appeared as the eighth offering in the New Directions "Poet of the Month" series for 1941. James Atlas describes the reviews as "mixed"; but F. O Matthiessen, in his sympathetic review of Genesis, remarks that when Schwartz's "short verse play, Shenandoah, seemed slight, it became the fashion to declare that he had been overpraised and had not deserved his reputation in the first place." Shenandoah was not a disaster like the Rimbaud translation, but it did not do Schwartz's reputation any good. It belongs among neither the best nor the worst of his writings. As noted earlier, Shenandoah deals with the naming of the protagonist, Shenandoah Fish. The adult Shenandoah witnesses and interprets the commotion occurring around his eight-dayold self on the stage. The autobiographical source of the material, if it were not already obvious, would be given away when Shenandoah's mother slips "Delmore" into a list of names for consideration. Once again Schwartz has depicted himself as a spectator watching his own origins reenacted before him. Such drama as the play can muster is provided by the conflict between Shenandoah's father, Walter Fish, and his uncle, Nathan Harris. Nathan has just finished medical school and has acquired enough sophistication to recognize the name "Shenandoah" as inappropriate. The rabbi, present for the circumcision ceremony, refuses to intervene, saying to himself: "Forbearance and humility are best: what good will it do me to become angry? The modern world is what it is." Finally, Walter Fish telephones his Gentile attorney, Mr. Kelly, to confirm his decision. "After all," says Walter, "this child is going to live in a world of Kelly si" At the end of the play, the circumcision is performed offstage, and "There is an appalling screech, as of an infant in the greatest pain"

652 I AMERICAN As one of his epigraphs to the play, Schwartz quotes the Encyclopaedia Britannica: "It is the historic nature of all particulars to try to prove that they are universal by nature...." But he apparently could not trust the particulars to do so on their own. In his commentaries the adult Shenandoah extracts the last drop of significance from the proceedings. Ruminating on the argument between Walter and Nathan, he declares: This is hardly the last time, little boy, That conflict will engage the consciousness Of those who might admire Nature, pray to God, Make love, make friends, make works of art, make peace— O no! hardly the last time: in the end All men may seem essential boxers, hate May seem the energy which drives the stars (L'amor che move il sole e I'altre stelle!) And war as human as the beating heart: So Hegel and Empedocles have taught. After going on to list the "world-wide causes" that have conspired to choose his name, Shenandoah embarks on a catalog of the great alienated modern writers who will "obsess this child when he can read," and perorates by saying: This child will learn of life from these great men, He will participate in their solitude, And maybe in the end, on such a night As this, return to the starting-point, his name, Showing himself as such among his friends. The speech that closes the play is similarly overwrought, rehearsing the sufferings worse than circumcision that will follow when "the horrors of modern life are your sole place," and "the dying West performs unspeakable disgrace /Against the honor of man, before God's utter gaze "

WRITERS

The problem with Shenandoah is not that it makes abstract or general statements in verse, but that the abstractions are several sizes too large for the particulars concerned. The effort to ensure that the audience understands the significance of Shenandoah's name—which is to say, of Schwartz's own—is so hysterically frenzied that one infers behind it a fear that perhaps the name is nothing but an accident, not very significant to anyone but the man who must bear it. A similar criticism can be made of Schwartz's next volume, Genesis: Book One. Genesis grew out of drafts for an autobiographical poem that go back as far as 1931, when the poem was to have been entitled "Having Snow." Later, Schwartz tried writing the piece as prose, settling finally on alternating passages of prose and verse. The stylized prose, set up typographically like biblical verses, is used for narration. The poetry, for the most part blank verse but sometimes freely rhymed or metrically irregular, is reserved for analysis and commentary. Schwartz appears under the name Hershey Green. One winter night, as Hershey is trying to sleep, he thinks he sees snow falling outside the window. Going to the window, he finds that the moonlight and his imagination have tricked him. But although there is no literal snow, the illusion is a portent: the ghosts of the dead appear to Hershey and ask him to tell the "endless story" of his life. The story, which might indeed have proved "endless" if continued at the same pace, takes us from the young adulthood of Schwartz's grandparents in the old country to the incident, earlier recounted in "Prothalamion," when his mother found her husband in a roadhouse, dining with another woman. This incident occurred in 1921, when Schwartz was seven. For Hershey Green, his persona in Genesis, it marks the loss of innocence: "Childhood was ended here!" We wait sixty-six pages for Hershey Green to be born; sixty-nine pages after that, he enters

DELMORE SCHWARTZ / 653 first grade. This exhaustive (and, for the reader, exhausting) reconstruction of early childhood reflects Schwartz's Freudianism. Though it would be difficult under the best circumstances to make a two-hundred-page book from the memories of early childhood, stranger projects have succeeded. But Schwartz's language does not, for the most part, recreate the child's experience with much vividness or exactness. It tells us what happened, and gives the names of the emotions that the child experienced, but it does little more. Hershey does not tell his story in the first person; instead Schwartz tells it in the third person, a technical decision that contributes to the lack of immediacy. One possible explanation for the inert language of Genesis is suggested in a long letter to Schwartz from W. H. Auden, whom New Directions had consulted as a reader for the manuscript. In this letter (quoted extensively in the Atlas biography), Auden criticizes the assumptions outlined in Schwartz's preface. In an age when "their beliefs and values are embodied in great institutions and in the way of life of many human beings," Schwartz tells the reader, authors "do not have to bring in their beliefs and values from the outside; they have only to examine their experience with love in order to find particular beings and actions which are significant of their beliefs and values." The most fortunate of all were the authors of the Gospels, "who, as authors, perhaps had only to look up or remember." Schwartz does not consider his own situation to be so fortunate; he is defending his own need to "bring in ... beliefs and values from outside." Nonetheless, Auden tells him: "The central fault in your poem is ... just this false hope that if you only look up and remember enough, significance and value and belief will appear of themselves." Indeed, one might easily conclude that the "significance and value" of the incidents in Genesis were so overwhelmingly present for Schwartz that he forgot

how much art is needed to re-create that overwhelming presence for someone else. All the same, Schwartz belabors the "significance and value" of each incident, great and small. The explanations are not explanations at all, but astonishingly pointless reifications of every emotion and institution into a "divinity" or cosmic force. When Mrs. Green sells a bond to finance the operation that enables her to conceive Hershey, it proves that "Capitalismus penetrates each heart." When Hershey, watching the funeral of a young woman, wishes to see the corpse naked, it means that "Love and Death have lain by each other in his mind, Eros and Thanatos, the beginning and the end, Romeo and Juliet forever composed!" Does Hershey Green go to school? No; say, rather, that "The school divinity exerts its power, Much like the big city on a farm boy—" "Against the parenthood, against the life Made by the family divinity...." "Elucidate, go on, make lucid all, / For it will do him good!" interrupts still another ghost, but it is hard to see how such pseudo insights could do anyone any good. When an analysand indulges in such explanations, the analyst is professionally obliged to set him straight. However sincerely Schwartz may have intended Genesis as a cathartic self-exploration, part of him seems to have resisted that intention. The result is a work of autobiography that evades rather than engages the hard questions that its content raises: What, as a morally responsible adult, can one do to surmount a destructive heritage? What, as a poet, can one do to make art of such intractable materials as infantile sexuality and the perils of kindergarten? Schwartz explains himself away, telling his story with a curious suppression of affect, veiling his motives in grandiose universals. The problem, then, may not be quite what Auden

654 I AMERICAN said it was. Schwartz may have believed that his life would interpret itself if he recorded it faithfully enough, but he shrank from the pain of reexperiencing it as well as from the pain of understanding it. Genesis: Book One must be accounted a failure, and the excerpts from the manuscript of the unpublished Book Two that Atlas reprints in New Directions 35 do not suggest that the sequel would have been much better. Nonetheless, as one might expect from a writer of Schwartz's gifts, there are interesting passages scattered through it. Not all the narration is flat; not all the insight is bogus. Details like the unexpected snowfall on Christmas Eve, and Hershey's delight at receiving a bicycle the following morning, are evocatively presented. More somber scenes also stick in the memory: Hershey, on vacation with his father, looking at his phosphorescent watch in the darkness, waiting for his father to return from one of his amours; Hershey witnessing his father's shame during the roadhouse confrontation. Even the tedious ghosts get a witty line now and then: Forgive strange God, maker of Heaven and Earth, Who made the spring and fall with a slight tilt Such as vain beaux will give their Sunday hats! Above all, one can respect what Schwartz was trying to do in Genesis. He was trying, in a time that favored tightly controlled lyric poetry, to write a huge, sprawling work that would triumph by its sheer intensity, sincerity, and inclusiveness. He wanted to crowd everything from his first day in kindergarten to World War I, from the right fielder's throw home in a Giants game to the stock market crash, into a single work of art. The reception given Genesis was not as harsh as it might have been. The book drew praise not

WRITERS

only from R. P. Blackmur and F. O. Matthiessen, whom Schwartz knew personally, but also from Richard Eberhart, Dudley Fitts, and Northrop Frye. But Schwartz wanted to be told that he had produced a masterpiece on the order of William Wordsworth's Prelude, and no one was prepared to go that far. There were also dismissive reviews from William Rose Benet and Horace Gregory, among others; nor did Schwartz's friend Dwight Macdonald care for Genesis, though he refrained from saying so in print. It was a difficult time for Schwartz personally as well. His marriage was breaking up. Also, although he had risen to the rank of associate professor at Harvard, he felt burdened by his increased teaching load and ill at ease with his colleagues. In these circumstances his thirtieth birthday seemed little cause for celebration. He missed New York, and it was to New York that he returned when he left Harvard, without giving notice, in the spring of 1947. Despite his unhappiness, Schwartz continued to produce excellent critical essays and stories, though it was a lean time for his poetry. Indeed, his next book, The World Is a Wedding (1948), almost equals the achievement of his first. It contains six previously uncollected stories, along with a reprinting of "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities." In some ways the six later stories resemble "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities." They continue to use autobiographical material, and they employ the same deliberately flat style. But "In Dreams" occasionally modulates from the flat style into a more poetic language, and it supplements autobiography with the surrealistic device of the dream theater. The later work is more insistently flat, but it has a wider range of observation and a more complex treatment of relations among the characters. The exception to this generalization is "The Statues," which

DELMORE SCHWARTZ / 655 adopts the conventions of parable rather than those of realism. The title story, the longest in the volume, concerns a circle of young intellectuals gathered around the unpublished writer Rudyard Bell, whom they revere as a genius. Episodic rather than tightly plotted, the story examines each of several characters in turn, with Rudyard's overbearing presence always in the background. We perceive the characters through the eye of Jacob Cohen, "the conscience of the group," its most compassionate and imaginative member. To a lesser extent Rudyard's embittered sister Laura also serves as a surrogate author. Like Jacob, she sees through the pretensions of Rudyard and his admirers, although she judges more harshly. On the most universal level, "The World Is a Wedding" is about the difficulties of friendship, but the atmosphere of the Great Depression permeates the lives of the characters. After brilliant careers in college, Rudyard and his friends find only dull jobs or no jobs at all. The circle provides the only release for their intellectual energies. This claustral mutual dependence and the lack of prospects for advancement intensify the brittle egocentricity common in ambitious young persons even under more favorable circumstances. The meetings of the circle are full of one-upmanship, of conscious and unconscious cruelty. Even Laura, detached and lucid as her sarcasms often are, has a personal motive: She had hoped to find a husband among her brother's friends, but none of them is interested. The Depression may contribute indirectly to their indifference to her, for "their lower middle class poverty kept them from seeking out girls and entertaining the idea of marriage." Atlas has identified Rudyard Bell as Paul Goodman, who indeed had a circle of admirers about him in the mid-1930's. Schwartz himself is Jacob Cohen. But if we read the story as autobiography, we must also find part of Schwartz

in Rudyard Bell. Rudyard has, like Schwartz, an unlikely given name yoked to a common, one-syllable surname. One of his plays centers on a poet who, like Schwartz at the time the story was written, is obsessed with his own decline from early brilliance. His conversation with his former teacher, Percival Davis, is taken from an actual exchange between Schwartz and David Prall of Harvard. We might interpret Rudyard and Jacob as "bad" and "good" versions of Schwartz's character. But to read "The World Is a Wedding" purely as autobiography is to slight its universality, its insights into the life of the 1930's and the problems of late adolescence. The theme of the Great Depression is intertwined with those of generational conflict and coming of age. The parents of the young men in the circle, who have struggled toward assimilation and economic security, cannot understand their sons' rejection of conventional social manners and of moneymaking. Upon meeting Israel Brown, an idealistic young teacher admired by the circle, Edmund Kish's mother can only ask: "How much money does he make?" This question becomes an ironic leitmotiv in the discussions of the group. Rudyard and his friends carry their refusal of convention and compromise to noble but selfdestructive extremes. Francis French, the only member of the group to secure a teaching job in a university, is dismissed when he refuses to make a nominal denial of an accusation of homosexuality. As a result, he is reduced to "the drudgery of teaching in a high school"; he no longer has time for his intellectual interests, and spends his evenings solely in pursuit of sexual pleasure. Rudyard himself, when visited by a producer who admires his plays, feigns contempt for success so convincingly that the opportunity is lost. Among the members of the circle, contemptus mundi is an honorific name for sour grapes. Their social habits have been

656 I AMERICAN formed around the need to make failure bearable; when a chance to escape from failure presents itself, they cannot respond appropriately. Toward the end of the story, Rudyard's group has begun to drift apart. Relations have been strained by the rivalry between Marcus Gross and Ferdinand Harrap for the affections of a girl identified only as "Irene" (as the lack of a second name suggests, Irene hardly matters in herself). Jealous of Ferdinand's victory in love, Marcus threatens to reveal Irene's previous affair with Algernon Nathan, whom Ferdinand detests. Jacob restrains him; but Laura, jealous of the attention lavished on Irene, blurts out the secret when Ferdinand arrives. Quite apart from the rancor produced by this incident (which, we surmise, is typicaf), the Great Depression is ending. Some members of the circle have found jobs and drifted away from the neighborhood. Rudyard, the central figure in the group, has accepted a teaching job in Cleveland, so the others must decide whether to disband or to continue without him. At this point Jacob launches into a long eulogy for the circle. In his readings he has found the words "the world is a wedding" (which Schwartz got from the Talmud). Meditating on this oracular statement, Jacob thinks of Pieter Brueghel's The Peasant Wedding as an illustration of it. The wedding ceremony includes many guests who can have little portion in the joy of the bride and groom: the celibate nuns, an "unkempt and middle-aged" musician whose abstracted gaze suggests that he is "thinking of his faded hopes." Even "the suitor whom the bride refused" must be present, "perhaps among the crush that crowds the door." The parents of the couple are old: "Their time is passed and they have had their day." And yet, Jacob continues, "this too is a pleasure and a part for them to P'ay." Like the members of the circle, most of the

WRITERS

wedding guests do not have what they want; only the bride and groom have happiness, and they perhaps only for a little while. But participation in the ceremony releases and transforms everyone present. In this sense "the world is a wedding," "the most important kind of party, full of joy, fear, hope, and ignorance. And at this party there are enough places and parts for everyone." The circle, for all its bickering, has been "a circle of friendship," the kind one must have "to be present at the wedding of this world." Laura, though she speaks more briefly, speaks last. During all the self-important philosophical discussions, she has been in the kitchen cooking for her brother's friends, who repay her kindness with indifference or condescension. It is the income from her job that has supported Rudyard for so many years. She replies to Jacob: "You can't fool me ... the world is a funeral." AsJRichard McDougall remarks, "Jacob and Laura ... define the familiar polarities of Schwartz's mind," though his definition of these polarities as "loving communion" and "analytical reason" is misleading: Jacob is at least as analytical as Laura, and far more self-conscious. Manic and depressive would be closer to the truth: an untenably complete affirmation and an insupportably dreary despair. "New Year's Eve," the next story in the collection, treats the discontents of friendship on a smaller scale. Again the plot is slight: A group of intellectuals, including Shenandoah Fish, his girl friend Wilhelmina Gold, and his friend Nicholas O'Neil, attend a 'New Year's Eve party at the home of Grant Landis, an editor and co-owner of "Centaur Editions, a small publishing house" that has just printed Shenandoah's first book. Like the characters of "The World Is a Wedding," the guests at the party seek each other out in order to mitigate or forget their own unhappiness. But for the most

DELMORE SCHWARTZ part they spend the evening hurting each other's feelings, motivated by an insecurity that finds malice in the remarks of others and replies in kind. Although, as intellectuals and writers, they are committed to a high calling, they are at least as petty as other people. The representative man at this gathering is Oliver Jones, a talented writer who has compromised himself by courting popularity in his fiction and flattering the powerful in his reviews. "And all this behavior," Schwartz observes, "would have been unnecessary to Oliver, had he only known that he was really a gifted author!" Unsure of his gifts, Oliver belittles all pretensions to an integrity greater than his own. He spoils the party's one brief "period of good feeling" by reading and then mocking Edmund Wilson's admiration, in Axel's Castle, for Marcel Proust's affirmation of "laws which we have obeyed because we have carried their precepts within us without knowing who inscribed them there " Shenandoah leaves the party thinking, with Proust, that such laws must come from "some other world," since they certainly cannot derive from the pettiness of ours, in which writers are implicated as much as everyone else. Schwartz left in his notes a key identifying the characters of "New Year's Eve": Shenandoah Fish is of course Schwartz himself, Wilhelmina Gold is Gertrude Buckman, and Nicholas O'Neil is William Barrett. The host, Grant Landis, is Dwight Macdonald, and Oliver Jones is an unflattering rendition of F. W. Dupee. Barrett's complaint about "The World Is a Wedding"—that it is "dull, unless you happen to know the people"—applies with more justice to "New Year's Eve." Whereas the longer story develops fictionalized characters enough so that we need not refer to their originals, "New Year's Eve" reduces character to caricature, and caricature loses its point if one doesn't "happen to know the people."

/ 657

"A Bitter Farce," which follows "New Year's Eve," is more sharply focused. It tells of the young Shenandoah's encounters with antiSemitism in his wartime summer classes. Shenandoah teaches two sections of composition, one for navy students and one for women. Discouraged by the heat of the summer and the bad prose of the navy students, Shenandoah often wanders "from discussions of spelling and grammar to ... matters which are sometimes referred to as topics of the day." On one such occasion, Shenandoah's navy class draws him into a discussion of "the Negro problem." Asked if he would marry a Negro woman, Shenandoah decides not to "lose face with his students" by answering yes. "I would not marry a Negro woman," he replies, "but there are many white women I would not marry for the same reasons...." Most of the students interpret this answer to mean "that Mr. Fish would not marry many white women as well as Negro women because he was a Jew," although this inference is incorrect. Not long after this incident, one of the young ladies brings in a journal entry on the question: "If you had to marry one of them, which of these three would you choose, a Chinaman, a Jew, or a Negro?" A Jew would seem to be the closest racially, but, as the girl's friends point out, "there is something about Jews that other races can't stand." The student concludes with a halfhearted attempt at liberality; if "placed in that horrible position," she would "choose the one who was fairest and most honest, the kindest, and he whose ideas most nearly coincided with mine." Shenandoah declines to discuss the content of the passage. By commenting only on the style, he once more avoids confrontation. But when provoked a third time, by a Mr. Murphy in the navy class, he can be silent no longer. He launches into a passionate defense, most of which is lost on his students. "My ancestors," he declares, "in whom I take pride,

658 I AMERICAN but not personal pride, were scholars, poets, prophets and students of God when most of Europe worshipped sticks and stones...." After the bell rings, Murphy stays to talk to him. "I have nothing against you," says Murphy; "you always give me a square deal." Shenandoah considers reporting Murphy to his commanding officer, for such "extraordinary lack of tact and discretion" ill becomes "an officer-to-be." But although he can find no reason for his decision, he lets the incident drop. We are left to wonder whether he does so from generosity or from cowardice. Unfortunately, James Atlas did not reprint this story in his selection. In the next story, "America! America!," Schwartz for once succeeded in portraying a character much different from himself. The central figure, Mr. Baumann, is neither artist nor intellectual, but a modestly successful insurance salesman. Shenandoah listens to his mother's recollections of Mr. Baumann at a time when he has been feeling "a loss or lapse of identity." On this occasion "His mother's monologue began to interest him more and more, much more than ever before, although she spoke of human beings who, being of her own generation, did not really interest Shenandoah in themselves." As he listens, he fidgets with a silver spoon, engraved with his initials, that the Baumanns gave him when he was born. This detail clearly foreshadows his climactic recognition of . . . how closely bound he was to these people. His separation was actual enough, but there existed also an unbreakable unity. As the air was full of the radio's unseen voices, so the life he breathed in was full of these lives and the age in which they had acted and suffered. He comes to understand that "the contemptuous mood which had governed him as he listened was really self-contempt and ignorance." It is certainly the "separation" between Shenandoah and Mr. Baumann that strikes us

WRITERS

first. Shenandoah has assumed the role of cosmopolitan and alienated young poet; he has just come back from a trip to Paris. (This detail, by the way, is not autobiographical.) Mr. Baumann is not cosmopolitan, alienated, or poetic; his success as an insurance man stems from his geniality. To succeed at insurance, " it was necessary to become friendly with a great many people," and to "join the lodges, societies, and associations of your own class and people. This had been no hardship to Mr. Baumann who enjoyed groups, gatherings, and meetings of all kinds." Mr. Baumann values moneymaking and the good opinion of the community above all else, though the second goal often gets in the way of the first. He lacks the ruthless business instinct of Shenandoah's father, who does not allow bonhomie to interfere with profits. In a moment of weakness, Shenandoah's father takes Mr. Baumann and young Dick Baumann into his business; but upon discovering their amiable inefficiency he abruptly dissolves the partnership, the long friendship between the two families notwithstanding. Dick Baumann inherits his father's geniality, but is unable to make a living from it. For that matter, after the stock market crash, Mr. Baumann himself has a hard time of it. His reduced circumstances are partly a result of the Great Depression, but also partly the result of his obsolete methods. As his other son, Sidney, cruelly tells him, "the old oil" no longer works in the increasingly assimilated and impersonal ambience of the community. Sidney, for his part, seems incapable of work; the daughter, Martha, makes a gdod marriage but becomes "more impatient with her family year by year," and eventually wishes to sever all ties with them, though her husband prevents her from doing so. The old ways, which served well enough for Mr. Baumann, will not do for his children. They must choose between failure and a radical break with the previous generation. In either

DELMORE SCHWARTZ / 659 case the result is bitterness: "The lower middleclass of the generation of Shenandoah's parents had engendered perversions of its own nature, children full of contempt for every thing important to their parents." Despite the "gulf between Shenandoah and his mother's old friend, the two have some things in common. We learn that Mr. Baumann, like Shenandoah, enjoys sleeping late in the morning. He is "pleasure-loving," and thus an object of suspicion in the eyes of Shenandoah's father. Within his provincial world he is considered an intellectual, a more traveled and cultured man than his neighbors. And he doesn't just "sell" insurance policies, he "writes" them. Mr. Baumann's frustrated desire for high culture is typical of his generation; it finds fulfillment in the next generation, when Shenandoah and others like him become writers and scholars. But if Shenandoah completes Mr. Baumann, he has also cut his ties to family and community, and so becomes incomplete in another sense. In his isolation he has cause to envy Mr. Baumann's secure bond to a community. "All I ever wanted," laments Shenandoah in "New Year's Eve," "was to have friends and go to parties." But by this criterion he is a failure and Mr. Baumann is a success. Thinking of his generation's "contempt" for its parents, Shenandoah ... began to feel that he was wrong to suppose that the separation, the contempt, and the gulf had nothing to do with his work; perhaps, on the contrary, it was the center; or perhaps it was the starting-point and compelled the innermost motion of the work to be flight, or criticism, or denial, or rejection. Shenandoah finds his complementary relationship to Mr. Baumann difficult to acknowledge, but the acknowledgment is necessary for selfunderstanding. "The Statues" stands apart from the other stories in The World Is a Wedding. Whereas

the others deal with friendships and families in a quotidian social setting, "The Statues" is a parable, taking as its premise a miraculous event. One winter, at five o'clock on December 8 (Schwartz's birthday, as it just so happens), an unusual snow begins to fall in New York. It forms "curious and unquestionable designs, some of which were very human"; it also has "the hardness of rocks," so that it "could not be removed from the pavement." At first the mayor vows to get rid of the snow "as quickly as possible," but the citizens protest. There is a lull in all everyday activities—work and crime slow almost to a halt. Attendance drops at art galleries and movie theaters, for no art form, elite or popular, can compete with the astonishing snow sculptures. The modern rational temper cannot account for this miracle. Scientists attempt to explain it by the laws of statistical probability, and even the clergy carefully avoids ascribing it to any supernatural power. Understood or not, the snowfall brings about a temporary Utopia. It brings the central character, Faber Gottschalk, to discover in himself a passion for the good, the true, and the beautiful, scarcely apparent hitherto in his prosaic career as a dentist. But suddenly "a tireless and foul rain descended and to everyone's surprise utterly destroyed the fine statues." Everything immediately returns to normal, as if nothing unusual had ever happened. This story, like "A Bitter Farce," remains out of print; again, one wishes room had been found for it in Atlas' selection. The last of the stories in The World Is a Wedding, aside from "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities," is "The Child Is the Meaning of This Life." It draws its characters from the household of Schwartz's maternal grandmother, Hannah Nathanson, whose fictional name is Ruth Hart. Schwartz appears under the name Jasper, but his story is subordinated to that of his mother's family. As in "America! America!" the second generation has lost the

660 I AMERICAN tough adaptability of the first. Ruth Hart has a generous, loving disposition and is dearly loved by all her friends. One might think that, despite the early death of her husband, she would succeed in raising capable, affectionate children. But her daughter Sarah (Jasper's mother) becomes sharp-tongued and resentful after her marriage to the rich but philandering Michael; her son Seymour is too lazy to hold a job, and gambles away what little money he has. Rebecca, the one loyal child, has helped to spoil Seymour; she even rescues him when he takes money belonging to his employer and bets it on a baseball game. She manages to make a respectable marriage to a dentist, but it is not a great success. Sarah's husband, a far better catch, repeatedly abandons his family to chase other women. The characters are interesting, but the story lacks the power of "America! America!," in which the confrontation between Shenandoah's values and those of the Baumanns provides a much needed dramatic tension. Though only half the length of "The Child Is the Meaning of This Life," "America! America!" has more richness of implication. If Atlas disappoints us by omitting "A Bitter Farce" and "The Statues" from his selection of Schwartz's stories, he makes up for it by restoring two noteworthy pieces that Schwartz for some reason never included in any of his books. "Screeno" was not published in any form until Partisan Review printed it in 1977, more than a decade after Schwartz's death. It concerns a young writer, Cornelius Schmidt, who goes to the movies and wins a game of "Screeno," apparently a variation of bingo played in theaters during the 1930's. The master of ceremonies, attempting to make conversation, asks Cornelius: "What do you do?" Cornelius replies that he is a poet. When the master of ceremonies and the audience find this amusing, Cornelius increases their hostility by reciting a passage

WRITERS

from Eliot's "Gerontion." Just as everyone has become suspicious of Cornelius, an old man calls out from the balcony, claiming that he also holds a winning card. The master of ceremonies tries to avoid paying the old man his prize money, although the card is indeed complete. Cornelius denounces the management as dishonest and miserly, and, in a sudden burst of generosity, gives his own prize money to the old man, though he had planned to invest it in books. Less completely successful but also interesting is "The Commencement Day Address," which was published in the New Directions annual for 1937. It provides a minimal fictional scaffolding for the undecorously passionate speech of the historian Isaac Duspenser, who upbraids his audience for its frivolous indifference to history and mortality. The rhetoric of the speech is melodramatic but often powerful; perhaps the best passages of all come in Schwartz's descriptions of the ambience of the event: An airplane gnawed overhead, bare, abstract and geometrical in the cloud-flowered sky; and its tone accented the passage of the afternoon. One listener had a firm sense of the narrow metropolitan city, its ribs bound by deep, narrow rivers, narrow on all sides, narrow in its tall towers, full of thousands of drugstores and apartment houses, full of thousands of narrow avenues, all of which stood in back of the idyllic campus scene and showed its falsity. "The Commencement Day Address" is an odd combination of short story, essay, and prose poem; indeed, Dr. Duspenser's talk includes a prose rearrangement of "In the Naked Bed, in Plato's Cave." After the publication of The World Is a Wedding, we approach the years in Schwartz's life that Saul Bellow used as material for Humboldt's Gift: the second marriage, to Elizabeth

DELMORE SCHWARTZ / 661 Pollett, in 1949; the purchase of the rural New Jersey farmhouse in 1951; the ill-fated appointment at Princeton in 1952; the deterioration of the marriage; and, finally, the psychotic outburst against Hilton Kramer that ended with Schwartz's commitment to Bellevue Hospital for a week in 1957. During this period Schwartz alienated most of his old friends and began to lose his sense of membership in the literary community. His last book appeared in 1961, and he stopped publishing work in magazines after 1962. He taught at Syracuse University from 1962 to January 1965; despite his erratic teaching, he attracted a loyal following among the students. He might have stayed at Syracuse for the rest of his life, but instead left abruptly to spend his last months in cheap hotels in midtown Manhattan. When he died, on July 11, 1966, he was so isolated that the literary world knew nothing of his death for two days. Eventually a reporter, checking the morgue lists, recognized his name. Received opinion has it that as Schwartz deteriorated, so did his work. "I'd bleed to say his lovely work improved / but it is not so," wrote John Berryman in one of his commemorative Dream Songs. Recently some critics have begun to question this judgment. Robert Phillips, in his foreword to Last and Lost Poems of Delmore Schwartz, takes issue with James Atlas' description of the opening stanza of "Darkling Summer, Ominous Dusk, Rumorous Rain" (1958) as composed of "haphazard, euphonious, virtually incomprehensible effusions." To dismiss such poetry because of its euphony, replies Phillips, "would be to dismiss Gerard Manley Hopkins, Dame Edith Sitwell, and Dylan Thomas, to name three." But Atlas does not mean to dismiss the late poems because of their euphony. The problem is, rather, that they lack the meaning and emotional depth that would make the euphony amount to more than a technical effect. Here is

the stanza, so that the reader may judge: A tattering of rain and then the reign Of pour and pouring-down and down, Where in the westward gathered the filming gown Of grey and clouding weakness, and, in the mane Of the light's glory and the day's splendor, gold and vain, Vivid, more and more vivid, scarlet, lucid and more luminous, Then came a splatter, a prattle, a blowing rain! And soon the hour was musical and rumorous: A softness of a dripping lipped the isolated houses, A gaunt grey somber softness licked the glass of hours. These lines, it should be added, are better than most in the later poems of this type. A critic should not be afraid to overturn a received opinion; but sometimes a received opinion happens also to be just, and in such cases one has the dull duty of confirming it. Although the late poetry is not a total loss, it contains only two or three poems that will stand comparison with the best eight or ten of In Dreams Begin Responsibilities. The late fiction in Successful Love and Other Stories (1961) is also clearly inferior to the stories in The World Is a Wedding. The nadir of Schwartz's career came in 1950, with the publication of Vaudeville for a Princess. This collection of poems, alternating with prose sketches in the first of its three sections, is a virtually unmitigated disaster. Schwartz tells us in a note that the title was "suggested by Princess Elizabeth's admiration of Danny Kaye." The poems aim at wit and playfulness, but the wit is leaden, the playfulness grim and willful. As noted earlier in connection with Genesis, Schwartz's style could become lazy, in a way that suggests an inertia born of despair. In

662 I AMERICAN WRITERS Vaudeville for a Princess, this despair is sometimes expressed as technical negligence. Metrical and syntactic clumsiness abounds, and in one of the sonnets, Schwartz simply doesn't bother to rhyme the last line of the sestet: Churchill nudged Roosevelt. With handsome glee Roosevelt winked! Upon life's peak they played (Power is pleasure, though anxious. Power is free!) Mah-jong or pat-a-cake with history: They swayed like elephants in the gaiety And the enormity of their success! These lines exemplify the carelessness of the poems in other respects as well. The parenthetical sentences in the third line are awkward; the superfluous "Power is free!" looks like metrical padding; and one might have difficulty transporting the "elephants" of the fifth line to the "peaks" of the second. The tone of Vaudeville for a Princess was well described, in a savage but perceptive review by Hugh Kenner, as "frenetic embarrassment." The irony is too ponderous to be funny, too flippant to be profound. Rolfe Humphries, though he found the poems "solemn, owlish, abstract, and . . . entirely earless," liked the prose interludes of the first section, which struck him as witty, though "at times a bit glib." But these pieces have not worn well, and it is mostly the glibness that remains. Ranging from a discussion of automobiles to deliberately banal retellings of Hamlet and Othello, these sketches have the ephemeral quality of stand-up comedy, albeit a stand-up comedy for intellectuals. The one good poem in Vaudeville for a Princess is "Starlight Like Intuition Pierced the Twelve," in which Christ's disciples, far from rejoicing in their master's completed mission, are overcome with guilt for their own inability

to match his "Unspeakable unnatural goodness." Instead of providing comfort and hope, Christ's life has exhausted the possibilities of goodness: "No one will ever fit / His measure's heights, all is inadequate: / No matter what I do, what good is it?" Christ's perfection "stares" accusingly at human imperfection, like Rainer Maria Rilke's archaic torso of Apollo. The poem makes a sad contrast with Schwartz's earlier remark, in the preface to Genesis, that the makers of the Gospels "had only to look up or remember" in order to find a sustaining faith. The style of Vaudeville for a Princess is not yet the euphonious, rhapsodic manner that Phillips identifies as Schwartz's late style. For this we must turn to the previously uncollected work that Schwartz included in Summer Knowledge, the selection of his poems that he published in 1959. In this poetry, vague imagery of light and morning, and an exclamatory, occasionless affirmation, run rampant. Some of the poems continue using formal stanzas; others use a long free-verse line like that of Walt Whitman, or of Theodore Roethke in "The Lost Son" or "North American Sequence." Without any prejudice against free verse or poetry of lyrical celebration, one must object when free verse is handled so ponderously or when celebration becomes so disembodied, so divorced from experience. The following example, which is far from the most damning that might have been chosen, will have to suffice. Here is the opening of "A Little Morning Music": The birds in the first light twitter and whistle, Chirp and seek, sipping and chortling— weakly, meekly, they speak and bubble, As cheerful as the cherry would, if it could speak when it is cherry ripe or cherry ripening. And all of them are melodious, erratic, and gratuitous,

DELMORE SCHWARTZ / 663 Singing solely to heighten the sense of morning's beginning. How soon the heart's cup overflows, how it is excited to delight and elation! And in the first light, the cock's chant, roaring, Bursts like rockets, rising and breaking into brief brilliance; As the fields arise, cock after cock catches on fire, And the pastures loom out of vague blue shadow, The red barn and the red sheds rise and redden, blocks and boxes of slowly blooming wet redness; Then the great awe and splendor of the sun comes nearer, Kindling all things, consuming the forest of blackness, lifting and lighting up All the darkling ones who slept and grew Beneath the petals, the frost, the mystery and the mockery of the stars. Some of the phrases are pleasing and evocative, taken in isolation. But as one can already sense in this passage, which is only the first half of the poem, there is no movement, only a proliferation of grandiose variations on the single image of morning. A little of this sort of description, wedded to an emotional occasion, set into motion and developed, could make a whole poem. But the rest of "A Little Morning Music" continues in the same vein. By the end of the poem, one questions the sincerity of all this joy: it seems rhetorical and manic, unmotivated by any adequate occasion, less concerned with the delights of morning than with the desperate assertion that all is well. A few of the late poems are anchored in a specific occasion, and on the whole they prove to be the best ones. "'I Am Cherry Alive,' the Little Girl Sang" is spoken, as its title suggests,

by a child. It has the breathless, run-on rhythms of a child's speech: "I am cherry alive," the little girl sang, "Each morning I am something new: I am apple, I am plum, I am just as excited As the boys who made the Hallowe'en bang: I am tree, I am cat, I am blossom too: When I like, if I like, I can be someone new, Someone very old, a witch in a zoo: I can be someone else whenever I think who.... ["] The language may strike us as slightly too precious, but it is still effective, as are the insistent rhymes. The poems that James Atlas and Richard McDougall single out for praise are also dramatic monologues. Atlas admires the biblical group: "Abraham," "Sarah," and "Jacob"; McDougall prefers the monologues spoken by writers: "Sterne," "Swift," and "Baudelaire." All of these poems have their moments, especially "Jacob," but at times they seem too slackly written. They borrow too passively from their sources and are content with presenting a static attitude. A good dramatic monologue must progress and unfold as one moves from beginning to end. Schwartz's borrowing is anything but passive in the wonderful "Seurat's Sunday Afternoon Along the Seine," a long free-verse meditation on Georges Seurat's Un dimanche h la GrandeJatte. The source for this poem would seem to be not only the painting itself, but also Meyer Schapiro's article, "New Light on Seurat," published in the April 1958 issue of Art News. (The poem is dedicated "To Meyer and Lillian Schapiro.") Schwartz appears to have drawn upon Schapiro's commentary, even to the extent of adapting its language. Schapiro wrote: With all its air of simplicity and stylization, Seurat's art is extremely complex. He painted

664 I AMERICAN WRITERS large canvases not to assert himself nor to insist on the power of a single idea, but to develop an image emulating the fullness of nature. One can enjoy in the Grande Jatte many pictures each of which is a world in itself.... Schwartz's words echo Schapiro's in these lines: His vision is simple: yet it is also ample, complex, vexed, and profound In emulation of the fullness of Nature Within this Sunday afternoon upon the Seine Many pictures exist inside the Sunday scene: Each of them is a world itself, a world in itself More generally, Schwartz appears to have elaborated on Schapiro's description of the figures in the painting as "a secular congregation, grave and ceremonious, in their holiday communion with the summer light and air." Schwartz's poem, though indebted to Schapiro's essay, is not a merely passive appropriation of it. Schwartz finds a pathos in the scene that Schapiro does not. The painting becomes a symbol of precarious reconciliation, in which The Sunday summer sun shines equally and voluptuously Upon the rich and the free, the comfortable, the rentier, the poor, and those who are paralyzed by poverty. Seurat is at once painter, poet, architect, and alchemist: The alchemist points his magical wand to describe and hold the Sunday's gold, Mixing his small alloys for long and long Because he wants to hold the warm leisure and pleasure of the holiday Within the fiery blaze and passionate patience of his gaze and mind Now and forever: O happy, happy throng, It is forever Sunday, summer, free....

The "happy, happy throng" should recall the "happy, happy boughs" of John Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn," for here, as in Keats, the permanence of art reminds us of the impermanence of life. Outside the painting, time presses on. Seurat died young, and in his brief span had little Sunday leisure. To create the apparent spontaneity of the painting, . . . it requires the labors of Hercules, Sisyphus, Flaubert, Roebling: The brilliance and spontaneity of Mozart, the patience of a pyramid, And requires all these of the painter who at twenty-five Hardly suspects that in six years he will no longer be alive! Although the transient pleasures that the artist celebrates are not for him, the world within the painting is in a sense more "real" than his. In it people can sometimes lose their self-consciousness and fear of death in ordinary happiness. They find a summer's day by the river sufficient in itself, without any need to "describe and hold" it. The artist can pay homage to this simplicity, but he has no share in it. The poem ends wistfully: . . . Far and near, close and far away, Can we not hear, if we but listen to what Flaubert tried to say, Beholding a husband, wife and child on just such a day: 7/5- sont dans le vrai! They are with the truth, they have found the way The kingdom of heaven on earth on Sunday summer day. Is it not clear and clearer? Can we not also hear The voice of Kafka, forever sad, in despair's sickness trying to say: "Flaubert was right: 7/5- sont dans le vrai!

DELMORE SCHWARTZ / 665 Without forbears, without marriage, without heirs, Yet with a wild longing for forbears, marriage, and heirs: They all stretch out their hands to me: but they are too far away!" We hear not only Gustave Flaubert and Franz Kafka, but also Schwartz in these closing lines. In them he has made clear, for once, his true relation to the celebratory rhetoric in the late poetry. None of the poems that Robert Phillips recovered for his selection Last and Lost Poems of Delmore Schwartz (1979) approaches the power of "Seurat's Sunday Afternoon Along the Seine," but a few of them are better than most of the late work in Summer Knowledge. One might recommend "America, America!" (which has no connection with the story "America! America!"), "Poem; Remember Midsummer: The Fragrance of Box," "Spiders," and the somber "All Night, All Night," with its bleak cry: O your life, your lonely life What have you ever done with it, And done with the great gift of consciousness? There are occasional striking images, of a sensuous intensity rare in Schwartz's work. Here, for instance, is the third of the "Phoenix Lyrics": Purple black cloud at sunset: it is late August and the light begins to look cold, and as we look, listen and look, we hear the first drums of autumn. On the whole, though, the examples in Phillips' book will hardly support a higher estimation of Schwartz's late poetry. By turning away from the personal and historic determinisms that had

burdened him for so long, he sometimes attained a measure of spontaneity and sensuous immediacy missing in most of the early poetry. But it is freedom in a vacuum, the volatilized fantasy of a man who has nearly withdrawn from all relation to the world. Only in those poems in which some source in externality kept him from severing that relation did he continue to produce work of any substance. Schwartz's last book, Successful Love (1961), finds his prose style in tolerable repair, but the stories lack the emotional force and social detail of the earlier work. The characters are not drawn from autobiographical sources; they are neither Jewish immigrants like Mr. Baumann nor Jewish intellectuals like Shenandoah Fish. Schwartz's style always tended toward abstractness, and when he tried to depict a milieu he did not know intimately, the texture became too thin. "A Colossal Fortune" and "The Hartford Innocents" are amusingly plotted but too long for their slight content. "An American Fairy Tale" wittily reverses the cliche of the philistine father and the idealistic son: an aspiring young composer sells out and writes advertising jingles, while the father retires from his business and becomes a noted abstract expressionist painter. It's a good joke, but little more than that. James Atlas' selection contains only one story from Successful Love, and it is unquestionably the right one. "The Track Meet," with its savage irony and disturbing symbolism, stands apart from—and above—the other late stories. The narrator, Frank Lawrence, is awakened at dawn by an unexpected English visitor, Reginald Law. Law takes Lawrence to a track meet, at which Law is surprised to find his mother among the spectators and his brothers among the participants. The competition becomes a symbolic commentary on the cruelty of human nature, especially of human nature as influenced by a capitalist, mass-culture-dominated

666 I AMERICAN society. One of the athletes kisses the lips of a girl on a billboard as if she were real; the runners punch and kick each other to gain position in the race, while the audience eggs them on. The brothers, who at first cooperated against the other athletes, begin to fight among themselves. When the race ends, an official shoots the winner, and five cheerleaders shoot the narrator's five brothers. During these alarming events, Lawrence protests to his English companion that such tactics are "against the rules of the game." But if, as his name suggests, the Englishman represents "law," he does not stand for old-fashioned British propriety. The "law" he represents is postDarwinian: "'Nature is unfair,' said Law, 'and existence is also unfair.'" "Law" is also the first part of "Lawrence," as we understand at the end of the story. The narrator wants to escape from his nightmare by waking to "the little things and small actions of early morning" (the language echoes the celebratory rhetoric of Summer Knowledge). But waking is no escape, as Law brutally explains: You don't escape from nightmare by waking up, you know. And if what occurred on the field were merely imaginary and unreal and merely your own private hallucination, then the evil that has terrified you is rooted in your own mind and heart. Like the rest of us ... you not only know more than you think you know but more than you are willing to admit. The other stories in Successful Love seem negligible in comparison with this one. Schwartz's essays, although they cannot be said to have improved, remained lucid and at least intermittently interesting until he stopped writing them altogether in 1962. As a critic, Schwartz was preoccupied with the same issues as most of his contemporaries: the relationship between poetic statement and literal belief, and the tension between the need to connect poetry

WRITERS

with a social context and the need to defend its autonomy and transcendence. His formulations of these problems usually derive from other critics, and his essays do not quite add up to a coherent and original view of literature. Schwartz's special gift was his ability to analyze, define, and qualify the assertions of more imperious critics like T. S. Eliot, Yvor Winters, and Allen Tate. His "Poetry and Belief in Thomas Hardy" (1940), for instance, derives its central idea from the discussion of poetry and belief in T. S. Eliot's essay on Dante. But Schwartz defines more exactly than Eliot had done the ways in which a poet's beliefs do and do not affect the artistic success of a poem. The assessments Schwartz makes of other critics, such as R. P. Blackmur and Winters, and of major writers such as Yeats, Wallace Stevens, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner, show a fine ability to go straight to the essentials in a body of work, and to balance generosity with the impersonal severity that necessarily accompanies high standards. Even in a late essay, "The Present State of Poetry" (1958), he writes with a penetration and sanity untouched by the chaos of his personal life. Selected Essays ofDelmore Schwartz, edited by Donald A. Dike and David H. Zucker (1970), preserves Schwartz's best critical writings. If anything, one might wish the selection had been a little narrower, whereas in Atlas' edition of the stories, one would like a longer book. But if one adds to these two volumes Summer Knowledge and Atlas' biography, one gets a fairly complete sense of Schwartz's career. In England, Carcanet New Press issued Douglas Dunn's selection of the poems, What Is to Be Given (1976). Dunn weeded out the later poetry, perhaps too ruthlessly, although he retained '"I Am Cherry Alive,' the Little Girl Sang" and the Seurat poem. He also omitted "Coriolanus and His Mother." But for those who would rather have slightly too little than slightly too much, this volume makes a good al-

DELMORE SCHWARTZ / 667 ternative to Schwartz's own selection. McDougalPs study, though uneven, is often quite perceptive; it deserves more attention than it has apparently received. A paperback selection of the best short pieces on Schwartz would also be welcome. Schwartz deserves to be rescued from the oblivion for which he seemed destined at the end of the 1960's, but he cannot be regarded a£ a major poet or writer of fiction. Whether he ever possessed, as his friends believed, the potential to become a major poet, we cannot say, but it seems extremely doubtful. He had intelligence, emotional intensity, and devotion to the art, but lacked a subtle ear. Nor is Schwartz's poetry notable for visual suggestiveness. The wit that dazzled everyone in his conversation rarely informs his writing, especially his most ambitious writing. A great poet can do without a first-rate ear, without vivid evocation of the physical world, or without exceptional grace or wit. One thinks of Thomas Hardy, Alexander Pope, and Wordsworth, respectively. But can a great poet dispense with all three of these gifts? Rather than lament Schwartz's failure to become a major poet, we may be glad that he overcame his limitations, both personal and artistic, to the extent that he did. Not to the extent that we might have hoped, but enough to make us grateful for what he has left us.

Selected Bibliography WORKS OF DELMORE SCHWARTZ

Shenandoah. Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1941. Reprinted in New Directions 32, edited by James Laughlin, Peter Glassgold, and Frederick R. Martin. New York: New Directions, 1976. Pp. 24-45. Genesis: Book One. New York: New Directions, 1943. Selections from the manuscript of Book Two, introduced by James Atlas, appear in New Directions 35, edited by James Laughlin, Peter Glassgold, and Frederick R. Martin. New York: New Directions, 1977. Pp. 34-47. The World Is a Wedding. Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1948. Vaudeville for a Princess and Other Poems. New York: New Directions, 1950. Summer Knowledge: New and Selected Poems, 1938-1958. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1959. Reprinted as Selected Poems (1938-1958): Summer Knowledge. New York: New Directions, 1967. Successful Love and Other Stories. New York: Corinth Books, 1961. Selected Essays of Delmore Schwartz, edited and with an introduction by Donald A. Dike and David H. Zucker and an appreciation by Dwight Macdonald. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970. What Is to Be Given: Selected Poems, edited and with an introduction by Douglas Dunn. Manchester, England: Carcanet New Press, 1976. In Dreams Begin Responsibilities and Other Stories, edited and with an introduction by James Atlas; foreword by Irving Howe. New York: New Directions, 1978. "Selections from the Verse Journals," with an introduction by James Atlas. New Directions 36, edited by James Laughlin, Peter Glassgold, and Frederick R. Martin. New York: New Directions, 1978. Pp. 40-48. Last and Lost Poems of Delmore Schwartz, edited and with an introduction by Robert Phillips. New York: Vanguard Press, 1979.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL STUDIES BOOKS

In Dreams Begin Responsibilities. Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1938. A Season in Hell Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1939; 2nd ed., 1940.

Atlas, James. Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977; paperback edition, New York: Avon Books, 1978.

668 I AMERICAN McDougall, Richard. Delmore Schwartz. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1974. ARTICLES, MEMOIRS, AND REVIEWS

Barrett, William. "Delmore: A 30's Friendship and Beyond." Commentary, 58, no. 3:41-54 (September 1974). Bogan, Louise. "Young Modern." Nation, 148:35354 (March 25, 1939). (Review of In Dreams Begin Responsibilities.) Bonham, Sister M. Hilda. "Delmore Schwartz: An Idea of the World." Renascence, 13:132-35 (1961). Deutsch, R. H. "Poetry and Belief in Delmore Schwartz." Sewanee Review, 74:915-24 (1966). . "Delmore Schwartz: Middle Poems." Concerning Poetry, 2, no. 2:19-28 (1969). Dike, Donald A. "A Case for Judgment: The Literary Criticism of Delmore Schwartz." Twentieth Century Literature, 24:492-509 (1978). Flint, Robert W. "The Stories of Delmore Schwartz." Commentary, 33:336-39 (April 1962). Halio, Jay L. "Delmore Schwartz's Felt Abstractions." Southern Review, 1:802-19 (1965). Hook, Sidney. "Imaginary Enemies, Real Terror." American Scholar, 47:406-12 (1978). Howe, Irving. "Delmore Schwartz—a Personal Appreciation." New Republic, 146:25-27 (March 19, 1962). . "Purity and Craftiness." Times Literary Supplement, 28:458-59 (April 1978). Humphries, Rolfe. "A Verse Chronicle." Nation, 171:490 (November 25, 1950). (Review of Vaudeville for a Princess.)

WRITERS

Kazin, Alfred. "Delmore Schwartz, 1913-1966." World Journal Tribune Book Week, 1:17-18 (October 9, 1966). Kenner, Hugh. "Bearded Ladies and the Abundant Goat." Poetry, 79:50-53 (October 1951). (Review of Vaudeville for a Princess.) Kloss, Robert J. "An Ancient and Famous Capital: Delmore Schwartz's Dream." Psychoanalytic Review, 65:475-90 (1978). Knapp, James F. "Delmore Schwartz: Poet of the Orphic Journey." Sewanee Review, 78:506-16 (1970). Lyons, Bonnie. "Delmore Schwartz and the Whole Truth." Studies in Short Fiction, 14:259-64 (1977). Macdonald, Dwight. "Delmore Schwartz (19131966)." New York Review of Books, 7, no. 3:1416 (September 8, 1966). Matthiessen, F. O. "A New York Childhood." Partisan Review, 10:292-94 (1943). (Review of Genesis.) Novak, Michael Paul. "The Dream as Film: Delmore Schwartz's 'In Dreams Begin Responsibilities.'" Kansas Quarterly, 9, no. 2:87-91 (1977). Politzer, Heinz. "The Two Worlds of Delmore Schwartz: Lucifer in Brooklyn." Translated by Martin Greenberg. Commentary, 10:561-68 (December 1950). Rahv, Philip. "Delmore Schwartz: The Paradox of Precocity." New York Review of Books, 17, no. 9:19-22 (May 20, 1971). Zucker, David. "Self and History in Delmore Schwartz's Poetry and Criticism." Iowa Review, 8, no. 4:95-103 (1977). —PAUL BRESLIN

Anne Sexton 1928-1974

I,

In contrast, those who read Sexton's poetry in more traditional ways, evaluating it in strictly aesthetic terms, have tended to be harsh in their judgments. The persistent refrain in their responses is that Sexton indulged in an uninhibited confessionalism that she had not sufficiently crafted. Such criticism is to a large extent warranted, particularly in terms of the later poetry, for as Sexton gained recognition, she all too often abandoned the commitment to form that characterized the best of her earlier writing. Whereas the earlier volumes contain some remarkable poems of insight, beauty, and craft, many of her later efforts are awkward, uncontrolled, sometimes sentimental, sometimes boring. It may well be that as her notoriety grew, Sexton became unable to separate her life and her art. Although in letters and interviews she continued to affirm her determination to write poetry that had formal integrity, that contained meaning beyond the autobiographical, and that was of lasting value, she seemed to fall victim to the misconception that anything she wrote either was valid as art or was of interest because she had written it. She increasingly published poems that she had not revised at all. In the several years preceding her suicide in 1974, Sexton began writing almost frantically about her personal torments and her needs. Be-

N part because she wrote confessional poetry and in part because she became a sort of media event—"the mad suicide poet, the live Sylvia Plath," as she put it—it has become nearly impossible for Anne Sexton's readers to separate the poet from the poetry she wrote. Most of her readers focus on her work either as a personal case history or as a social document. Those with an interest in psychology often value Sexton's poetic efforts to recreate her repeated nervous breakdowns, her stays in mental hospitals, and her exploration of her memories, dreams, and fantasies. Some find in Sexton's life and her poetry verification of British psychologist R. D. Laing's popularized theories that madness may be a sane response to an insane world and that insanity breeds special perceptions. Others are drawn to Sexton because they see in her suicide what A. A. Alvarez saw in Plath's death, evidence that an anguished life, and even suicide, may be the price of artistic genius. Feminists also claim Sexton, reading her poetry as an expression of oppressed womanhood. Some feminist readers especially applaud the boldness of her confessionalism, valuing it as a rejection of literary conventions that they define as masculine. But whatever their bias, such readers tend to be generous in their praise, celebrating the poetry primarily because it so fully and openly reveals Sexton's personal pain.

669

670 I AMERICAN cause she initially had been rewarded with success for the honesty of her confessions, she now seemed impelled to confess even more honestly. But in doing so, she lost control of the poetry, worrying all the while that her success was damaging to her art. The paradox is a devastating one. Sexton became a success as a poet primarily because of her ability to disclose her private failures publicly, but that success ultimately contributed to failures in both her poetry and her life. Those failures in turn became the subject of her progressively deteriorating poetry. The conflicting critical reactions to Sexton's poetry, coupled with the fact that she and her editors so often failed to differentiate between the memorable and the mediocre in her work, raise the unsettling question of whether Sexton was being acclaimed as a poet or as a cultural phenomenon. For example, had she lived in a different time and in a different way, would her poetry have been so easily published, so widely recognized, and often so uncritically read? Had she not, along with Plath, taken a poetry workshop directed by Robert Lowell, had she not attempted suicide and been institutionalized repeatedly for her breakdowns, had she not written quite so fully and frequently about her despairs and death wishes—indeed, had Plath not killed herself—would Sexton's poetry have been so compelling? To do justice to both Sexton and her art, it is necessary to read and assess her poetry and her life in conjunction with each other. To do otherwise undervalues her strengths and either glosses over or glorifies her weaknesses. A year before her death Sexton wrote to her agent, Claire S. Degener, "I want to be an important poet more than a popular one." She may have been perceptive about herself when she added, "God only knows if the two go together." Anne Sexton was born Anne Gray Harvey on November 9, 1928, in Newton, Massachusetts.

WRITERS

Her parents, Ralph Churchill Harvey and Mary Gray Staples Harvey, were from old, established New England families. Her father's woolen firm was successful, and Sexton's childhood was spent in a mansionlike home in Weston, Massachusetts. But by her own account her childhood was an unhappy one. Her poetry is filled with descriptions of her father's alcoholism and her mother's indifference. The third daughter, Sexton described herself in "Those Times ..." (Live or Die, 1966) as the unwanted, the mistake that Mother used to keep Father from his divorce. Only her great-aunt, Anna Ladd Dingley (known variously in the poetry as Anna, Nana, and Elizabeth), was a figure of love and stability for Sexton. Dingley's eventual deafness, senility, and confinement to a nursing home brought Sexton a good deal of pain. There were early if slight hints of future psychological problems. Sexton's elementary school teachers and administrators recommended psychiatric treatment, advice her parents did not take. Later, judging her a rebellious high school student, the Harveys sent her to Rogers Hall, a boarding school in Lowell, Massachusetts. There Sexton was popular, particularly with males, and photographs from this period show her to have been an extraordinarily beautiful young girl. Although not a serious student, she did write poetry, abandoning it when her mother mistakenly accused her of plagiarism. After graduating from Rogers Hall, Sexton spent a year at what she called a "finishing school," Garland Junior College in Boston. In the summer of 1948 she met, and a month later eloped with, Alfred Muller Sexton II, known as Kayo. The couple soon abandoned their hope that Kayo, a premedical student at Colgate University, would finish his schooling. Instead,

ANNE SEXTON / 671 unhappy about needing his family's financial support, he left college and went to work for a woolen firm. Sexton's letters to her parents suggest that she was enthusiastically embracing the stereotypical role of the happy young bride, concerned with clothes, cooking, and her new husband. In one letter she revealed that her "heart's desire" was an electric Mixmaster. In 1950, at the outbreak of the Korean War, Kayo joined the naval reserve. When he was aboard ship or in Korea, Sexton lived with his family. It was during this period that the senior Sextons became concerned about her manicdepressive states. After the birth of her first child, Linda Gray Sexton, in 1953, Sexton was repeatedly hospitalized for severe bouts of depression and a suicide attempt. Kayo had completed his tour of duty and joined his father-in-law's woolen firm. Anna Ladd Dingley's death in 1954, at the age of eighty-six, caused Sexton new emotional difficulties. The following year a second daughter, Joyce Ladd Sexton, was born. Although Sexton recalls in "The Double Image" that "we named you Joyce / so we could call you Joy," she suffered another breakdown. After months of hospitalization, she returned home, able to care only for Linda. Joy remained with her paternal grandparents for the next three years and did not think of Sexton as her mother. In an interview with Barbara Kevles in 1968, Sexton recounted those years: Until I was twenty-eight I had a kind of buried self who didn't know she could do anything but make white sauce and diaper babies. I didn't know I had any creative depths. I was a victim of the American Dream, the bourgeois, middleclass dream. All I wanted was a little piece of life, to be married, to have children. I thought the nightmares, the visions, the demons would go away if there was enough love to put them down. I tried my damnedest to lead a conventional life, for that was how I was brought up,

and it was what my husband wanted of me. But one can't build little white picket fences to keep nightmares out. The surface cracked when I was about twenty-eight. I had a psychotic break and tried to kill myself. After her psychiatrist told her she "had a perfectly good mind" and "creative talent," Sexton began to watch the Boston educational television station. When she heard I. A. Richards read a sonnet and explain its form, she began writing. Her doctor encouraged her by saying, "Don't kill yourself. Your poems might mean something to someone else some day." In 1957 Sexton enrolled in John Holmes's poetry seminar at the Boston Center for Adult Education, where she met and became friends with Maxine Kumin. Sexton repeatedly insisted that it was W. D. Snodgrass' "Heart's Needle" that actually gave her the impetus and the courage to write confessional poetry. Her admiration for Snodgrass led her to the 1958 Antioch Summer Writers' Conference so that she could work with him, an experience that began a friendship and an intense correspondence that lasted for years. On Snodgrass' advice Sexton sought admission to Robert Lowell's graduate poetry seminar at Boston University. Accounts of that seminar and of Sexton's friendship with coparticipants Sylvia Plath and George Starbuck have become part of contemporary literary history. After the class the three habitually spent the rest of the afternoon drinking martinis at the Ritz bar, talking of poetry and of death. In "Sylvia's Death" Sexton described those conversations: the death we said we both outgrew the one we wore on our skinny breasts the one we talked of so often each time we downed three extra martinis in Boston the death that talked of analysts and cures, the death that talked like brides with plots,

672 / AMERICAN the death we drank to, the motives and then the quiet deed By 1959, Sexton's poems had been accepted by such major literary publications as the Hudson Review, the Antioch Review, and the New Yorker. With Lowell's advice about what to include (he urged her to discard about half of it and write approximately fifteen new poems), she put together the collection To Bedlam and Part Way Back. She signed a contract for its publication with Houghton Mifflin in April 1959. The poetic progress of these years was marred by personal tragedy. Although both children were now living at home, Sexton continued to suffer emotional problems. Early in 1957 her mother learned that she had breast cancer and her father suffered a major stroke. In March 1959 her mother died of cancer. The following June her father suffered a fatal cerebral hemorrhage. To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960) is Sexton's poetic account of her excursions into insanity and of her ambivalent, often guilt-ridden relationship with her parents and her children. Several poems flirt with popular psychology, suggesting her desire to illuminate the psychological motivation behind behavior and to explore the nature of repressed emotion. Other poems focus on her concern with death, particularly her attempts to come to terms with the passage of time and with the impact that death has on the living. The most successful poems demonstrate Sexton's early commitment to finding the rhyme, the rhythm, the image, or the voice that would best communicate and, at times, best evaluate the experience being presented. As she explained in 1965 to Patricia Marx, a rigid attention to formal concerns allowed her to be more "truthful." Comparing form to the superego, she elaborated: . . . if you used form, it was like letting a lot of

WRITERS

wild animals out in the arena, but enclosing them in a cage, and you could let some extraordinary animals out if you had the right cage, and that cage would be form. She also insisted that form and content were inseparable, and emphasized her efforts to find the right form: Content dominates, but style is the master. I think that's what makes a poet. The form is always important. ... The poems that aren't in form have a shape, just the same. . . . "Ringing the Bells" exemplifies what Sexton meant. The nursery-rhyme quality of the poem reinforces the motif of the childlike helplessness of those confined to mental hospitals. The poet's identification with the bell she holds during music therapy, the E flat, further suggests that being in "Bedlam" dehumanizes the patients by negating their individual personalities: and this is always my bell responding to my hand that responds to the lady who points at me, E flat; and although we are no better for it, they tell you to go. And you do. Significantly, as the volume progresses, the poet's voice evolves. In the early poems the stance and voice frequently are of a child who is lost, fearful, and dependent on a male authority figure. The poet assumes a more active voice as she deliberately attempts to reconcile herself to time, death, and her own psychological impulses. She also begins to explore her relationships with the women in her life. Several of the poems assume a fictional voice, but in them, too, the speaker generally is confronting the realities of life, death, and loss. Finally, in the concluding section (part II), the poet directly asserts her adultness. With a sure voice she takes responsibility first for her poetry and then for her relationships with her mother and daughter. In the last two poems she

ANNE SEXTON / 673 also acknowledges some of her needs, her failures, and her guilt. The first poem in To Bedlam and Part Way Back, "You, Doctor Martin," is one of several set in a mental hospital. Addressing her psychiatrist, the poet at first ironically identifies herself as "queen of this summer hotel." By the second stanza she has likened herself and the other patients to schoolchildren: We chew in rows, our plates scratch and whine like chalk in school. Later she says, "What large children we are / here." Nevertheless, what the poet feels toward the doctor is anger. In the opening stanza she contrasts his freedom to "walk / from breakfast to madness," and presumably all the way back, with her own lack of control: I speed through the antiseptic tunnel where the moving dead still talk of pushing their bones against the thrust of cure. She notes that the patients are denied knives that might be used, she seems to be telling Martin, "for cutting your throat." Still, she bitterly recognizes her dependence on him: Of course, I love you; you lean above the plastic sky, god of our block, prince of all the foxes. The poem is one of the bleakest in the collection, for it depicts the institution as a deathlike place that offers little hope for a genuine cure. Even as the poet learns to mend moccasins, she is aware that another finger will break them tomorrow. Wondering "Am I still lost?" she decides that she, who once was beautiful, is now herself as she acquiesces to the meaningless talk

at hand: counting this row and that row of moccasins waiting on the silent shelf. The second poem, "Kind Sir: These Woods," is more affirmative, embodying the Laingian view that insanity may merely be a label attached to those who have "this inward look that society scorns." The poem's epigraph, a statement of Thoreau's that "Not til we are lost . . . do we begin to find ourselves," and the concluding lines of the poem further suggest that insanity may lead to a fuller and better self-understanding. By being "lost," by facing the "strange happenings, untold and unreal" that her night mind conjures up, the poet discovers that she will "find nothing worse / than myself, caught between the grapes and the thorns." Significantly, the "Kind Sir" to whom the poem is addressed may be Snodgrass rather than Thoreau. In a letter written during this period, Sexton referred to Snodgrass as "Kind Sir." The poem may well reflect her attempts to take Snodgrass' advice that she try to find her own voice and abandon poetic "masks." In "Music Swims Back to Me" the poet again assumes a child's voice and asks an unidentified "Mister" for help in a world that seems to provide none. A later poem in this volume, "Noon Walk on the Asylum Lawn," vividly illustrates the range of her fears. Believing that even the sun, the grass, and the sky are harmful, she concludes the poem: The world is full of enemies. There is no safe place. "The Bells" may explain why the poet at times is drawn into a state of childlike dependency. Addressing her father, she reminisces about a childhood visit to a circus. Despite her sense of potential danger ("the bells / trembled for the flying man," the circus had "three rings of danger," and she felt small in comparison

674 I AMERICAN with the "rough legs of strangers"), she felt secure in her father's love: love love love grew rings around me. Sexton's learning how to cope on her own characterizes the better poems in To Bedlam and Part Way Back. For instance, "Elizabeth Gone" centers on her attempt to accept her great-aunt's death. (Sexton apparently chose the name "Elizabeth" for its rhyme with "death.") The first three stanzas are structured around her inability to honor her great-aunt's plea that she be released from the "beds" that mark her dying, her funeral, and her cremation. Each stanza ends with the older woman's refrain: let me go let me go. In the first stanza the poet feels helpless in the face of her knowledge that the dying woman also is helpless. Elizabeth has become childlike, her breath "grown baby short," but the poet cannot release her from "the nest of your real death," from "the human bed." In the second stanza Elizabeth has died. Hers is now an "inhuman bed," a coffin. Again the poet grieves, mourning that the body in the coffin bears no likeness to the person Elizabeth was. Even after Elizabeth's cremation, her bed now "the cardboard urn," the poet cannot accept the death: I waited you in the cathedral of spells And I waited you in the country of the living. Only in the last stanza is she able to heed Elizabeth's cries, throwing out her "last bony shells." Still not fully in control, the poet screams involuntarily. Only then can she accept the death and act on it: Then I sorted your clothes And the loves you had left, Elizabeth, Elizabeth, until you were gone. Sexton's control of rhyme in this poem is particularly effective. All four stanzas are constructed with an a b a d c e rhyme scheme, but

WRITERS

the power of the final stanza comes with its breaking away from the let me go let me go refrain of the first three stanzas. The finality of the poet's acceptance of the death is revealed not only in her actions but also in the last line of the poem, "Elizabeth, until you were gone." The next poem, "Some Foreign Letters," is both another gentle, loving reminiscence of her great-aunt and an effort by Sexton to reconcile herself to the toll that time takes. The strength of the poem comes from the poet's dual consciousness. She is aware simultaneously of the happiness of her great-aunt's girlhood trip to Europe and of the pain that the future had brought her. As she reads her great-aunt's letters, written when Dingley was "a young girl in a good world still," the poet is aware that "life is a trick, life is a kitten in a sack." The opening lines of the poem make it clear that the greataunt's future is the context in which the letters are being read: I knew you forever and you were always old, soft white lady of my heart. Throughout the poem Sexton juxtaposes images of the great-aunt's happy love affair with a married count with her own awareness that eventually her great-aunt would lose her hearing, become senile, and be sent to a nursing home. "When you were mine," Sexton writes as she attempts to "breathe" life into the letters, "You wore an earphone." And later: When you were mine they wrapped you out of here with your best hat over your face. I cried because I was seventeen. I am older now. The poem, which Lowell praises as one of Sexton's "finer and quieter poems," is carefully crafted. In each stanza a rhymed couplet frames three interior quatrains. The contrasting images of past and present further intensify the sense of the devastation that time brings. Thus, the idyllic love affair is implicitly contrasted

ANNE SEXTON / 675 with the count's eventual death and the greataunt's prim life. Peaceful, even dull moments in London will be lost to ensuing world wars. Skating to a Strauss waltz with the count will be replaced, as the great-aunt goes deaf, with music that has a "sour sound." The agility of their climbing the Alps will ultimately become physical helplessness. The final stanza is the most poignant. As the poet reads of her great-aunt's youthful adventures, she has the illusory sense that she can "tell" her great-aunt of the future. Yet she is aware that she is as helpless to alter that history-to-be as her great-aunt actually had been. The final image of the poem is one of the greataunt, long out of place in a changing world, become even more disoriented. Her once-happy affair has become her albatross, and her love, a guilty love: Tonight I will speak up and interrupt your letters, warning you that wars are coming, that the Count will die, that you will accept your America back to live like a prim thing on the farm in Maine. I tell you, you will come here, to the suburbs of Boston, to see the bluenose world go drunk each night, to see the handsome children jitterbug, to feel your left ear close one Friday at Symphony. And I tell you, you will tip your boot feet out of that hall, rocking from its sour sound, out onto the crowded street, letting your spectacles fall and your hair net tangle as you stop passers-by to mumble your guilty love while your ears die. "Funnel," which uses a similar juxtaposition of past and present, focuses on Sexton's sense, as the title suggests, that time has diminished the grandeur that her family's past contained. Visiting her great-grandfather's grave, she reminisces about the grand scale of his life, with its "one dozen grand pianos," "seven arking

houses," and "eight genius children" who "honored their separate arts." In contrast, the poet is engaged in more banal pursuits: I sort his odd books and wonder his once alive words and scratch out my short marginal notes and finger my accounts. Then she returns home to her own life: to question this diminishing and feed a minimum of children their careful slice of suburban cake. Perhaps it was self-consciousness over the intimacy of poems such as these, but at times Sexton herself was ambivalent about the fullness with which she embraced the confessional mode. In 1960, for instance, she wrote to Louis Simpson, "I have written a new longish poem called The Operation' which is (damn it as I really don't want to write any more of them) a personal narration about my experiences this fall." Two years later she echoed that uneasiness, concluding a biographical sketch for her British editor, Jon Stallworthy, by observing, "Isn't too much of it in the poems, an almost shameful display and listing of one's LIFE STORY." Thus, she also experimented with fictional personae. But in these poems her concerns are much like those of the confessional poems. For example, "For Johnny Pole on the Forgotten Beach" explores the impact of time by juxtaposing nostalgic memories of a happier, more innocent past with descriptions of a harsh, present reality. Once again contrasting images are carefully balanced. The first stanza describes the almost ten-year-old Johnny riding the waves: He rode on the lip that buoyed him there and buckled him under. The beach was strung with children paddling their ages in,

676 I AMERICAN WRITERS under the glare of noon chipping its light out. He stood up, anonymous and straight among them, between their sand pails and nursery crates. The second half of the poem, with its description of Johnny's death in battle during a beach assault, is set in counterpoint to the first. Bodies are "strung out" at a noon that chips its light. Johnny again is anonymous. But the childhood game has been replaced with the grotesqueness and finality of death, and his youthfully "perfect skin" will soon decay. Ironically, the details of this poem and another nonconfessional poem, "Unknown Girl in the Maternity Ward," were so convincing that most readers assumed them to be autobiographical. But Sexton had no brother, nor did she give up for adoption an illegitimate child, the subject of "Unknown Girl." This poem was, in fact, a deliberate effort to "disguise" the details of her life. As Sexton explained in interviews, she was attempting to communicate through the fictional situation the pain she had experienced during her three-year separation from Joy. Two other nonconfessional poems, "The Farmer's Wife" and "The Moss of His Skin," are particularly interesting in that they explore deep, often repressed, taboo emotions. The farmer's wife, alienated from her husband despite the pleasure of "their country lust," desires more excitement or meaning than their "local life in Illinois" and their lovemaking provide. Thus, in her fantasies she wishes him cripple, or poet, or even lonely, or sometimes, better, my lover, dead. The speaker in "The Moss of His Skin" is a young Arab girl who, according to the custom of her tribe, is being buried alive beside her dead father. Rather than being afraid, the child is concerned only with hiding from her mother and sisters, and from Allah, the incestuous plea-

sure she feels as she holds her father and "falls out" of herself. In part II of To Bedlam, Sexton returns to the confessional mode. "For John, Who Begs Me not to Enquire Further" is her justification to her first poetry teacher, John Holmes, of the unconventional, unlovely, and private content of her poetry. The title refers to the volume's epigraph, a "letter of Schopenhauer to Goethe," which in itself suggests Sexton's desire to ally her poetry to a larger tradition: It is the courage to make a clean breast of it in the face of every question that makes the philosopher. He must be like Sophocles's Oedipus, who, seeking enlightenment concerning his terrible fate, pursues his indefatigable enquiry, even when he divines that appalling horror awaits him in the answer. But most of us carry in our heart the Jocasta who begs Oedipus for God's sake not to inquire further. The poem begins with the poet's explanation that writing about the details of her own life did have value: Not that it was beautiful but that, in the end, there was a certain sense of order there; something worth learning in that narrow diary of my mind, in the commonplaces of the asylum where the cracked mirror or my own selfish death outstared me. Sexton then reveals why she rejected writing about "something outside of myself," believing that had she done so: you would not know that the worst of anyone can be, finally, an accident of hope. But, most of all, she is certain that within her "own head," her "own bowl," some universality

ANNE SEXTON / 677 is to be found after all: At first it was private. Then it was more than myself; it was you, or your house or your kitchen. "The Double Image" succeeds in the ways Sexton had hoped. It certainly is one of the most carefully crafted of her poems. She alluded often in letters to the number of years she had worked on it, the number of revisions it had undergone. She also pointed out to Barbara Kevles that she had taken some poetic liberties with the truth: Many of my poems are true, line by line, altering a few facts to get the story at its heart. In "The Double Image," the poem about my mother's death from cancer and the loss of my daughter, I don't mention that I had another child. Each poem has its own truth. Furthermore, in that poem I only say that I was hospitalized twice, when, in fact, I was hospitalized five times in that span of time. The title initially refers to the portraits that Sexton and her mother had painted of themselves when Sexton lived with her mother in 1955, while she was recovering from a breakdown. Linda was with Kayo and Joy was with Kayo's parents. Sexton's mother was battling cancer. The portraits were painted as a way of allowing mother and daughter to distance themselves from their very painful realities: I cannot forgive your suicide, my mother said. And she never could. She had my portrait done instead. The motif of having "a portrait done instead" serves as a refrain to each of the four stanzas of the second section. Later, the finished portraits will "hang on opposite walls" of the mother's house, facing one another as mother and daughter themselves found difficult to do. The double image refers not merely to the lit-

eral portraits but also to the ways in which mothers and daughters reflect each other. Thus, the poem opens with the poet, at thirty, reunited with Joy after a three-year separation. The two of them stand together, looking out a window at the dying of the leaves and the seasons. The poet now understands that self-hatred led her to abandon her child, and so she has come to value belief in the self. When the child asks where fallen leaves go, the poet explains, "I say today believed / in itself, or else it fell." She urges the girl to "love your self's self where it lives." Still, she is overwhelmed by guilt for having left Joy, even as she recognizes that the child brings her a sense of renewal: The time I did not love myself, I visited your shoveled walks; you held my glove. There was new snow after this. In stanza 4 the poet explicitly applies the double image to Joy and herself. Despite their separation, she tells the child: And you resembled me; unacquainted with my face, you wore it. But you were mine after all. Tragically, as the poet assumes the role of mother, she grieves for her own mother: You call me mother, and I remember my mother, again, somewhere in greater Boston, dying. But because the poet's mother holds the poet responsible for her cancer, the poet carries a "double image" of guilt. Not only did she leave her daughter because she "would rather / die than love," but her own mother believes that that same suicide attempt was the cause of her dying: She turned from me, as if death were catching, as if death transferred,

678 I AMERICAN as if my dying had eaten inside of her. That August you were two, but I timed my days with doubt. On the first of September she looked at me And said I gave her cancer. They carved her sweet hills out and still I couldn't answer. The poem offers both hope and despair. The hope comes from the poet's attempts to understand why she sought to die. She no longer will be unreflective. Yet her honesty brings with it the tormenting realization that despite her awareness of how much she was damaged by being an image through which her mother defined herself, she may be placing the same burden on Joy: I, who was never quite sure about being a girl, needed another life, another image to remind me. And this was my worst guilt; you could not cure nor soothe it. I made you to find me. The final poem in the volume, "The Division of Parts," is an attempt by Sexton to understand her relationship with her mother, so that she can go on with her own life. Unable to grieve, she instead attempts to come to terms with the death. In many ways the process is one of rejection. She first recognizes that she has a need for religious belief, but abandons it as false. Since she can only "imitate / a memory of belief / that I do not own," she decides instead to "convert to love": . . . And Lent will keep its hurt for someone else. Christ knows enough staunch guys have hitched on him in trouble, thinking his sticks were badges to wear. She also rejects her desire to "remain still, a mixed child / heavy with cloths" of her mother.

WRITERS

But she is ambivalent here. Even though she tells herself "What was, is gone," she still wears her mother's Bonwit Teller nightgown to bed. Then, dreaming of her mother, she attempts to exorcise her: There in my jabbering dream I heard my own angry cries and I cursed you, Dame Keep out of my slumber. My good Dame, you are dead. By noon the next day she realizes that she both "would still curse" her mother "with my rhyming words" and attempt to bring her "flapping back" with a litany of endearments. In the final stanza the poet chooses to celebrate love and to accept both her mother's death and the fact that Mary Gray will always be a part of her, that she has become, in spiritual as well as literal ways, her mother's "inheritor." As Sexton was writing the poems for All My Pretty Ones (1962), she began an intense correspondence with a wide range of poets, including Snodgrass, Louis Simpson, and Anthony Hecht. She sent them new poems, asking them for critiques, and invited them to do the same. She also "workshopped" her poems frequently with Kumin. In the summer of 1960, she began studying literature, enrolling in seminars at Brandeis University taught by Philip Rahv, editor of the Partisan Review, and by Irving Howe. She wrote to her friend Nolan Miller: What I have been doing is reading. And that is good. I've been forming . . . Kafka, Mann, Dostoyevsky, Rilke, Faulkner, Gide—etc. A mixed bunch, picking and delighting. I wasn't kidding when I told you once that I had never read anything. I hadn't. So I'm forming, eating books, words, thinking and now and then worrying about all this intake and no output.

ANNE SEXTON / 679 She also continued, along with Kumin and Starbuck, to participate in Holmes's poetry workshop. In the spring of 1961, the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study named Sexton and Kumin their first scholars in poetry. Despite such activities and successes, these years were punctuated with more personal tragedies and with emotional distress. Only a month after her mother's death, Sexton's father announced his plans to remarry. Sexton unsuccessfully attempted to convince him to change his mind; but before the marriage could take place, Ralph Harvey had suffered a fatal cerebral hemorrhage. The following year Sexton's father-in-law was killed in a car accident. Clearly affected by so many deaths, she wrote Snodgrass in October 1960: There is no one new who is dead, at any rate. And that is something for me as I seem to specialize in dead people. Guilt. Guilt, etc. I guess I told you that Kayo's father was killed this March. The girl across the street died of cancer this August (... / said that she ought to die.) . . . why don't I keep my big mouth shut! [The second ellipsis is Sexton's, a device for punctuation.] During this period, according to Linda Sexton and Lois Ames, editors of Sexton's letters, Sexton placed such exorbitant demands on Snodgrass and others "for critiques and reassurances" that she began to drive people away. She also began to worry about negative reviews, in particular James Dickey's response to To Bedlam and Part Way Back. In fact, Dickey was the first to recognize a problem that would plague many of Sexton's readers—that the very personal nature of her writing made a critical assessment seem inappropriate. He wrote: Anne Sexton's poems so obviously come out of deep, painful sections of the author's life that one's literary opinions scarcely seem to matter;

one feels tempted to drop them furtively into the nearest ashcan, rather than be caught with them in the presence of so much naked suffering. Despite such reservations, Dickey criticized the poems for lacking "the concentration, and above all the profound, individual linguistic suggestibility and accuracy that poems must have to be good." Nevertheless, he urged his readers to buy the volume because "Mrs. Sexton's candor, her courage, and her story are worth anyone's three dollars." In All My Pretty Ones Sexton continues to tell her story with courage and candor, writing fully about her parents' deaths and again explaining the causes of her breakdowns. On the other hand, more fully than before, she affirms the value of love and life. This collection also is more experimental than To Bedlam and Part Way Back, but not always successfully so. For instance, some of Sexton's efforts at free verse seem to be more prose statements than poetry. Her images are more mixed, often chosen only for their private, associative value. Her exploration in her nonconfessional poems of psychological motivation at times seems simplistic. But most of all, some potentially fine poems are marred by moments that are awkward, by images that jar, by an uncontrolled voice. "The Operation," a poem about exploratory surgery Sexton underwent when it was feared that she, like her mother, might have cancer, exemplifies the problems. The poem gains most of its effectiveness because of the power of a series of related images that present the womb as the source of both life and death. The poet writes of her mother's cancer: It grew in her as simply as a child would grow, as simply as she housed me once, fat and female.

680 I AMERICAN WRITERS Always my most gentle house before that embryo of evil spread in her shelter and she grew frail.

for the greedy, they are the tongue's wrangle, the world's pottage, the rat's star.

Later she is even more direct: "Fact, death too is in the egg." Strikingly, despite the poet's fear in the face of the operation, she is now in control of herself. Her voice is sure, adult:

All My Pretty Ones contains several unrevised poems that Kumin has graciously termed "given" poems. But such poems as "Young" and "I Remember" are merely prose statements broken up into what look like poetic lines. Although the memories are pleasant, the images are often cliched or imprecise, as in the opening lines of "I Remember":

After the sweet promise, the summer's mild retreat from mother's cancer, the winter months of her death, I come to this white office. . . . The concluding lines of the poem are both unexpected and disappointing. The poet assumes the child's voice. Even more problematically, she abandons the image of the womb, and of the egg specifically, as a source of life and death. Instead her stomach has become like a football, and she herself, like Humpty Dumpty: Time now to pack this humpty-dumpty back the frightened way she came and run along, Anne, and run along now, my stomach laced up like a football for the game. "With Mercy for the Greedy" is also uneven. Written after her friend Ruth Soter had sent her a crucifix, the poem begins with a detailed description of the cross. But despite her need the poet decides once again that she cannot embrace Christ because "Need is not quite belief." She then reasserts the meaning poetry holds for her. The difficulty is that the initial seriousness and precision are replaced by inflated and, in some moments, meaningless language: My friend, my friend, I was born doing reference work in sin, and born confessing it. This is what poems are: with mercy

By the first of August the invisible beetles began to snore and the grass was as tough as hemp and was no color—no more than the sand was a color and we had worn our bare feet bare since the twentieth of June and there were times we forgot to wind up your alarm clock.... In her continued experimentation with fictional personae, Sexton chooses such diverse voices as Christ in the tomb, the father of a retarded child, an old man, an elderly seamstress, and a young girl involved in a love affair. All these poems explore psychological motivation, but with varying degrees of sophistication. Perhaps the most convincing is "The Hangman," in which the father admits his "guilty wish" that his retarded son had been allowed to die. He identifies with a Scandinavian folktale in which a king kills "nine sons in turn." The father's desire not to sacrifice his own life for the child is juxtaposed with his awareness that his wife has embraced the martyr's role: At first your mother said . . . why me! why me! But she got over that. Now she enjoys her dull daily care and her hectic bravery.

ANNE SEXTON / 681 You do not love anyone. She is not growing a boy; she is enlarging a stone to wear around her neck.

The third stanza further celebrates life and love:

In contrast, the motives in "Doors, Doors, Doors" seem either cliched or exaggerated. A young man enters the priesthood, despite the prediction of neighbors that he will marry well, because "As a youngster his private parts were undersize." Two young lovers enter into their affair because the woman's husband is given to "insane abuse," because her father died, and because the man's "wild-haired wife has fled." The better poems in All My Pretty Ones, as in To Bedlam and Part Way Back, reveal Sexton in control, both formally and thematically. For example, she told an interviewer she had rewritten "The Truth the Dead Know" three hundred times. The poem is notable because of the strength of the poet's voice and her determination, even in the face of the deaths of her parents, to continue to live and love. She has learned the importance of accepting death and of acting on that acceptance. The opening lines echo the conclusion of "Elizabeth Gone":

The irony, of course, is her realization that such touching is so precious that "Men kill for this, or for as much." The conclusion of the poem further mutes the affirmation. The poet is unable after all to forget the dead, thinking again of the truth that they know:

Gone, I say and walk from church, refusing the stiff procession to the grave, letting the dead ride alone in the hearse. It is June. I am tired of being brave. (The phrase "stiff procession" seems a disconcerting bit of gallows humor in this context.) In the second stanza the poet chooses life. With her lover she now is willing to drive, and they go to "the Cape." "I cultivate myself," she explains, and she and her lover touch. Whereas in "Elizabeth Gone" she had waited for her great-aunt "in the country of the living," she now accepts the separateness of the worlds of the living and the dead, emphasizing "In another country people die."

and when we touch we enter touch entirely. No one's alone.

They are more like stone than the sea would be if it stopped. She recognizes that the dead are unreachable. By virtue of being stone, they refuse her blessing. "The Starry Night" presents a very different view of death. By dying the poet hopes she will become part of the energy evident in Vincent Van Gogh's painting. The stars "are all alive," and death, in this poem, paradoxically has a vitality to it: 0 starry starry night! this is how 1 want to die: into that rushing beast of the night, sucked up by that great dragon, to split from my life with no flag, no belly, no cry. Kumin recalls that Sexton rewrote the title poem, "All My Pretty Ones," many times in order to "force it into the exigency of an abab,cdcd,ee stanza." She notes that Sexton was particularly proud of some of her multisyllabic rhymes: "slumber" and "disencumber," "navigator" and "look at later" and what Kumin calls "the tour de force final couple," "I outlive you" and "and forgive you." The poem is Sexton's first attempt to confront her ambivalences about her father. She again uses her discovery of memorabilia as the

682 I AMERICAN occasion for the poem. Sorting through her father's "boxes of pictures of people I do not know" and the scrapbook he began the year she was born, she attempts to reconstruct key moments in his life. As in earlier poems, time is the central character. Holding a picture of her father as a small boy waiting "for someone to come," the poet realizes: My father, time meanwhile has made it unimportant who you are looking for. The poem depicts Ralph Harvey's weaknesses (his alcoholism and his extravagance) but also the poet's guilt at opposing his wish to remarry, his "second chance": This year, solvent but sick, you meant to marry that pretty widow in a one-month rush. But before you had that second chance, I cried on your fat shoulder. Three days later you died. Ultimately this poem too is about the poet's freeing herself from the past. She decides that most of the photographs and the scrapbook must go. She will keep her mother's diary for others to discover. And in the end, she will attempt to forgive: Whether you are pretty or not, I outlive you, bend down my strange face to yours and forgive you. It is interesting that Sexton referred to this particular poem as an example of how her poetry did not always reflect the truths of her life. She told William Packard: Any poem is therapy. The art of writing is therapy. You don't solve problems in writing. They're still there. I've heard psychiatrists say, "See, you've forgiven your father. There it is in

WRITERS

your poem." But I haven't forgiven my father. I just wrote that I did. As she is attempting to accept her unhappy relationships with her parents, Sexton begins to write affirmatively about the value of love. In "The Fortress" she promises Linda that despite her inability to control the tragedies that time may bring, they can "laugh and touch" and share love. "Time," she says as she ends the poem, "will not take away that." In contrast, in "The Abortion" what she mourns is the death of a child "wAo should have been born" because it was conceived in the fullness of love. Sexton also is beginning to struggle with sexual roles. "Housewife" is a bitter poem about how "Some women marry houses," while "The Black Art" embodies the fairly conventional belief that women operate primarily on the level of feeling ("A woman who writes feels too much") and men on the level of thought ("A man who writes knows too much"). Moreover, a woman writes As if cycles and children and islands weren't enough; as if mourners and gossips and vegetables were never enough. She thinks she can warn the stars. A man, on the other hand, writes As if erections and congresses and products weren't enough; as if machines and galleons and wars were never enough. With used furniture he makes a tree. Nor does the conclusion offer hope of a healthy relationship between people with creative energy, whatever the different motivations for it. In the poet's mind those whose "eyes are full of terrible confessions" would create between them such a "weird abundance" that even their children would "leave in disgust." Two of the more appealing poems in this volume are ones in which Sexton gives way to

ANNE SEXTON / 683 whimsical fantasy. Her tribute to Snodgrass, "To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Triumph," is Sexton's retelling of the IcarusDaedalus story. The pleasure of the poem comes not only from her celebration of Icarus' ability to take risks and sail over the ocean, but also from the new and easy wit she displays as she contrasts the adventuresome son with his more prudent father: Admire his wings! Feel the fire at his neck and see how casually he glances up and is caught, wondrously tunneling into that hot eye. Who cares that he fell back to the sea? See him acclaiming the sun and come plunging down .while his sensible daddy goes straight into town. "Letters Written on a Ferry While Crossing Long Island Sound" has the same ease. The poet, saddened by the end of a love affair, is given new hope by her fantasy that the four nuns she sees on the ferry will suddenly fly. As they "rise / on black wings," she imagines: They call back to us from the gauzy edge of paradise, good news, good news. Early in 1962, Houghton Mifflin accepted All My Pretty Ones for publication. Sexton's career was growing in other ways as well. She gave frequent readings on the college circuit, was collaborating with Kumin on two children's books, and was writing the poems for Live or Die (1966). Nevertheless she was hospitalized again in June of that year, an experience that led to "Flee on Your Donkey." In the fall of 1963, with Kayo's encouragement, she accepted an unsolicited travel grant from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Leaving the children with Kayo and her mother-in-law, Sexton and a woman companion, Sandy Robart, embarked for what she intended to be a year of travel abroad. But, as her letters indicate, the trip was almost immediately disastrous. Fearing another breakdown, she returned home within a few months, despondent, believing herself a failure. Her depressions deepened when her psychiatrist of several years, "Doctor Martin," moved away from the Boston area. Although Sexton experimented with various therapists over the next several years, she had periodic stays in the psychiatric ward of Massachusetts General Hospital and at the private Westwood Lodge. In 1963 the Ford Foundation gave Sexton a grant to work on a play, Tell Me Your Answer True (later to become Mercy Street). But the poetry was coming slowly, and it was not until 1966 that she had Live or Die ready for publication. During these years she began to worry, as she would throughout the rest of her life, that her success was detrimental to her poetry. She wrote to "Doctor Martin" in 1963, "I think I have been getting to be an almost cheap artist since the first Radcliffe grant. Perhaps success is not good for me." The same year she similarly confided to Snodgrass: "I keep thinking I'm losing myself in some mad welter of publicity." She reminisced nostalgically about the days when she was "doing the desperate and lonely and even heart breaking work of trying to write and rewrite and rewrite, The Double Image.' I was 'true' then." She even wondered if "Poems, maybe, should be published anonymously. You wouldn't get any readings but you wouldn't have to get so nervous." Sexton's mode in Live or Die is fully confessional as she addresses the old themes: her impulses to commit suicide and her breakdowns, which are contrasted with her desire to live; her ambivalences about her parents; her wish to

684 I AMERICAN WRITERS give love to her daughters; and her need for a religious belief, which still is not belief. But as many reviewers noted, Live or Die has a new lack of control. Although such poems as "Somewhere in Africa," "Sylvia's Death," "To Lose the Earth," and much of "Wanting to Die" can be ranked with Sexton's better poetry, other poems are far from successful. To begin with, awkwardness, imprecision, and mixed images permeate the collection, as in "Those Times ... ," when the poet describes hiding in her closet as a child: I grew into it like a root and yet I planned such plans of flight, believing I would take my body into the sky, dragging it with me like a large bed. And although I was unskilled I was sure to get there or at least to move up like an elevator. In "And One for My Dame," the demands of the rhyme scheme lead to an embarrassing couplet about her father's salesmanship: At home each sentence he would utter had first pleased the buyer who'd paid him off in butter. Sexton also increasingly turns to shocking language and grotesque images for effect. Although such efforts work on occasion, all too often they merely call attention to themselves. In "Imitations of Drowning," for instance, she writes: I was shut up in that closet, until, biting the door, they dragged me out, dribbling urine on the gritty shore. In the otherwise remarkable "Wanting to Die," she describes her body after a suicide attempt: I did not think of my body at needle point. Even the cornea and the leftover urine were gone.

There is a new violence as well. For instance, the eventually affirmative final poem, "Live," begins with an upsettingly graphic image: The chief ingredient is mutilation. And mud, day after day, mud like a ritual, and the baby on the platter, cooked but still human, cooked also with little maggots, sewn onto it maybe by somebody's mother, the damn bitch! And when Sexton returns to the child's voice, which often functioned so effectively in the first volumes, the effect is cloying, as in "Protestant Easter," when the eight-year-old speaker reveals: Once I thought the Bunny Rabbit was special and I hunted for eggs. That's when I was seven. I'm grownup now. Now it's really Jesus. I just have to get Him straight. And right now. Once again it is when Sexton most adheres to form that she is at her best. Her elegy to John Holmes, "Somewhere in Africa," for instance, contains powerful imagery and a sure, strong tone: Let there be this God who is a woman who will place you upon her shallow boat, who is a woman naked to the waist, moist with palm oil and sweat, a woman of some virtue and wild breasts, her limbs excellent, unbruised and chaste. Let her take you. She will put twelve strong men at the oars for you are stronger than mahogany and your bones fill

ANNE SEXTON / 685 the boat high as with fruit and bark from the interior. She will have you now, you whom the funeral cannot kill. John Holmes, cut from a single tree, lie heavy in her hold and go down that river with the ivory, the copra and the gold. As the title of the book suggests, Live or Die is organized around Sexton's poetic confrontation with her suicidal impulses. Sexton told Kevles that a letter from Saul Bellow inspired the ultimate thematic plan of the book. Writing on the back of a page from his manuscript of Herzog, Bellow told Sexton he had a message for her from Herzog. He circled the lines on the manuscript page that became the book's epigraph: With one long breath, caught and held in his chest, he fought his sadness over his solitary life. Don't cry, you idiot! Live or die, but don't poison everything.... Such poems as "Wanting to Die" glorify death. In it Sexton explains the thrill of the suicide attempt: Suicides have already betrayed the body. Still-born, they don't always die, but dazzled, they can't forget a drug so sweet that even children would look on and smile. To thrust all that life under your tongue!— that, all by itself, becomes a passion. In her elegy to Sylvia Plath, "Sylvia's Death," she even calls Plath a thief for crawling "down alone / into the death I wanted so badly and for so long." Death becomes desirable, and Sexton romanticizes it in the refrain: that ride home with our boy.

"To Lose the Earth," a poem inspired by a lithograph done by Sexton's friend and illustrator, Barbara Swan, similarly presents the experience of dying as positive. Although the poem suggests that there may be initial terror, in the end there will be beauty. The music of the androgynous flutist will be better than "the music that you waited for in the great concert halls," and people who come "out of simple curiosity / remain for generations." As the poet explains it: And you, having heard, you will never leave. At the moment of entry you were fed— —and then you knew. The stronger thrust in this volume is toward life and love. In "Flee on Your Donkey" Sexton specifically rejects the child's stance. She no longer wants to be her doctor's "third-grader / with a blue star on my forehead." She now is adamant about facing reality: for this is a mental hospital not a child's game. She embraces her poetry, believing that even when others have abandoned her, she still has her muse, "that good nurse." But the real progress is evident in her new resentment of the time lost in breakdowns: I could have gone around the world twice or had new children—all boys. Nor is she romanticizing insanity, for though she has "come back," she now understands: but disorder is not what it was. I have lost the trick of it! the innocence of it! Further aware that brains and hearts deteriorate in mental hospitals, she admonishes herself, "For once make a deliberate decision." The

686 I AMERICAN decision is to flee not only the "sad hotel" but also "the fool's disease": Anne, Anne, flee on your donkey, flee this sad hotel, ride out on some hairy beast, gallop backward pressing your buttocks to his withers, sit to his clumsy gait somehow. Ride out any old way you please! "Imitations of Drowning" demystifies suicide. The poet has decided that "real drowning is for someone else." In contrast with "Wanting to Die," this poem argues that there is no pleasure to be had in "thrusting all that life under your tongue" in order to die. Rather, the act of suicide is presented as a dreadful experience: ... It's too big to put in your mouth on purpose, it puts hot stingers in your tongue and vomit in your nose as your lungs break. Tossed like a wet dog by that juggler, you die awake.

In "Mother and Jack and the Rain" the poet explicitly chooses both art and to "endure / somehow to endure." She decides that from both the pleasures and pains of her past, "let the poem be made." The decision to reject death is particularly strong in Sexton's poem to her daughter Linda, "Little Girl, My Stringbean, My Lovely Woman." As she watches Linda reach adolescence, she celebrates the changes in her daughter's body, allying those changes to the fullness of nature, to globe-size lemons, to "mushrooms / and garlic buds all engorged," and to ripened berries and swelling apples. She urges Linda to accept herself and to live: What I want to say, Lindd is that there is nothing in your body that lies.

WRITERS

All that is new is telling the truth. I'm here, that somebody else, an old tree in the background. Darling, stand still at your door, sure of yourself, a white stone, a good stone— as exceptional as laughter you will strike fire, that new thing! On the other hand, there are moments in this volume that also contain some troubling psychological undercurrents. In the poem to Linda, the poet takes pleasure in the knowledge that her hands formed Linda before the "strange hands" of lovers had touched her. She admits to feelings of jealousy toward her children in "Your Face on the Dog's Neck," saying that "Love twists me." She even expresses a need to possess the fantasy son, David, who is the subject of "Menstruation at Forty." She writes that "David" would make her "wild," fulfill her, and be her support as she aged. With him she sees herself as never growing old, waiting always for you on the porch ... year after year, my carrot, my cabbage, I would have possessed you before all women, calling your name, calling you mine. In their notes to the letters, Linda Sexton and Lois Ames reveal that Sexton had difficulty ending the volume because "She needed a capstone, a positive statement with which to end it. Finally, in February 1966 it came: the poem 'Live.'" The poet begins by describing how much death has been with her. A change occurs when she discovers the sun inside of her and thus is able to reject death. Instead of drowning some newborn puppies, she lets them live, a decision she universalizes. Even more important, she decides that if she cannot kill others, then

ANNE SEXTON / 687 she also is able to choose life for herself: I promise to love more if they come, because in spite of cruelty and the stuffed railroad cars for the ovens, I am not what I expected. Not an Eichmann. The poison just didn't take. So I won't hang around in my hospital shift, repeating The Black Mass and all of it. I say Live, Live, because of the sun, the dream, the excitable gift. Although Sexton tried to kill herself the summer after she wrote this poem, the determination to live soon became more than a poetic stance. For the next few years she appeared "stable and secure" and, according to Linda and Ames, "To the joy of her friends and family, suicide ceased to be a daily threat between 1967 and 1970." She gave a great many public readings and her books were selling well. Although the critical reaction to Live or Die wasmixed, in May 1967 she received the Pulitzer Prize for it. The following year both Harvard and Radcliffe made her an honorary member of Phi Beta Kappa. During these years Sexton also became increasingly interested in teaching. In 1967-1968 she and a friend, Robert Clawson, taught an experimental high school literature class in Wayland, Massachusetts, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. When one of the students set "Ringing the Bells" to music, Sexton was intrigued. With Clawson as her manager, she formed a chamber rock group called Anne Sexton and Her Kind (a reference to the early poem "Her Kind"). The group's first public performance was at a benefit for Eugene McCarthy's presidential campaign. Sexton also began collaborating with Kumin on another children's book. Her involvement in teaching grew. In the fall of 1968 she taught a poetry class to patients at

a private mental hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts. The following winter she conducted a poetry workshop for Oberlin College students in her home, a project she repeated the next year. And she completed Love Poems, which was published in February 1969. It is this volume that most belies the view of Sexton as a feminist. Many of its poems celebrate women in submissive roles. Although Sexton abandons the child's voice, the speaker of many of the poems receives her identity and her happiness from the love of a man. In "The Touch," for instance, the poet is vulnerable and unhappy until her lover gives her life: Then all this became history. Your hand found mine. Life rushed to my fingers like a blood clot. Oh my carpenter, The fingers are rebuilt. In "The Kiss" her entire body is useless, a boat "no more / than a group of boards," until her lover "hoisted her, rigged her." In "The Breast" the lover's hands find her "like an architect," while she believes that it is only through young men that she can learn the truth. Moreover, only when she is defined in relationship to men—as mother, daughter, or lover— does she come alive: Now I am your mother, your daughter, your brand new thing—a snail, a nest. I am alive when your fingers are. Even deception is acceptable if it will bring her sexual pleasure: So tell me anything but track me like a climber for here is the eye, here is the jewel, here is the excitement the nipple learns. Sexton happily assumes the role of slave in "Us," standing only when her lover calls her "princess." Only then does she become active so that the lovers together can "harvest." She is

688 I AMERICAN particularly self-deprecating about her role as the "other woman." In "You All Know the Story of the Other Woman," after the affair is over, she is placed "like a phone, back on the hook." A more extended working out of the adulterous relationship is the subject of "For My Lover, Returning to His Wife," one of Sexton's best poems. The poem operates on the contrast between the wife and the poet. The wife is a monument, a sculpture, something permanent, harmonious, "in fact, exquisite." The poet sees herself as "momentary," an "experiment," a "luxury" like "Littleneck clams out of season." But despite the wife's extraordinary qualities (she takes care of the oars and oarlocks for the family dinghy; she is an artist in her own right; she places "wild flowers at the window at breakfast"; and she nurtures her three children), she too is defined mainly as an extension of her husband. She is his "have to have." Moreover, as Sexton tells her lover: She is all there. She was melted carefully down for you and cast up from your childhood, cast up from your one hundred favorite aggies. Thus, the wife too is victimized. Out of the poet's awareness of the wife's complexity and of her anger she gives her lover "permission" to return to his wife: for the fuse inside her, throbbing angrily in the dirt, for the bitch in her and the burying of her wound— for the burying of her small red wound alive— The poem ends with the poet again contrasting the wife and herself in a wonderful culmination of the imagery that has characterized each of them: She is so naked and singular. She is the sum of yourself and your dream.

WRITERS

Climb her like a monument, step after step. She is solid. As for me, I am a watercolor. I wash off. In addition to poems about love, Love Poems introduces a new motif that will reappear increasingly in the poetry—the relationship between sexuality and violence. The poem "Loving the Killer" is one of the first that is directly about her marriage. The context of the poem is a safari the Sextons went on in 1966, just a month after one of Anne's suicide attempts. Although she dreaded the trip, she ignored her psychiatrist's advice and went, in order, she told friends, to give Kayo his lifelong dream. The poem specifically echoes Plath's "Daddy," in which Plath wrote: Every woman adores a Fascist, The boot in the face, the brute Brute heart of a brute like you. Sexton, in her turn, writes: Oh my Nazi, with your S.S. sky-blue eye— I am no different from Emily Goering. and

I will eat you slowly with kisses even though the killer in you has gotten out. "The Papa and Mama Dance" also associates sexuality and death. It is a bizarre, nonautobiographical poem in which the speaker attempts to convince her brother to burn his draft card rather than go to war. In doing so, she reminds him of the sexual games they had played as children: I tell you the dances we had were really enough, Your hands on my breasts and all that sort of stuff.

ANNE SEXTON / 689 But the brother prefers killing. He has become "Mr. Gunman," and denies the childhood games. Yet these games had intimations of death in them; the children playing the "Mama and Papa Dance" wore black wedding clothes. But despite its thematic interest, on the whole Love Poems is disappointing. Again there are too many awkward moments. The Whitmanesque catalogs in "In Celebration of My Uterus" in particular are without grace. Other moments are more private than interesting. "The Break" is filled with details chosen, apparently, because they are literal rather than because they function to forward meaning. For instance, Sexton describes her first moments in the emergency room: I cried, "Oh Jesus, help me! Oh Jesus Christ!" and the nurse replied, "Wrong name. My name is Barbara," and hung me in an odd device, a buck's extension and a Balkan overhead frame. There are increased references to excrement that, because they seem so unnecessary, are unsettling. In "The Break" she describes the hospital: Across the hall is the bedpan station. The urine and stools pass hourly by my head in silver bowls. They flush in unison in the autoclave. Shortly after the publication of Love Poems, Sexton won a Guggenheim Fellowship (1969) that allowed her to complete her play Mercy Street. During the next four months she and Lois Ames spent a great deal of time in New York readying the play for production. It opened in October at the off-Broadway American Place Theater to negative reviews. Sexton eventually decided that she did not want the play ever to be published. The following year she characterized her new book, Transformations (1971), as being "as far

away from Mercy Street, that confessional melodrama, as possible." She also wrote to Claire Degener, "I'm not even sure these are poems. I think they are artifacts." Houghton Mifflin shared her doubts that the retelling of the Grimms's fairy tales in modern terms was poetry. It balked at publishing Transformations because the contents were not "typical" Sexton. She immediately waged a countercampaign, insisting to Houghton Mifflin editor Paul Brooks: It would further be a lie to say that they weren't about me, because they are just as much about me as my other poetry. I look at my work in stages, and each new book is a kind of growth and reaching outward and as always backward.... Now that I've almost finished Transformations I see it as part of my life's work . . . a kind of dalliance on the way. She wrote to others with equal enthusiasm. When she asked novelist Kurt Vonnegut to write an introduction to the collection, she described the poems with obvious pleasure: They are small, funny and horrifying. Without quite meaning to I have joined the black humorists. I don't know if you know my other work, but humor was never a very prominent feature . . . terror, deformity, madness and torture were my bag. But this little universe of Grimm is not that far away. I think they end up being as wholly personal as my most intimate poems, in a different language, a different rhythm, but coming strangely, for all their story sound, from as deep a place. Houghton Mifflin eventually published the book, which brought Sexton some of the most positive reviews of her career. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, of the New York Times, for instance, praised it as being "a funny, mad, witty, frightening, charming, haunting book." He, like other reviewers, believed Sexton had

690 I AMERICAN found a balance in it between confessionalism and craft, and he noted with pleasure her technique of turning "the fairy tales into comic strips and other pop-art artifacts." Indeed, the contemporaneity of the language and the images, coupled with a breezy sort of pop psychology, give the book its freshness and its charm. "Rumpelstiltskin" exemplifies Sexton's method. To begin with, the dwarf is given a motive for stealing the child, his awareness that "no child will ever call me Papa." By alluding to Truman Capote, Sexton literally fleshes out the image: He speaks up as tiny as an earphone with Truman's asexual voice. Sexton begins the poem by saying that Rumpelstiltskin represents the inner self: Inside many of us is a small old man who wants to get out. He is not the superego, not "the law in your mind," but the more dangerous id, J. Edgar Hoover's "the enemy within." He is sexuality: . . . the law of your members, the kindred of blackness and impulse. It is your Doppelganger Sexton does not judge this inner self harshly. Rumpelstiltskin's desire for a child is understandable: ... he wanted only this— a living thing to call his own. And being mortal who can blame him? The miller's daughter also is given psychological validity. She initially is the victim of her fa-

WRITERS

ther's bragging and a sheltered childhood: Luscious and round and sleek. Poor thing. To die and never see Brooklyn. Because of her naivete she easily promises the dwarf her unborn child, but after the baby's birth she "thought him a pearl" and desperately wants to keep him. The denouement of the poem comes with the recognition that Rumpelstiltskin too has a split self. Thwarted in his desire for a child, he tears himself in two, revealing one side of himself as a nurturing parent, "soft as a woman" and "part papa," and the other side "a barbed hook," the doppelganger. The blending of the Grimms's fairy tales and pop culture permeates the book. The associations often are surprising and as often illuminating. Thus, the evil fairy in "Briar Rose (Sleeping Beauty)" is explained by the fact that "her uterus [is] an empty teacup." The queen in "Rumpelstiltskin" is "as persistent / as a Jehovah's Witness." Little Red Riding Hood's cape becomes "her Linus blanket," and Snow White "opened her eyes as wide as Orphan Annie." Cinderella, sooty before the ball, "walked around looking like Al Jolson." Other poems benefit from Sexton's sardonic use of contemporary slang. Snow White, in her foolish habit of opening the door to the wicked stepmother, is "the dumb bunny" and the dwarfs become "those little hot dogs." After she has been tied up so tightly that she swoons, Snow White is revived and is "as full of life as soda pop." Transformations also seriously explores the nature of relationships by examining the deeper psychological motives people have for their actions. For instance, Snow White's stepmother is unable to cope with her aging. The wife and the parson in "The Little Peasant" similarly are concerned with growing old, hoping that their

ANNE SEXTON / 691 lovemaking will make them young. The mother in "One-Eye, Two-Eyes, Three-Eyes" favors her deformed children because, like the mother in "The Hangman," her martyrdom brings her pleasure. The king in "The Maiden Without Hands" marries the crippled woman because her deformity seems a talisman that might keep him whole. And despite the apparent pleasures of lesbianism in "Rapunzel" ("A woman / who loves a woman / is forever young"), Rapunzel outgrows "mother-me-do" because The world, some say, is made up of couples. A rose must have a stem. Marriage comes in for its share of criticism in the transformations. In both "The White Snake" and "Cinderella," the conventional happy endings are perceived as sterile. In "The White Snake": They played house, little charmers, exceptionally well. So, of course, they were placed in a box and painted identically blue and thus passed their days living happily ever after— a kind of coffin, a kind of blue funk. Is it not? Cinderella and the prince have an equally uninteresting fate: like two dolls in a museum case never bothered by diapers or dust, never arguing over the timing of an egg, never telling the same story twice, never getting a middle-aged spread, their darling smiles pasted on for eternity. Regular Bobbsey Twins. That story.

"Iron Hans" more seriously dramatizes one of Sexton's usual concerns. The poem begins with a preamble that documents how those who are different make others "move off." In a reference to herself, Sexton writes: Take a woman talking, purging herself with rhymes, drumming words out like a typewriter, planting words in you like grass seed. You'll move off. Hans, of course, only "appeared . . . to be a lunatic." In reality he is more gentle, more just, and more powerful than anyone else. He was just under a spell, which the boy he helps has broken, and so: Without Thorazine or benefit of psychotherapy Iron Hans was transformed. No need for Master Medical; no need for electroshock— merely bewitched all along. Sexton was appointed lecturer in English at Boston University in 1969, as she was writing Transformations and planning her next two volumes: The Book of Folly (1972) and The Death Notebooks (1974). She wrote to Degener: I think I would like to do a book of very surreal, unconscious poems called The Book of Folly. After that I would like to do a very Sexton, intense, personal, perhaps religious in places book called The Death Notebooks. ... This period also brought new psychological torments. Her sister-in-law, Joan Sexton, was killed in a car accident only six days after being married for the second time. Sexton became newly plagued by thoughts of suicide, writing to Philip Legler, "I think I'm so busy fighting the suicide demons that I have little time for love.... I hope to hell my present shrink can help me work this out before it's too late." She

692 I AMERICAN began to write to friends about her desire for some sort of religious belief. The major importance of The Book oj Folly lies in what it reveals about Sexton's mental state. Although at times it suggests her return to more intricate rhyme schemes (as in the sonnet sequence "Angels of the Love Affair"), formally the book is deeply flawed. It may be that in her effort to write "surreal, unconscious poems," she had decided that simply simulating the life of her mind was enough. Thus, her streams of consciousness evidence what seems to be almost purely free association. The result often is an overabundance of mixed, private, and unappealing images. Such poems as "The Doctor of the Heart" reassert her desire to live. In others the old guilt is present. In "Dreaming the Breasts" she again feels responsible for her mother's death: I ate you up. All my need took you down like a meal.

She even implicitly assumes the burden for her great-aunt's senility, asking in "Anna Who Was Mad," "Did I make you go insane?" But there are two new notes in such poems: tenderness and a new accusatory stance. Thus Sexton writes in "Dreaming the Breasts" that after her mother's mastectomy, she plants her breasts: so that your great bells, those dear white ponies, can go galloping, galloping, wherever you are. On the other hand "The Hoarder" insists that her mother's attitude about toilet training led the poet to be "a hoarder of words": it was the diaper I wore and the dirt thereof and my mother hating me for it and me

WRITERS loving me for it but the hate won didn't it yes the distaste won the disgust won and because of this I am a hoarder of words

Two of the prose pieces, "Dancing the Jig" and "The Letting Down of the Hair," portray speakers who were victims of psychologically destructive families. "Dancing the Jig" and the poem "The Other" further suggest that such victimization led to an "other," a doppelganger responsible for the poet's inability to be in control. A particularly revealing sequence is "The Death of the Fathers," a series of poems that both describe the Electra complex of the poet toward her father and suggest that Ralph Harvey may not have been her natural father. The sequence is dominated by the poet's dual sense that her father had been cuckolded and that she had, in some ways, assumed her mother's role in relationship to him. The opening poem, "Oysters," describes the poet's rite of passage at fifteen from childhood into womanhood as she eats oysters, "this father-food," during a luncheon with her father. As J. D. McClatchy notes, the "father-food" has sexual implications: It was a soft medicine that came from the sea into my mouth, moist and plump. I swallowed. It went down like large pudding. At nineteen, in "How We Danced," the poet "orbited" with her father while her mother danced "with twenty men." The poem has sexual implications as the poet tells her father "the serpent spoke as you held me close / The serpent, that mocker, woke up and pressed against me." In "The Boat" the father steers the family's Chris-Craft containing his wife and his daughter "out past Cuckold's Light" and

ANNE SEXTON / 693 through a dangerous wave. The unity the three momentarily feel doesn't exist in the next poem, "Santa." The poem begins nostalgically, with the poet watching her mother, who is "that tall," kiss her father as he masquerades as Santa Glaus. When the poet realizes that Santa has "Daddy's cocktail smell," his voice "slithery like soap," she is disillusioned. Her father is relieved that the charade is over. Years later they reenact the scene, but with a difference. The daughter, now "tall enough," kisses the father. In "Friends," perhaps Sexton's most terrifying poem of childhood memories, she remembers a stranger who took liberties with her, putting his tongue in her mouth when he kissed her and beating her "on the buttocks with a jump rope" when her father was "gone on a trip." "An oily creature," he "knew Mother too well." The poem ends with the poet again assuming a child's voice, pleading with her father to assert his paternity as she asks: He was a stranger, Father. Oh God, he was a stranger, was he not? "Begat," the final poem in the sequence, supplies an answer from the stranger himself, who, years after the father's death, calls to announce, "I am your real father." The poet denies the connection and, despite her father's flaws, reclaims him because "He is my history." The sexual violence of the stranger reappears in other poems in The Book of Folly. The husband in "The Wifebeater" kisses "With a tongue like a razor." The assassin in the poem of that name finds the thought of the impending murder sexually exciting. In "Santa" the poet describes her husband "with a crowbar breaking things up." The prose fable "The Ballet of the Buffoon" also is extremely violent. A perverse tale about a Mr. Ha-Ha who cons other men into murdering their wives, its moral is

"Every man kills his wife. It's a matter of history." Even young girls know that violence, with its sexual implications, will come to them, and they sing, "When will the gun come to me." The Book of Folly also indicates Sexton's desire to continue working in the mode of Transformations. "The Jesus Papers" transforms biblical tales with the goal of humanizing, as they modernize, Christ. Sexton justifies the tone by the epigraph "God is not mocked except by believers." But the effort often seems strained. For instance, in "Jesus Cooks," when Jesus wants to feed the multitudes, he asks God to "send down a short-order cook." God later advises, "Work on the sly / opening boxes of sardine cans." Sexton also reveals her usual psychological preoccupations. Jesus, in "Jesus Asleep," has incestuous desires for Mary: Jesus slept as still as a toy and in His dream He desired Mary. His penis sang like a dog. But instead of giving in to the taboo, Jesus sublimates his desire into art: He made a statue out of His need. With His penis like a chisel He carved the Pieta. Mary Magdalene displays some of Sexton's traits. In "Jesus Raises up the Harlot" she is so grateful for Christ's attention that she "followed Jesus around like a puppy" and "became His pet." She even forsakes her fornications because His raising her up made her feel like a little girl again when she had a father who brushed the dirt from her eye. Perhaps the most successful poem of the volume is its opening one, "The Ambition Bird." Confronting her insomnia ("the business of

694 I AMERICAN words keeps me awake"), the poet acknowledges that she "would like a simple life." Still, she writes poetry because it is her "immortality box," her "lay-away plan," her "coffin." She acknowledges her various motives for writing: a desire for suicide, a wish to be a Michelangelo, a hope of creating God or man, a wish to "unlock the Magi," a need to affect others, an urge to be like Icarus. But the poem ends poignantly, quietly, with the question: Dear God, wouldn't it be good enough to just drink cocoa? and with a determination to get a new bird and a new immortality box. There is folly enough inside this one. But the folly was to increase. In the two years after the publication of The Book of Folly in the fall of 1972, Sexton's life seemed to accelerate, sometimes out of control. Writing to a friend, she worried that her life was "becoming like the Perils of Pauline. It is exaggerating itself." She intensified her campaign to convince Boston University to pay her on the same scale as they paid their male writers, particularly John Barth. In February 1973 she asked Kayo for a divorce. The time was difficult for Sexton, her family, and her friends. Linda Sexton and Lois Ames describe her as asking friends "to care for her like a child" and, in the end, alienating those close to her because of her exhausting demands. She regretted her decision to leave Kayo, who had attempted to convince her to stay in the marriage. She began to turn more to religion for solace. But most of all, she began to write frantically. Thus, between June 1972 and her death a year and a half later, Sexton wrote poetry for four collections: The Death Notebooks, The Awful Rowing Toward God (1975), 45 Mercy

WRITERS

Street (1976), and the final section of Words for Dr. Y (1978). She seldom revised, noting that she had written the first draft of The Awful Rowing Toward God in twenty days with "two days out for despair, and three days out in a mental hospital." Although she deemed the poems "raw, unreworked," and in need of revision, she arranged to publish them almost totally as they were. The Death Notebooks, completed first, is deeply flawed. The weaknesses are the familiar ones but sometimes even more exaggerated. For instance, the child's voice in "Hurry up Please It's Time" asks: Why shouldn't I pull down my pants and moon at the executioner as well as paste raisins on my breasts? Why shouldn't I pull down my pants and show my little cunny to Tom and Albert? They wee-wee funny. I wee-wee like a squaw. I have ink but no pen, still I dream that I can piss in God's eye. I dream I'm a boy with a zipper. There is also a new preachiness to some of the poems, as in the sophomoric lines in "The Fury of Flowers and Worms": If all the world picked daisies wars would end, the common cold would stop, unemployment would end, the monetary market would hold steady and no money would float. The best that can be said about this book is that it reveals Sexton's continued interest, however badly realized, in working with new poetic forms. For instance, the sequence of psalms is modeled after the Jubilate Agno of the eighteenth-century poet Christopher Smart. "Hurry up Please It's Time" (the phrase is taken from The Waste Land) seems to be an effort by Sexton to present a world that is sterile and without

ANNE SEXTON / 695 redeeming values in different voices, as T. S. Eliot had. Although she still shows the desire to live in some poems, there is a new note of self-deprecation here as well. She is not always as in control as she is at the conclusion of "The Fury of Rain Storms," where she decides almost matter-of-factly: Depression is boring, I think, and I would do better to make some soup and light up the cave. Rather, she begins to write about the ways in which she is being exploited because of her death wishes. In "Making a Living" she compares the biblical Jonah first to Christ and then to herself: Then he told the news media the strange details of his death and they hammered him up in the marketplace and sold him and sold him and sold him. My death the same. When the title of the poem is juxtaposed with the collection's epigraph, "Look, you con man, make a living out of your death," it becomes clear that Sexton also feared that she was a party to this process of selling her personal suffering. "Hurry up Please It's Time" reveals her disdain for her sense that she must confess all to please her audiences: Who's that at the podium in black and white, blurting into the mike? Ms. Dog. Is she spilling her guts? You bet. Otherwise they cough. . . . Still, there are moments when she seems to welcome the voyeurism of others. In "For Mr. Death Who Stands with His Door Open," she

asks that her own dying be "slow": Let it be pantomime, this last peep show, so that I may squat at the edge trying on my black necessary trousseau. Sexton became almost obsessed with her relationship to her audience. In "Talking to Sheep," which was published posthumously in 45 Mercy Street, she admitted shame at her compulsion to keep "confessing, confessing" in the face of her readers' avariciousness. In 1973, in the essay "The Freak Show," which she wrote for the American Poetry Review, she was similarly critical of what she saw as her pandering to predatory audiences. Sexton had reason to worry. She had become obsessed with giving readings and with promoting herself for financial gain. For instance, when she was unhappy with the advance publicity for a scheduled reading at Sanders Theater at Harvard, she conducted and paid for her own publicity campaign. She had posters made up, took out full-page newspaper ads complete with a photo of herself, and ran radio spots. Her advertising was successful and she read to a standing-room-only audience. She spent much time quibbling with various sponsors about fees for readings and insisting on more money and status from Boston University. Eventually she was given the rank of professor. It becomes particularly painful, then, to read Sexton's confession to Donald Hall some ten months before her suicide: "I've just been too Christly busy— either readings or my class or hospitals. Dear God, only one poem since July and that not finished. I must remember that I am a poet—at least I must remember it now and then...." On the day of her suicide, October 4, 1974, Sexton had lunch with Maxine Kumin, and, as they had for Sexton's other books, proofread the galleys for The Awful Rowing Toward God. Then, without having given Kumin, family, or friends any warning, Sexton went home, locked

696 I AMERICAN herself in the garage, turned on the ignition of her automobile, and died. Because The Awful Rowing Toward God is the last volume Sexton herself prepared for publication, the poems take on special interest and poignancy. As the title suggests, the book articulates Sexton's desire to achieve a religious faith. The opening poem, "Rowing," describes the evolution of her acceptance of God. Initially "ignorant of him," she eventually realized that "God was there like an island I had not rowed to." The most powerful lines in the poem, and perhaps the entire book, describe her efforts to reach that island: I am rowing, I am rowing though the oarlocks stick and are rusty and the sea blinks and rolls like a worried eyeball, but I am rowing, I am rowing, though the wind pushes me back and I know that that island will not be perfect, it will have the flaws of life, the absurdities of the dinner table, but there will be a door and I will open it and I will get rid of the rat inside of me, the gnawing, pestilential rat. God will take it with his two hands and embrace it. This story ends with me still rowing. Many of the interior poems, much like "The Jesus Papers" in The Book of Folly, attempt to make God seem accessible, to have "the flaws of life" and "the absurdities of the dinner table." In "The Earth" Sexton fantasizes about a God who would like to have a human body, who "would like to smoke His cigar / or bite His fingernails" or even take a bath. She also desires to find God in the dailiness of her life. Thus, in "Welcome Morning" she cooks "a

WRITERS

chapel of eggs" and eats at "the godhead of the table." In "Snow" she believes that each snowcovered branch "wears the sock of God," and in "Small Wire" she convinces herself that even a small amount of love, a "thin wire," will be strong enough to hold faith, for God does not mind. He will enter your hands as easily as ten cents used to bring forth a coke. Although poem after poem explores the ageold theological dilemma of how to explain the existence of evil in the world, in the end Sexton suggests that the evil within her may be her "ignorance of God." She admonishes her readers in "The Wall" to open themselves up to God: take off the wall that separates you from God. She decides in "The Evil Seekers" that evil may be necessary for growth because one must see the night before one can realize the day. The concluding poem, "The Rowing Endeth," is meant to be affirmative, although Sexton's final vision of God as a poker-playing male is another disconcerting example of her assuming a dependent stance. Nevertheless, she opens the poem "mooring my rowboat / at the dock of the island called God." God then invites her to play poker, and because he has a "wild card," he ends up with five aces, which beat the poet's royal flush. This is, she believes, a triumph for them both; and she and God are joined in laughter, laughter motivated by an awareness of the absurd, of the need for a leap of faith, and of the ultimate power of love: Then I laugh, the fishy dock laughs, the sea laughs. The Island laughs. The Absurd laughs.

ANNE SEXTON / 697 Dearest Dealer, I with my royal straight flush, love you so for your wild card, that untamable, eternal, gut-driven ha-ha and lucky love. In the years following Sexton's death, her daughter Linda edited and published two volumes of poetry, 45 Mercy Street and Words for Dr. Y. In addition, collaborating with Lois Ames, she put out a collection of her mother's letters, Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters (1977). All three books are problematic for the same reason: they have value only in terms of what they reveal about Sexton personally. The poetry is deeply flawed and offers nothing new thematically. In all fairness to Sexton, it should be stressed that she neither revised the poetry nor arranged for its publication. Still, except for the fact that they reveal an increasing deterioration in the poetry, these books are harmless enough. The letters raise a more complicated question. On the one hand they contribute little to an understanding of Sexton's art. What they provide instead is an excess of details about her intimate life and, sadly, the portrait that emerges is of a woman even more tormented, more pathetic, and often more adolescent than the poetry reveals. To be sure, a few letters about specific poems and some broader statements about poetry in general are illuminating and interesting, but these occur only sporadically. The editors' biographical notes are more useful, suggesting that Sexton might have been better served by a critical biography that drew on and included the important letters. On the other hand Sexton herself made and kept carbons of her letters, apparently tens of thousands of them, a habit that suggests she would have sanctioned their publication even though many of them merely pander to the sort

of voyeurism that was making her increasingly uncomfortable toward the end of her life. In essence the original problem that Sexton's poetry occasioned—the tendency to read it as a case history or a social document and not as art—persists. Certainly the growing body of Sexton criticism is dominated by those who praise her for her honesty and not her artistry. Indeed, an almost anti-intellectual bias emerges, with many readers either ignoring aesthetic and formal questions or insisting, sometimes fervently, that traditional standards of literary analysis should be replaced by extraliterary considerations. Robert Boyers, who most values Sexton because her concern is "herself and her emotions," finds it particularly "remarkable that she never flinches from the task at hand, never attempts to use her art as a device for warding off final perception." J. D. McClatchy similarly praises Sexton's honesty while echoing Boyers' reservations about art itself. Emphasizing Sexton's refusal to "dodge or distort" the details of her life, McClatchy favorably contrasts Sexton's directness with what he calls the "covers" of other confessional poets: "Lowell's allusiveness, Snodgrass's lyricism, Berryman's dazzle, Plath's expressionism." But what McClatchy denigrates as "covers" generally are prized as the tools of poetry. It is not surprising that it is Sexton's "courage in coming true," and not her artistry, that McClatchy cites as the reason why she should be considered "one of the most distinctive voices in this generation's literature, and a figure of permanent importance to the development of American poetry." Some feminists also reject as obsolete the conventional critical standards by which Sexton might be judged negatively. They argue that because new forms are necessary to express feminine sensibilities, new criteria by which to evaluate those forms are necessary as well.

698 I AMERICAN They urge that the New Critical concern with form be replaced with such criteria as the authenticity of the presentation of female experience by a work and the ability of that work to raise the consciousness of its readers. From this vantage point, feminists such as Erica Jong and Suzanne Juhasz define as virtues the aspects of Sexton's poetry that a New Critic might perceive as flaws. Jong, in her tribute to Sexton (thinly disguised as the fictional Jeannie Morton) in How to Save Your Own Life (1977), asserts that those who criticize Sexton do so because "She was a woman—and her images (even of God) were kitchen images.... She was easy to mock." Jong, in her turn, admires Sexton because "She wrote about all the things we had been told in college were unfit subjects for poetry—blood, madness, excrement, the transmigration of the soul." Juhasz, in Naked and Fiery Forms (1976), rejoices in Sexton's devotion to the particulars of her life precisely because Juhasz rejects the effort to universalize as a masculine (and therefore undesirable) trait. She takes pleasure in the fact that ... unlike the confessionalism of so many male poets (Robert Lowell's, for example, in Life Studies), Sexton's poetry does not plug into a larger tradition—that of being a poet whose life and consciousness is in some sense meant to typify the consciousness of his age. Juhasz offers a feminist variation on Alvarez's linking of the artistic temperament with death wishes, arguing that for both Plath and Sexton "madness and ultimately suicide seem integrally linked to the conflict and strain experienced in trying to be both woman and artist." Because Juhasz sees poetry as having traditionally been a male domain, she argues that Sexton, like Plath, "finds the double bind" of trying to be both a woman and a poet "to be too

WRITERS

powerful and kills herself." (Such theorizing of course ignores the crucial fact that in Sexton's case, at least, the suicidal impulses preceded the poetic ones. It also ignores Maxine Kumin's belief that writing poetry kept Sexton alive longer than might otherwise have been the case.) The tragedy of such approaches to Sexton's poetry is that they negate her commitment to art and emphasize her psychological demons instead. She wrote to an admirer, "Madness is a waste of time. It creates nothing." She similarly insisted to Patricia Marx, "I do not think genius and insanity grow in the same bed." She also affirmed herself as a poet and as a woman, saying that the two roles were compatible because "It's within a woman to create, to make order, to be an emotional, full human being." But most of all Sexton valued art above death. As she wrote after Plath had killed herself, "Suicide is, after all, the opposite of the poem." Denise Levertov, in her remarkable essay "Light up the Cave," has attempted to direct attention back to Sexton's artistry and away from her death. Noting that Sexton's death was followed by a surge of articles and essays equating the poetic sensibility with emotional instability, Levertov rails against what she sees as a dangerous tendency to romanticize alienation. Specifically, she suggests that Sexton's "private anguish" was exploited "by a greedy public" and that Sexton, like so many others, "internalize [d] the exploitive, unwittingly becoming selfexploitive." In her introductory notes to Words for Dr. Y, Linda Sexton promises that an edition of her mother's collected works will be forthcoming. Levertov's ultimate tribute to Sexton would be both a fitting and a welcome epigraph to such a book and to future readings of Sexton as well: To recognize that for a few years of her life Anne Sexton was an artist even though she had so hard a struggle against her desire of death is

ANNE SEXTON / 699 to fittingly honor her memory. To identify her love of death with her love of poetry is to insult that struggle.

Selected Bibliography WORKS OF ANNE SEXTON POEMS

To Bedlam and Part Way Back. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960. All My Pretty Ones. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962. Selected Poems. London: Oxford University Press, 1964. Live or Die. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966; London: Oxford University Press, 1967. Poems. London: Oxford University Press, 1968. With Thomas Kinsella and Douglas Livingstone. Love Poems. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969; London: Oxford University Press, 1969. Transformations. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971; London: Oxford University Press, 1972. The Book of Folly. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972; London: Chatto and Windus, 1974. The Death Notebooks. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974; London: Chatto and Windus, 1975. The Awful Rowing Toward God. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975; London: Chatto and Windus, 1977. 45 Mercy Street, edited by Linda Gray Sexton. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976; London: Martin Seeker and Warburg, 1977. Words for Dr. Y, edited by Linda Gray Sexton. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978. CHILDREN'S BOOKS (with Maxine Kumin) Eggs of Things. New York: Putnam, 1963. More Eggs of Things. New York: Putnam, 1964. Joey and the Birthday Present. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971. The Wizard's Tears. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1975.

PROSE

"The Barfly Ought to Sing." Tri Quarterly, 7:89-94 (Fall 1966). Reprinted in The Art of Sylvia Plath, edited by Charles Newman. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970. Pp. 174-81. "The Freak Show." American Poetry Review, 2, no. 3:38, 40 (May/June 1973). LETTERS

Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters, edited by Linda Gray Sexton and Lois Ames. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977. BIBLIOGRAPHY Northouse, Cameron, and Thomas P. Walsh. Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall and Co., 1974.

CRITICISM AND REVIEWS Alvarez, A. Beyond All This Fiddle: Essays, 195557. New York: Random House, 1969. Boyers, Robert. "Live or Die: The Achievement of Anne Sexton." Salmagundi, 2, no. 1:41-71 (Spring 1967). Reprinted in Anne Sexton, The Artist and Her Critics, edited by J. D. McClatchy. Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1978 (hereafter referred to as McClatchy). Dickey, James. "Five First Books." Poetry, 97, no. 5:318-19 (February 1961). Reprinted in his Babel to Byzantium. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968. Also in McClatchy. Fields, Beverly. "The Poetry of Anne Sexton." In Poets in Progress, edited by Edward Hungerford. Evanston, 111.: Northwestern University Press, 1967. Pp. 251-85. Gullans, Charles. "Poetry and Subject Matter: From Hart Crane to Turner Cassidy." The Southern Review, 7, no. 2:497-98 (Spring 1970). Reprinted in McClatchy. Howard, Richard. "Anne Sexton: 'Some Tribal Female Who Is Known but Forbidden.'" In his Alone with America: Essays on the Art of Poetry in the United States Since 1950. New York: Atheneum, 1971. Pp. 442-50.

700 I AMERICAN WRITERS Juhasz, Suzanne. Naked and Fiery Forms: Modern American Poetry by Women, A New Tradition. New York: Harper Colophon, 1976. Kumin, Maxine. "A Friendship Remembered." In McClatchy. Pp. 103-10. Lehmann-Haupt, Christopher. "Grimms' Fairy Tales Retold." New York Times, September 27, 1971, p. 37. Reprinted in McClatchy. Levertov, Denise. "Light up the Cave." Ramparts, 13, no. 5:61-63 (December 1974-January 1975). Reprinted in McClatchy. McClatchy, J. D. "Anne Sexton: Somehow to Endure." In McClatchy. Pp. 244-90. Mills, Ralph J., Jr. Contemporary American Poetry. New York: Random House, 1965. Phillips, Robert. The Confessional Poets. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973. Rosenthal, M. L. The New Poets: American and British Poetry Since World War II. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967. Spacks, Patricia Meyer. "45 Mercy Street." New York Times Book Review, May 30, 1976, pp. 34. Reprinted in McClatchy. Additional reviews are reprinted in McClatchy, pp. 115-90.

INTERVIEWS Heyen, William. "From 1928 to Whenever: A Conversation with Anne Sexton." In American Poets in 1976, edited by William Heyen. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1976. Pp. 304-28. Kevles, Barbara. "The Art of Poetry XV: Anne Sexton." Paris Review, 52:159-91 (Summer 1971). Reprinted in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Fourth Series, edited by George Plimpton. New York: Viking Press, 1976. Also in McClatchy. Madden, Charles. "Anne Sexton." In Talks with Authors, edited by Madden. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1968. Pp. 151-79. Marx, Patricia. "Interview with Anne Sexton." Hudson Review, 18, no. 4:560-70 (Winter 196566). Reprinted in McClatchy. Showalter, Elaine, and Carol Smith. "A Nurturing Relationship: A Conversation with Anne Sexton and Maxine Kumin, April 15, 1974." Women's Studies, 4, 1:115-36(1976). —SUSAN RESNECK PARR

Karl Shapiro 1913-

I

A aam an atheist who says his prayers," Karl Shapiro wrote in The Bourgeois Poet (1964). "I am an anarchist, and a full professor at that." A versatile poet and a serious, if lighthearted, critic, he is at the same time a bundle of contradictions; and any generalization about his poetry, his criticism, or his life calls for immediate qualification, as one accounts for conflicting evidence. Shapiro is a lyrical satirist and a pedantic antiformalist, a neomodernist and a "true contemporary." These contradictions are evident in his earliest poems, in his later criticism and fiction, and in his public life as editor and teacher, as enfant terrible and defender of the status quo. Without these conflicts, Shapiro would not have been the kind of poet who speaks to a large audience, in an age when poetry remains distressingly unread. He is a poet both closely attended to, with several early books still in print, and surprisingly neglected by literary historians and influential critics—a member of a select group of distinguished artists, yet a renegade well outside the centers of power. If he were asked to speak at the White House, he would probably arrive dressed in a Hawaiian shirt, orange trousers, and sneakers; at a rock concert he would be the one in white tie and tails. "If I don't take the wrong side, who will?" he asks in one poem. For most people, such contrary be-

havior would be viewed, justifiably, as posing; for Shapiro, it is natural. He is the man, like the one in Mark Strand's poem "Keeping Things Whole," who does what no one else is doing; "In a field" he is "the absence / of field." These conflicts are the source of Shapiro's power and originality, as well as the cause of his periodic estrangement from the artistic and political establishment. They may be understood with reference to the ages in which he has lived, his background, and his places of residence. They are also the result of a series of choices he has made that keep him at the edge of things. Attending to these facts of biography does not explain his particular genius as poet and critic, but it does call attention to his way of being in the world, as man and writer. More important, it helps one appreciate his achievement and his dedication to certain principles concerning the relationship of poet and audience, of the writer and his craft, and of the responsibilities of the artist and the needs of American society. Shapiro has written directly and indirectly about his own life on numerous occasions and twice at some length: in the poem "Recapitulations" (1946), which gives biographical details up through World War II, and in the essay "American Poet?" (1964), which discusses why and how he became a writer. Born in Baltimore, Maryland, on November 707

702 / AMERICAN WRITERS 10, 1913, "under the [hospital] roof where Poe expired," Karl Jay Shapiro is the grandson of Russian-Jewish immigrants who settled in America in the 1880's, and the younger son of Joseph and Sarah (Omansky) Shapiro, who were both natives of Baltimore. His father, a traveling salesman who kept a book of Oscar Wilde's poetry on a living room table, taught him "to be superior, as befits / A nation of individual priests." He attended private and public schools in Norfolk, Virginia; Chicago; and Baltimore; and the University of Virginia (1932-1933) and Johns Hopkins University (1937-1939), but never took a degree. Shapiro began writing in high school, somewhat in imitation of his older brother, who had already won a literary reputation locally. Afterward he had what he called "a long and lonely apprenticeship during the Depression," although the record of those years suggests differently. At the age of twenty-one, with the help of his uncle and a medical publishing company, he published a book of poems, "imitations of William Carlos Williams and William Shakespeare." In "Recapitulations" he describes the circumstances surrounding that event: My first small book was nourished in the dark, Secretly written, published, and inscribed. Bound in wine-red, it made no brilliant mark. Rather impossible relatives subscribed. The best review was one I wrote myself Under the name of a then-dearest friend. In the mid-1930's, working for an oil company, "listening to the Communists," and studying at Johns Hopkins and the Pratt Library School in Baltimore, he discovered the works of Stephen Spender and, later, W. H. Auden, who helped him find the direction he needed as a poet. Shapiro was drafted into the army prior to the bombing of Pearl Harbor; soon afterward he received two literary prizes

from Poetry magazine. While with the Fifth Medical Training Battalion at Fort Lee, Virginia, and shortly before being shipped to the South Pacific, he published his first substantial group of poems in Five Young American Poets (1941). His first major collection, Person, Place and Thing, appeared in November 1942, as he was on his way to war. A collection of very different writings, prose poems and Whitmanesque verse, The Place of Love, was published in Australia the same year. In writing the latter book, Shapiro found himself "with Lenin in one hand and the Old Testament in the other, although with little sense of desperation or loss of joy in the adventure." Later, he suspected that these poems were written with "hidden panic" and from the perspective that this might be "the last personal moment." In V-Letter and Other Poems (1944), Shapiro proved that he was better prepared than most writers of his generation to make poetry out of the experience of World War II. The book brought him a Pulitzer Prize, a grant from the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and "some very heady praise from the critics." Earlier, in a sharply worded review of two World War I poets, Edmund Blunden and Siegfried Sassoon, Shapiro had said that they gave very tame promise of being useful to later poets; and in the introduction to V-Letter and Other Poems, he declared his independence of them: "Since the war began," he wrote, "I have tried to guard against becoming a "war poet'"—that is, a writer totally defined by that subject, and the volume indicated that he had successfully escaped that fate. After returning from the South Pacific in 1945, Shapiro spent the last months of his army duty with the Office of Strategic Services, in Washington, D. C. The publication of Essay on Rime (1945), written while he was still on duty in New Guinea, helped to confirm his reputation as a knowledgeable prosodist, as well as a

KARL SHAPIRO / 703 poet. A 2,070-line poem in iambic pentameter, it discusses three "confusions"—in prosody, language, and belief—that allegedly characterized much contemporary verse. Francis Matthiessen, among others, praised the book rather extravagantly. That same year, Shapiro married Evalyn Katz, who had acted as his editor and agent during his years overseas. They had three children—Poems 1940-1953 (1953) is dedicated to them—and were divorced in 1967. His second marriage was to Teri Kovach in 1969. After a year as a fellow of the Library of Congress and another as consultant in poetry, Shapiro began his career as a teacher at Johns Hopkins University (1947-1950) and the University of Nebraska (1956-1966), and in 1968 moved to the University of California at Davis—with shorter terms as visiting professor at other universities in the United States, Austria, India, and Japan. He also served as editor of Poetry (1950-1956), the Newberry Library Bulletin (1953-1955), and Prairie Schooner (1956-1966). Although a nonconformist and an "anticritic," Shapiro has been honored principally by traditionalists. He was twice a fellow of the Kenyon School of Letters (1956, 1957), was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Institute of Arts and Letters (1959), and was awarded the Bollingen Prize for Poetry (1969). Since the publication of In Defense of Ignorance (1960), an attack on the influence of T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and the New Criticism, he has been widely read and even influential as a critic. Regarded as eclectic and unpredictable, even idiosyncratic, he is always intelligent and readable, and expresses opinions boldly and often with wit. A discussion of American culture in To Abolish Children and Other Essays begins with a characteristic flourish: "This is going to sound far-fetched, but here goes."

Early on, Shapiro established a reputation as a poet fond of regular, if sometimes untraditional, verse forms—"telling poems in iambic pentameter," he once wrote disparagingly of them, "with a masculine inversion in the second foot." But, like his contemporaries Robert Lowell and Stanley Kunitz, he altered his approach in the early 1960's. The result was The Bourgeois Poet, the collection of prose poems that appeared in 1964. Four years later, in WhiteHaired Lover, he turned sharply to the sonnet and variations on similar verse patterns. Subsequent books include, most notably, Selected Poems (1968); the novel Edsel (1971); selected essays in The Poetry Wreck (1975); and Collected Poems: 1940-1978 (1978); as well as a film, Karl Shapiro's America (1976). Although he has written significant works in prose and possesses a particular genius as polemicist and pamphleteer, Shapiro is first and foremost a poet, and any discussion of his writing must focus on this aspect of his life. Shapiro's criticism and, in a lesser sense, his novel, contribute, nonetheless, to our understanding and appreciation of him as an artist. In them he works out a poetics for "the bourgeois poet" and "the American poet," as he understands these terms. Shapiro's career is usually discussed in relation to writings before and after 1958. But if one looks closely at the interrelationships between the poetry and the criticism, and the way in which that interplay has affected his various styles, his career falls more precisely and naturally into four clearly defined periods. For reasons explored later, one can usefully approach his writings with reference to particular emphases, changes, and developments during (1) the period of apprenticeship, from the beginnings to 1944, the year of publication of V-Letter and Other Poems; (2) the period of the "anti-critic," 1944-1958, including Essay on Rime, Beyond Criticism, and Poems of a Jew;

704 I AMERICAN (3) the period of "the true contemporary," 1958-1968, including In Defense of Ignorance, The Bourgeois Poet, and Selected Poems; and (4) the period of "the American poet," beginning in 1968, including Edsel, the later essays in The Poetry Wreck, and the new work in Collected Poems: 1940-1978. The changes in style and in preoccupations that these designations suggest are usually matters of emphasis rather than of radical transformation, calling attention to the forces that struggle for dominance in Shapiro's work at various times. If the conflicts had ever been totally resolved, one might expect him to turn to other work. As things stand, they create a tension between what he once called "the lyrical ego" and the critical conscience, making his poetry vigorous in feeling and intelligence. To the first period, the long apprenticeship, belong the privately printed Poems (1935); his initial appearance in magazines, especially Partisan Review and Poetry, as well as Five Young American Poets; the books edited by Evalyn Katz during his years in the South Pacific; and the important prizes and serious critical attention that established Shapiro as a national literary figure while he was still in his early thirties. In form, the early poems are usually metrically regular with a fixed, though untraditional, stanza form, employing enjambment and regular rhyme. The language is tough, flat, and prosaic, like the hard outlines of an Edward Hopper painting; but the overall effect can be celebratory or ceremonial. Although attentive to the integrity of the person, place, or convention they describe, these poems border on or occasionally plunge headlong into satire. Poems (1935) is written in a conventional poetic language, with obvious echoes of Shapiro's early enthusiasms, especially Shakespeare and William Carlos Williams. Shapiro's own judgment that his imitations of Williams were better

WRITERS

than those of Shakespeare is confirmed in a short poem reminiscent of Williams in form and imagery: "First / I look / (O wondrous / apple with / the window in your cheek) / then bite—." It also acknowledges the fact that his ear for American speech was, even then, superior to his ear for English cadence. Although less overtly political than several of his contemporaries, especially Muriel Rukeyser, Shapiro in his first verses does write about the turmoil and struggle during the Great Depression. The long poem "Irenicon," which explores the poet's relation to society, includes a "Marxian invocation." And "Shenandoah," beginning "This poem is for eleven / on the hill / who came to my door / in the dark," ends with the line, "This poem is not for Poe," suggesting a natural dichotomy between "pure" poetry and poetry with a message. This division of interests and conflict of impulses is observable in Shapiro's poetry and criticism from then on. A more characteristic early poem, "University," indicates a sophisticated sense of cultural and political history and a preference, formally, for the modernist tradition of Eliot and Auden, rather than the contemporary style of Williams. Based on Shapiro's experience at the University of Virginia, this satiric lyric begins with these justly famous lines, "To hurt the Negro and avoid the Jew / Is the curriculum," and then enumerates the prejudices, pretensions, and stupidities of an institution gone wrong. The first three of the five stanzas describe the injustices sanctioned by students, faculty, and administration: The Deans, dry spinsters over family plate,... Humor the snob and lure the lout. Within the precincts of this world Poise is a club. Although he is never named in the poem, Thomas Jefferson hovers nearby, as the proto-

KARL SHAPIRO / 705 type of the founder, "the true nobleman, once a democrat, / [who] Sleeps on his private mountain." "University" conveys a feeling, a sense of injustice, that characterizes many poems of the Great Depression; though one associates its technique with the Augustan satirists of the eighteenth century. Shapiro not only exposes the dunces, in the manner of Alexander Pope; he also chastises them, in the manner of Samuel Johnson and other Juvenalian satirists. Yet, as Allen Tate once said of Pope, Shapiro transforms his rage into art. In "University" one understands and shares his disappointment in seeing an institution perpetuate what it pretends to resist. A central theme is the conflict between the ideal and the real, between what Thomas Jefferson—or any person with a dream of a just society—imagines and what the institution that he founded later becomes. "University" is the angriest of the angry poems in Shapiro's first commercially published collection, Person, Place and Thing. It is also one of his best poems, building successfully on a young man's disappointment, even disgust, at seeing an ideal corrupted and an evil, slavery, perpetuated. The need to expose and purge is at the heart of several poems from Shapiro's first period; it was, in fact, one of the strongest and most remarkable qualities of his early achievement. This discontent informs much of the literature of the 1930's—the early poems of Spender and Auden, the novels of James T. Farrell, John Steinbeck, and Nathanael West—and, in Shapiro, that anger is particularized, delineated, and clearly focused on various aspects of American life. Usually he tempers his fury with appreciation or sympathy, recognizing that hate and love are not necessarily mutually exclusive but move, like wind and water, in several directions at once. These conflicting emotions are successfully

rendered in "The Fly," which begins on a note of exasperation: "O hideous little bat, the size of snot." But by the end of the sixth stanza, which includes precise descriptions of the insect's seedier habitations and habits, the speaker regains his composure and proper aesthetic distance. Finally victorious in his battle against the fly, he feels some pity for the poor creature, that falls And stunned, stone blind, and deaf Buzzes its frightful F And dies between three cannibals. The satire that is so strong in Person, Place and Thing is muted at times by the arrangement of the poems, as well as in individual works like "The Fly," in which a slight twist or shift in mood softens the negative tone. Read together, "University," "The Fly," "The Snob" ("Nothing but death will smash this ugly cast"), and "The Glutton" ("The jowls of his belly crawl and swell like the sea") give the impression that "the tooth of satire," as Pound called it, dominates Shapiro's first book. Yet these poems represent less than half of the total collection. As in his later critical essays, Shapiro, the true polemicist, infuriates and charms at the same time. The other group of poems that, like the satires, constitute a significant part of Person, Place and Thing are the "still photographs" of American life, scenes that Norman Rockwell sentimentalized, but that Shapiro views with an occasionally jaundiced but always attentive eye: "Drug Store," "Buick," "Emporium," "Honkytonk," "Midnight Show," and "Conscription Camp." The titles alone suggest a kind of encyclopedia of slang for this period in American history; and Shapiro, with what Delmore Schwartz called a "limitless capacity for detail," captured the times. Some of these poems risk being circumscribed by the period in which they were writ-

706 I AMERICAN ten, during the later years of the Great Depression and the early 1940's. Yet, like the plays of Anton Chekhov, their timeliness is also their strength, capturing a style or a mood confined to a physical place, just as it is on the verge of extinction. They seem peculiarly American and quite untranslatable; like the "Drug Store," they baffle "the foreigner like an idiom." But these ordinary subjects are presented with energy and humor, a mixture of positive and negative feeling that characterizes Shapiro's style throughout much of his career. The reason for Shapiro's ambivalence toward his world is perhaps best suggested by the most philosophical of the early poems, "Auto Wreck," more frequently anthologized, perhaps, than any other American poem of the period. It is a powerful, naturalistic portrait of what Ernest Hemingway called the commonest occurrence in modern life: violent death. The poem focuses not on the victims of an automobile crash but on the emotional reactions of the witnesses. It describes the incident, from the ambulance's arrival, as it "Wings in a heavy curve, dips down, / And brakes speed, entering the crowd," until its departure, "with its terrible cargo / ... As the doors, an afterthought, are closed." Through the four stanzas of the poem, observers reflect upon the wreck, in a language and mood resembling those of a Greek chorus, trying to place the event in context and to understand its implications in relation to their own lives. They proceed, like the citizens of Thebes, by question and answer, through strophe and antistrophe: We are deranged, . . . The traffic moves around with care, But we remain, touching a wound That opens to our richest horror. Already old, the question Who shall die? Becomes unspoken Who is innocent?

WRITERS

Their response to the casual cruelty of the accident is fatalistic and primitive in its implications: For death in war is done by hands; Suicide has cause and stillbirth, logic; An auto wreck, though, makes no sense and invites, rather, "the occult mind, / Cancels our physics with a sneer, / And spatters all we know of denouement"—that is, of meaningful resolution—"Across the expedient and wicked stones." The answers to the questions provide not only a fitting resolution to the observers' dilemma, in the face of a senseless death, but also an insight into Shapiro's own way of looking at the world during this period of his life as a poet. It is a philosophy that sustained him through a long apprenticeship and the early years of World War II. Such naturalism was as appropriate for wartime, in other words, as it was for the Great Depression, and it gives a point of view and depth to the poems Shapiro wrote while in the medical corps in Australia and New Guinea. "We . . . fought the Second World War before it happened and then again when it did happen," Shapiro said, regarding the poets of his generation. Being shipped to the South Pacific, just after the appearance of his first poems, left him "almost insane with fury." But it was to be a time and place of great productivity, bringing his apprenticeship to an end and giving a new direction to his career as a writer. In addition to the poems that appeared in The Place of Love, erotic lyrics, personal prose poems, and excerpts from letters in the contemporary style of Williams rather than in the neomodernist style of Auden, he wrote most of the poems that appear in V-Letter and Other Poems and a long verse essay on poetry. In a cautionary note to the war poems he said: "I have not

KARL SHAPIRO / 707 written these poems in accord with any doctrine or system of thought or even a theory of composition. I have nothing to offer in the way of beliefs or challenges or prosody. I try to write freely, one day as a Christian, the next as a Jew, the next as a soldier who sees the gigantic slapstick of modern war. I hope I do not impersonate other poets." He didn't. Although the principal subject of V-Letter and Other Poems (the title refers to the serviceman's small photostat of a letter) is clearly the war, V-Letter contains a number of poems that might easily have appeared in Person, Place and Thing. "Fireworks," "Movie," "Christmas Tree," "Public Library," and "The Communist" discuss topics and express attitudes and sentiments that belong to Shapiro's Americana of the 1930's, giving the book a markedly different tone from that of previous poetry collections dealing with battlefield experience. Since accounts of total war in 1918 had been a part of literature for over twenty years, in the novels of Hemingway and John Dos Passos as well as in the poetry of Wilfred Owen and Sassoon, it would not have been appropriate for a soldier in 1943 to have been "surprised" by the horror; and Shapiro surveyed the destruction not unfeelingly but with a casualness implying that he had traveled this way before. "Troop Train," for example, speaks of men moving . . . on through continents and days, Deliberate, grimy, slightly drunk we crawl, The good-bad boys of conscience and chance, .. . Trains lead to ships and ships to death or trains, And trains to death or trucks, and trucks to death, Or trucks lead to the march, the march to death,...

The horror of war, or what Owen in 1918 had called "the pity of war," has become "the monotony of war." As in similar poems by his contemporaries Richard Eberhart, Randall Jarrell, and Rukeyser, Shapiro speaks not melodramatically but matter of factly about the event. His heroes, like the men in Joseph Heller's Catch 22 (1961), are often antiheroes. Such soldiers do not expect to be praised for their courage under fire but, like Jarrell's ball turret gunner, to be "washed out of the turret with a hose." In this last book of Shapiro's learning period, the one that brought him a large audience and a Pulitzer Prize, the soldier-narrator also speaks about the irony that arises because of the contrast between the romantic setting and the ominous fate of men at war. "These nights we fear the aspects of the moon," the beautiful lyric "Full Moon: New Guinea" begins; the soldiers Sleep lightly in the radiance falling clear On palms and ferns and hills and us; for soon The small burr of the bombers in our ear Tickles our rest; . . . These nights We fear Orion and the Cross. ... And in "V-Letter," a young man writes from the battlefield about what his lover teaches, by her absence, about survival: I love you first because your years Lead to my matter-of-fact and simple death Or to our open marriage, And I pray nothing for my safety back, Not even luck, because our love is whole Whether I live or fail. In these poems, the war seems almost distant, an event described with awkward acceptance and complacency. It was only later, in poems written during his last days in the South Pacific or after returning home, that Shapiro began to explore the deeper psychological effects of his experience, to combine precise outward descrip-

708 I AMERICAN tion with inwardness. By 1944 his work was beginning to take a slightly different direction, still intelligent, emotional, and humorous but with a deeper personal investment in the consequences of his satiric comments. For the next fourteen years he wrote not as an apprentice but as a critical iconoclast. This second period, 1944-1958, that of the "anti-critic," marks the beginning of Shapiro's influence as a commentator on the work of other writers and his growing sophistication and ambition as a poet. In Essay on Rime (1945), one hears the voice of a man very aware of his audience and somewhat self-conscious about his responsibilities as a man of letters. He speaks with an assurance and subtlety that are only fleetingly apparent in the early works. To this period belong his early writings on prosody, as well as several long poems in a style similar to that of the first period, but polished, even perfected. In the long poems "Recapitulations" and "Adam and Eve," he is able to sustain a narrative and a mood through several pages of discourse. In the criticism, he thinks through his preoccupations as a writer, being explicit about his similarities to and differences from his predecessors. A writer's sensibility and ultimately his life are forged upon the dichotomy between "what is without and what is within, the models he is given and his reaction to them," Shapiro wrote in "A Malebolge of Fourteen Hundred Books" (1964). And during this period he began to shape his own aesthetic, to write criticism "in the first person singular." The contrast between the first two periods of Shapiro's career are evident in the works written before his return from the South Pacific. On the basis of his success, even before receiving the Pulitzer Prize, he apparently became confident of his ability to "take on" poets past and present, including those from whom he had learned his craft: William Blake, John Keats, Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, Walt

WRITERS

Whitman, T. S. Eliot, Rainer Maria Rilke, William Carlos Williams, D. H. Lawrence, Stephen Spender, and W. H. Auden. In doing so, he resembles the poets of an earlier generation who performed a similar task after World War I. Much as he would dislike the comparison, Shapiro in Essay on Rime sounds much like Eliot, who in The Sacred Wood rearranged the monuments of Western literature, enthroning those who most resembled him (John Donne and George Herbert) and devaluing those who did not (John Milton and Percy Bysshe Shelley). The conditions under which Essay on Rime was written, from Shapiro's own account, are pertinent. He was living in New Guinea as a soldier, resting for ninety days before moving further inland with his medical unit. As a company clerk with a typewriter, he decided to write the poem, blocked out the sections with titles, and "even figured out how many lines a day I'd be able to write." William Van O'Connor, a fellow soldier and later a colleague at the University of California at Davis, loaned Shapiro a copy of William Butler Yeats's Oxford Book of Modern Verse. That and his own copy of Baudelaire "was about the extent of my library at that time." Although something of an anomaly, comparable to James Russell Lowell's A Fable for Critics (1848) or Amy Lowell's A Critical Fable (1922)—both poetic evaluations of their contemporaries—Essay on Rime is of particular interest, directly related to Shapiro's growth and change as a poet and indicative of the direction of American poetry ten years after the appearance of his first book. The words "essay" and "rime" in the title are used in their original senses: "essay" meaning "an attempt at understanding" and "rime" understood as "the art of poetry," rather than just as "a strict science of metrics and versification." This long poem in blank verse, composed in

KARL SHAPIRO / 709 three sections on confusions in prosody, language, and belief, is a knowledgeable if highly personal view of modern poetry and the direct statement of what a young poet had absorbed, as Matthiessen said, "from thirty years of living and ten of learning his craft." Its principal argument, to which Shapiro often returned over the next twenty-five years, is "that criticism / Has charted poetry into dangerous narrows / And dashed its own brains out upon the rocks / Of absolute meaning." Each of the three sections substantiates this charge by enumerating the confusions, with particular references to poets and critics. In naming and describing the confusions that weaken neomodernist poetry, in a concluding section on "The Dead Hand and Exhaustion of Our Rime," Shapiro is obviously thinking seriously about his own future as a poet, as well as the future of American poetry. The conditions under which he wrote, as a participant in World War II, give him little cause for hope: The rime produced by soldiers of our war Is the most sterile of our century. In this poem, as in his later criticism, Shapiro is clearly trying to plot a course between the formalists, represented by Yeats, Eliot, and Tate, and the so-called antiformalists, represented by Williams, Lawrence, and Hart Crane. It is a defense of poetry expressed in language similar to William Wordsworth's in the preface to the Lyrical Ballads (1798) and to other statements acknowledging the common speech as the source of poetic language in a new age: The measure of prosody is the current speech, The cadences inherent in the voice Of one particular generation. Each Has its own standard, and no choice exists Between the past and present....

As a prosodist, Shapiro is haunted by the specter of the past, which he associates primarily with English formalists and the early modernists. Like most original poets responsive to their own time and attentive to a contemporary audience, he wants to find a tradition other than the one immediately available to him, without the proscriptions that prevent him from speaking about the pressures of the moment. Much of Essay on Rime concerns itself, therefore, with elementary questions about nature, love, beauty, and "the plain statement of feeling": At what point in the history of art Has such a cleavage between audience And poet existed? When before has rime Relied so heavily on the interpreter, The analyst and the critic? . . . Never, Shapiro answers, and then ends the poem, having given only a few hints of a positive alternative to the dead-end situation he decries. The way out is there, nonetheless, to be plotted; and after returning to the United States, Shapiro begins to do so, not in poetry so much as in criticism. Of the four people mentioned in Essay on Rime as possible guides for the future—James Joyce, Lawrence, Williams, and Auden—the middle two become increasingly important over the next twenty years. In the early poems, as mentioned above, and in The Place of Love, with thirteen of its thirty-one poems in prose, he had followed Lawrence's and Williams' lead in writing about personal feelings more intimately and less formally than in any of his books published commercially before 1964. In the preface to The Place of Love, Shapiro complains about being "brought up to shun the lyrical ego, to look at ourselves from without, to make a science of our acts." Thinking obviously of the modernist criticism of "personality" in poetry, he laments that "the poet in particular has reacted to a revolution in knowledge by developing the most advanced self-con-

710 I AMERICAN sciousness possible, an intolerance for his own personality that is just short of madness." Shapiro here anticipates by more than a decade a complaint repeated by the poets of open form and the beat generation. Pressures to conform to the early modernist attitude kept Shapiro at war with himself for a long time, venting his anger as an "anti-critic" but adhering for the most part to the standard and writing style inherited from Eliot and Auden. For twenty years he worked to justify intellectually the kind of poetry that he had yet to master, while writing the kind of poetry for which he was known and admired. Returning to the United States, he enjoyed the personal success that Person, Place and Thing and V-Letter and Other Poems had won for him: national awards, fellowships, lectureships in this country and abroad; and in 1950 he was appointed editor of Poetry magazine, "as formidable a literary institution as any in the country," he said later. In lectures, eventually published in periodicals, small editions, and later in several collections, he continued to explore the issues raised in Essay on Rime, railing against the oppressive effect of an age of criticism on poetry and politics. Although Essay on Rime occupies a relatively minor place in the canon of Shapiro's poetry and does not appear in Collected Poems, 1940-1978, it is significant in the development of his aesthetic. From that seed would flower his later poems and essays, suggesting new life and color, in the midst of the wasteland of American poetry catering to the New Criticism. The subject of prosody also continued to occupy his attention in several academic treatises: English Prosody and Modern Poetry (1947), a transcript of a lecture at Johns Hopkins University; A Bibliography of Modern Prosody (1948), compiled during his tenure as consultant in poetry at the Library of Congress; and, much later, A Prosody Handbook (1965), written

WRITERS

with Robert Beum. "Prosody," one of the wittiest poems in The Bourgeois Poet, describes his fascination with this subject: "I make a muse of prosody, old hag. She's just a registered nurse, I know, I know, but I have her sashay, grind and bump, register Alcaics, Sapphics, choriambs. ..." At that task, he adds, "I burn with an even flame, I'm cooking with gas." In the poetry of the second period, there were discernible changes in tone, if not in form and content. Subtleties of feeling and perception informed the poems about war in particular; and The Trial of a Poet, published two years after he received the Pulitzer Prize, includes three poems that are among the most powerful of his career. The prose poem "The Dirty Word," which had appeared in the volume published in Australia, resembles in style the lyrics of the third period. (St.-John Perse's admiration for this poem contributed to Shapiro's further experimentations in prose.) "Recapitulations" and "The Conscientious Objector," although similar in form to the poems of the first period, are markedly different in their judgment of the war. In "Recapitulations," Shapiro's longest poem in regular stanzaic patterns up to that time, the war "was the death he never quite forgot / Through the four years of death, and like as not / The true death of the best of all of us / Whose present life is largely posthumous." Although still somewhat detached in tone, like the earlier poetry, it is more inward and autobiographical than he risked before; one section, originally entitled "A Song of Conscience," explains his inactivity during the Spanish Civil War and his unresponsiveness during the Soviet invasion of Finland and the bombing of Britain. Unlike Pound's Hugh Selwyn Mauberleyt written just after World War I and with which Shapiro's post-World War II poem is often compared, "Recapitulations" uses no persona to voice the poet's frustrations and dissatisfactions

KARL SHAPIRO / 711 with contemporary life. Originally a series of sixteen short poems, usually in quatrains, "Recapitulations" is significantly altered in later printings. In the poem, the speaker describes the ethnic, religious, and artistic influences that shaped him, underscoring the conflicts and contradictions that are evident in Shapiro's own life: his Jewish heritage and his Catholic inclinations, his bourgeois background and his radical sympathies, his individual choices and his communal feelings, his active militarism and his pacifist leanings, his public good behavior and his private confessions. One of the best poems of its kind, it records experiences common to those born just before World War I, who grew up and came of age in the shadow of another war. If, as Virginia Woolf said, the world spun on its axis about 1910, it had made several more revolutions by 1945, and Shapiro's poem accurately renders the confusion of those times. But it ends somewhat inconclusively—suggesting Shapiro's own uncertainty about the present, as well as about his future, as man and poet. As a statement about the causes of his confusion, "The Conscientious Objector" is a clearer poem than "Recapitulations," describing the psychological conflict that many men felt once World War II had ended. The resemblances between Shapiro's poem and the antiwar poems of Sassoon and Owen, especially the latter's "Mental Cases," are obvious; the differences, like those between the two world wars, are related to the reflections of someone confronting total war as an innocent and those of someone confronting it as a veteran. The hatred of war reflected in Shapiro's poems is mixed with a profound sympathy for brave men fighting senseless battles. And the conflict between his hatred of the warmaking state and his admiration for his comrades goes to the very heart of the poem. "The Conscientious Objector," a blank verse

poem in four eight-line stanzas, follows a war resister (probably a close friend or perhaps Robert Lowell, Shapiro's fellow poet) through his journey into resistance. The prisoner of conscience is compared to a pilgrim on a journey to a new land. His jail cell and prison become a Noah's ark or Mayflower, as he sets out "To establish new theocracies to west": Like all men hunted from the world you made A good community, voyaging the storm To no safe Plymouth or green Ararat; One of the main sources of the poem's power is the speaker's awareness of the conscientious objector's unpopularity—the public indecency of being a noncombatant—and his understanding about what it cost pacifists to maintain their moral position. As a combatant, Shapiro recognizes the integrity of those who, because of conscience, did not fight: Well might the soldier kissing the hot beach Erupting in his face damn all your kind. Yet you who saved neither yourselves nor us Are equally with those who shed the blood The heroes of our cause. Your conscience is What we come back to in the armistice. In later years Shapiro the "anti-critic" fleshed out in prose the opinions expressed in Essay on Rime, suggesting, like the poems, a growth in sophistication and ambition. Beyond Criticism (1953), based on the Montgomery lectures at the University of Nebraska, was once summarized by the author in one sentence—"Stop lecturing, for God's sake." They speak to the modernist academic critics and their disciples, those who dominated the literary scene during the cold war, as well as to himself. They are negative statements about what not to do in poetry; the positive statements describing possible alternatives belong to a later period. In poetry, the concluding years of the "anti-critic" include the publication of Poems 1940-1953,

772 / AMERICAN which adds his longest work to date, "Adam and Eve," and another selection, Poems of a Jew (195%). Shapiro has always been a careful, even severe, critic of his own work, continually editing out poems, in successive editions, that fail to meet his own high standard of performance, and Poems 1940-1953 is interesting as the first large selection of previously published poems that withstood that test. Among the eighteen poems not previously published in book form, there is "Adam and Eve," a spectacular demonstration of Shapiro's versatility as a poet and an appropriate finale, in some ways, to one of the formalist phases of his career. Using several stanza forms, regular rhyme, and a range of traditional metrical patterns and rhythms—quatrain, sonnet, couplet, versions of the seven liner—Shapiro gives in "Adam and Eve" his version of the Genesis story. With imagery drawn from the Zohar and from Wilhelm Reich, he concentrates on the early days of Adam and Eve's creation, their lovemaking, sin, and exile. God, he says, "determined" Adam to leave Eden; the poem's view that "man is for the world, not for the afterworld, is Jewish," according to Shapiro. Although the narrative is too casually developed to carry the weight of the poem, he does maintain the story line, and individual passages, especially the banishment of Adam and Eve from Paradise, are among the most beautiful in Shapiro's early work: They turned in dark amazement and beheld Eden ablaze with fires of red and gold. The garden dressed for dying in cold flame, And it was autumn, and the present world. Although Shapiro usually describes himself as having no religion and no politics, he has been persistently preoccupied with his origins, including his southern and mid-Atlantic inheritance and early background. Poems of a Jew

WRITERS

gathered together poems exploring one aspect of his past, a consciousness "that never really goes away," Shapiro later said on the subject, especially if Jews are in trouble. In poems extracted from the previous volumes that had nothing to do with this "obsession," the book talks about being a Jew among Christians and in several poems, including "The Crucifix in the Filing Cabinet," about one Jew's "private flirtation with Catholicism." This clear identification of his origins, in poems about people and incidents from history, mythology, and his own life, gives Poems of a Jew an obvious unity and structural clarity. It expands upon and deepens a theme central to modernist art, symbolized for Shapiro by Joyce's portrait of Leopold Bloom in Ulysses, and builds upon the modernist theme of the impersonality of history, so central to literature since World War I. Implicit in individual poems and throughout the book is the threat posed by political purges, by total war, and even by nuclear holocaust, with the question of survival and the threat of annihilation always at the edge of consciousness. When Ezra Pound was nominated in 1949 for the Bollingen Prize for Poetry, Shapiro voted against him, saying, "I am a Jew and cannot honor anti-semites," and publicly defended his position in the literary furor that surrounded the event. In Poems of a Jew he again indicated the depth of his loyalty to that ethnic history. Although the book adds little to Shapiro's canon, it is significant biographically and attitudinally, allowing him to move toward a new understanding of himself as a writer, as "the true contemporary," and toward responsibilities other than those imposed by the past. Publishing Poems of a Jewf Shapiro wrote later, "decolonized" him, making him "as rootless as a Texas millionaire with Negro and Indian blood in his veins." As a public manifestation of his inheritance

KARL SHAPIRO I 713 and of his "decolonization," the publication of Poems of a Jew coincides with the end of the second period of Shapiro's career. By then he had begun to surrender his old identity as a neomodernist in style, with loyalties to Baudelaire, Yeats, Eliot, and Auden, and to ally himself, as "the true contemporary," with Whitman, Lawrence, and Williams. As a break with the past, this change resembles previous changes in sensibility in literary history, including the one by English poets in the late eighteenth century from neoclassicism to romanticism and the one by English and American poets in the early twentieth century from late Victorianism to early modernism. For Shapiro, it was a natural expansion of ideas and practices observable in his experiments in criticism in Essay on Rime and, in poetry, in The Place of Love. During the third period, 1958-1968, Shapiro becomes less concerned with keeping up appearances than with plummeting depths. He turns away from a preoccupation with "good form" toward a peculiarly American preoccupation with discovery. In In Defense of Ignorance he rephrases Ralph Waldo Emerson's literary declaration of independence from Europe, in criticism; and in The Bourgeois Poet he repeats Whitman's celebration of the democratic people en masse, in poetry. Shapiro forgets Poe, one might say, to remember Whitman, turning his back on "the jingle man" and the French symbolists and toward the man chanting his barbaric yawp and his contemporary disciples. He moves away from the dominant poetry of the twentieth century, which prides itself on its adherence to tradition, ritual, metaphysical wit, learned irony, and the need for discipline in art and society, and moves toward a new poetry that took pride in originality, spontaneity, immediacy, and the need for experimentation in art and society. In doing so, he not only risked working in a style, the prose poem, in which he had not excelled pre-

viously but also alienated admirers, especially formalists and academics—Tate and other New Critics—who had encouraged and praised his early work. Shapiro's substantive change in style and subject matter during this period parallels a general movement in American poetry at this time, symbolized by the publication in 1956 of Allen Ginsberg's Howl, by the popularity of the beat poets, and by the sudden emergence of Williams as a major influence on writers a decade or so younger than Shapiro—John Logan, Denise Levertov, and Robert Creeley. It coincides also with the political and social upheaval associated with the civil rights movement and the early years of the movement against the Vietnam war. As a reawakening of social conscience in American society, the decade is superficially more dramatic but essentially less radical than that of the 1930's, whose politics had strongly influenced Shapiro's life and work. How and why this shift in attitude came about, around 1960, is understandable also in light of several correspondences in Shapiro's own life. It had something to do with the clear and inevitable identification of himself as a true "outsider," as a poet and person who could not belong even if he wanted to. No matter how "establishment" his behavior or how many honors and professorships were heaped upon him, he was that most bizarre of creatures, an American poet. From the example of the beats, he seemed to derive, as well, some confidence in stepping up his own campaign against the critical citadels of the cold war aesthetic. "Each age takes down the masterpieces of its fathers," he wrote in "Romanticism Comes Home" (1957), and "stores them in the cellar where someday they will be exhumed by other judges. In San Francisco they are building the crates." And in an influential book, In Defense of Ignorance (1960), he repeated the arguments of his earlier criticism in a diatribe against neomod-

714 I AMERICAN WRITERS ernists and the poets who made him a poet; more important, he laid down a new canon, with a different tradition, that would sustain him as a poet over the next decade. In Defense of Ignorance is an apologia in the classic sense for turning one's back on what has been defined by the culture as the "right," the "informed" opinion. For the future of poetry, Shapiro argues, one must forget the great names of early modernism, whose legacy is an artistic wasteland, not unlike that described in Eliot's poem. In successive essays on Pound, Yeats, and Eliot, Shapiro challenges their reputations as major poets and their influence as critics, describing them as antiquarian in their interest, reactionary in their politics, and altogether questionable in their aesthetics. On the basis of his reading of Whitman, Lawrence, Williams, and Henry Miller, and of several more philosophical writers, especially Wilhelm Reich and Martin Buber, Shapiro argues for the primacy of intuition over reason as a guide to wisdom and poetic vision. Through these writers, he forges a new aesthetic that, he believes, will finally dispel the false and unnecessary dualisms imposed by modernist poetry and criticism. Four years after the appearance of In Defense of Ignorance, which described Whitman as America's "most original thinker... the poet of the greatest achievement; . . . the most accomplished artist" and Henry Miller as America's "greatest living author," Shapiro published a collection of poems, The Bourgeois Poet, based upon this new poetics. In an effort to win his audience back to poetry, he speaks not only in the language of the moment but also in a style proper to the moment, that is, in the prose poem. In doing so, he makes a conscious break with a European tradition dating from the time of the Greeks to the romantics, in order to ally himself with an American tradition that began with Whitman. Turning away from his old master, Baudelaire, who advised the poet

"to shake up the middle class," Shapiro writes, instead, to celebrate it. The title, The Bourgeois Poet, came inadvertently from a casual remark by Theodore Roethke, during an introduction for Shapiro, in Seattle, in the late 1950's. Said in a tone of "admiring contempt," the phrase prompted the "equivalent to a ten year psychological analysis," Shapiro wrote later. The Bourgeois Poet, like In Defense of Ignorance, is a direct assault on "cultured" behavior and a loud Rotarian hymn to middle-class sensibility and bourgeois taste, in language that is often witty, joyous, erotic, and nonsensical. The Bourgeois Poet is a collection of lyrical ballads, in prose, by a purposefully unsophisticated artist who arranges his books, one poem says, "with a view to their appearance. Some highbrow titles are prominently displayed." He lives among businessmen, militarists, and tenured professors—all with living rooms "like beauty parlors, like night-club powder rooms, like international airport first-class lounges"; and he loves almost everything about it. His affection for the mundane and the mediocre appears boundless; so does his capacity for all remembered incidents, recorded, like jottings in a journal, as they occur. It is a book of poems not only about the life of the bourgeoisie and material success but also about the social conditions that made them possible. It glorifies the melting-pot view of American history, the social confusion, and the lowered standard, where even the writing of poetry is made easy. Bourgeois poem #9, for example, entitled in later editions, "Lower the Standard," describes both a method for enthroning the ordinary and the reasons for adopting that system of evaluation: Lower the standard: that's my motto. Somebody is always putting the food out of reach. We're tired of falling off ladders. Who says a child can't paint? A pro is somebody who does

KARL SHAPIRO / 715 it for money. Lower the standards. Let's all play poetry. The key to Shapiro's "new" attitude, promoting a kind of social and cultural anarchism with its corresponding joie de vivre, is indicated in the closing lines of the poem: The law of gravity is the law of art. You first, poetry second, the good, the beautiful, the true come last. As the lad said: We must love one another or die. The sentiment of the last line is Auden's, taken from his "September 1, 1940," but that is the book's only resemblance to the work of Shapiro's former mentor. Its principal direction is toward a transvaluation of values, seizing the "old" values and standing them on their heads. In "Lower the Standard," as in many of the poems, the enemies of good behavior are "morals," "beliefs," "style," and "culture." It is a poetic statement in support of an underground culture, anticipating Theodore Roszak's popular The Making of a Counter Culture (1969) and its various imitators in prose and poetry. Shapiro writes in The Bourgeois Poet in sympathy with the theme of Ginsberg's Howl (1956), Norman O. Brown's Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (1959), and Paul Goodman's Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized System (1960), the other scriptures of the generation that came of age in the 1960's. In a society in which organization is symbolized by the bomb and by the impersonal, bureaucratized, repressive state, the absence of laW is preferable. "Better mendacities, than classics in paraphrase," Pound wrote in 1919, in overthrowing the aesthetics of the late nineteenth century. "Burn the Syntopicon and The Harvard Classics," Shapiro writes in a similar vein forty-five years later: "Keelhaul the poets in the vestry chairs Get off the Culture Wagon." In turning his back on the aestheticism and

the religiosity of modernism, Shapiro associates himself quite rightly with Whitman, who praises what is, rather than with one who laments what was or might have been. The Bourgeois Poet celebrates himself and sings himself, but in a manner somewhat different in voice and tone from Whitman's. "Of love and death in the Garrison State I sing," the speaker says in one poem, dreading not the overthrow of nations, but the loss of a head of hair. "One by one my troops desert," he says in "Hair"; "in the bath the other day," he laments, "a pubic hair turned silver gray!" The man speaking is many-voiced but usually middle-aged, relatively comfortable with himself, attentive to a diverse world, reminiscing about his survival through adventures and misadventures, fascinated by but skeptical of belief. "When I say the Hail Mary I get an erection," he confesses to a priest. "Doesn't that prove the existence of God?" This last line is from "The Missal," which begins "Priests and Freudians will understand." Like several other poems in the book, it returns to a subject discussed in Shapiro's early war poems and religious poems, especially those about his fascination with Catholicism. It is a poem that recognizes the common ground of human and divine love, the complex of feelings that characterize the mystical writings of St. John of the Cross and the erotic lyrics of John Wilmot, the earl of Rochester, as well as the physical passion and longing for union in the Holy Sonnets of John Donne. Both priests and Freudians, with their conflicting views on the soul, know why a soldier "In the throttling Papuan heat, . . . Deprived of love and letters and the sight of woman," needs help and possible forgiveness: I set up mental prayer wheels and spin them with the whips of fear. Help me, Freudians and priests: when I say the proud Hail Mary, the serpent takes me in the groin.

716 I AMERICAN WRITERS In this poem, as in several others, a persistent theme is the thinness of the veil separating civilization and barbarism. The speaker or persona seems quite uncertain about which is which. He is thrown back and forth between civilization and barbarism, finding the latter often preferable. He moves as an aborigine in a polite society, surrounded by the furniture of Western culture ("classics, battleships, Russian ballet, national anthems"), and dismisses most of it as useless. Shapiro's predecessors after World War I regarded their inheritance as "an old bitch gone in the teeth, a botched civilization," on the basis of the devastation brought about by war. But in their criticism and, by implication, in their poetry Yeats, Pound, and Eliot recommended an alternative structure; nothing could happen, in fact, without it. Shapiro, a survivor of World War II, speaks from experience more shattering than theirs, and is more skeptical than they of all structures. "Order became the enemy, the concentration camp, the totalitarian state," Karl Malkoff says of Shapiro. "The nothingness persisted, but now almost as an ally rather than an antagonist; meaninglessness had to serve as the source of meaning." Even Shapiro's identity as a Jew, which sustained him or at least defined his human boundaries in the earlier books, is insufficient to the post-World War II experience. His ironic view, expressed in previous poems from a single angle of vision, now shifts from poem to poem and even, as Malkoff says, from line to line. The affirmative tone, though, is persistent, and the unity of The Bourgeois Poet is maintained by this factor, if by no other. The feeling is predominantly one of joy. Read as one long poem, The Bourgeois Poet bears obvious resemblances to Howl but omits, one might say, the first two sections of the Ginsberg poem, that is, the accusatory sections about the destruction of a generation by madness and the sins of the sex-

less hydrogen bomb created by the servants of Moloch. It elaborates, instead, on the two final sections of Howl, the litany to Carl Solomon, gone mad in Rockland State Hospital, and the ecstatic hymn in Ginsberg's "Footnote" to Howlf beginning "Holy, Holy, Holy, Holy, Holy." In The Bourgeois Poet, Shapiro sings his barbaric yawp, like Whitman; he howls the world's holiness, like Ginsberg. In comparing Shapiro to these poets, I mean to suggest not his derivativeness but a common heritage, a resemblance to an earlier and a later American Jeremiah. Shapiro's random celebration of spontaneity, gaiety, and open form was temporary; within three years after the publication of The Bourgeois Poet, he turned his back on this generally absurdist view of the human condition to espouse more traditional humanistic values. After the publication in 1968 of Selected Poems, he returned to the attitudes that informed his early criticism and poetry. In this period of "the American poet," Shapiro begins to reconcile the two major and conflicting directions of his life and work and to arrange a tense alliance between Poe and Whitman, between Eliot and Williams, between the modernists who returned to Europe for form and idea and the aborigines who relied upon the "precultural" American language created by natives and refugees from three continents. By 1968, Shapiro became uneasy as "the true contemporary," rebelling against the "now" aesthetics that he had espoused in criticism since 1958 and against the lyrical and meditative prose poems that characterized his poetry during the same period. The change is prompted in part by a dissatisfaction with the social scene. Rather suddenly and inconsistently, he disapproves of political dissidence and of poetic responses to political upheaval associated with student protests and the antiwar movement. "Their poetry has sunk to a low

KARL SHAPIRO / 717 which even the most gifted enemies of the Movement could not foresee," he wrote in 1968. This transformation is perhaps the least surprising of Shapiro's changes as a writer. It is a change in politics and aesthetics that altered the perceptions and rhetoric of many people in the 1970's and that he anticipated by a few years. Like the three previous periods of Shapiro's life, this change led him in some positive directions—to some new poetry, to some insightful criticism, and, most surprisingly, to fiction. One can trace its origins in an important tribute to the late Randall Jarrell, in an address at the Library of Congress in 1967, and to a collection of love poems, in sonnets and other structured metrical forms, in White-Haired Lover in 1968. The essay on Jarrell, the poet whose work he admired most after Williams', is the first in a series of essays in the fourth period defining the term "American poet." The book of love poems, undoubtedly the weakest collection in his many years as a writer, indicates his return to traditional metrical forms. Shapiro's own opinion of this book is reflected in the fact that he includes only six of these poems in Collected Poems 1940-1978. They are conventional poems of an overwrought lover, more attentive to the person than to his art, and are interesting primarily in relationship to subsequent criticism and fiction. Shapiro's most direct statement about his change in attitude is an essay denouncing advocates of spontaneity and contemporaneity, entitled "To Abolish Children" (1968), a rather hysterical argument later refined and restated in a somewhat more coherent fashion for the California Library Association in 1970. The latter version, which became the title essay in The Poetry Wreck: Selected Essays 1950-1970, warns against the "barbarism and savagery" that threatens every aspect of contemporary life. In this essay, as in his other writings, aesthetics and politics complement one another. He is clearly disturbed by the direction of re-

cent art and thought, represented by the popular songs of rock bands, by the psychobabble of contemporary social sciences, and by the popular poetry of Rod McKuen.("His writing is not even trash.") The solution to this chaotic or melodramatic state, outlined in "To Abolish Children," is to rid the culture once and for all of the nonstate of being called "adolescence" and to make a clearer line of demarcation between "child" and "adult." The call for reform in "The Poetry Wreck" is more directly related to his cure for our poetry ills. Briefly stated, it tells us to go back to the library and to reclaim the university's proper functions, "to train the qualified student to the height of his capacity for learning, productivity in his skills, and imaginative research." To use the university, as it is now being used, "as an intellectual testing-ground of the personality is criminal," Shapiro says. "Sensitivity training for twenty-year-olds is obscene." The manner in which Shapiro came to these insights and judgments regarding contemporary culture is hinted at in his only novel, Edsel (1971), about a teacher-poet who goes through an identity crisis, or "passage" as psychologists sometimes call it, and is eventually converted from barbarism to civilization. The book, a kind of twentieth-century Tom Jones, is a picaresque novel about a middle-aged male whose adventures are as erotic as the eighteenth-century hero's and who is brought to heel as successfully by his lover as Tom Jones is by Sophie at the end of Henry Fielding's novel. Edsel is not so much about the central character, Edsel Lazerow, Regent's professor of English at Milo University, as it is about Edsel's "thing," its fall and rise. It is the story of an impotent, loquacious man who has lost his capacity for lovemaking and his sense of purpose—a man who has a reputation, after separating from his first wife, for promiscuity, for

718 I AMERICAN being "a character," for destruction. His latest affair, with Wanda Shontz, his wife's hairdresser, symbolizes the depth of his nightmarish depression, and their lovemaking sessions indicate the extent of his depravity. "We were rolling naked on the basement carpet, . . . on broken glass, bleeding and grunting and cursing, biting and punching, burnt with cigarette ends, crawling to the bathroom like wounded animals, slimy with anger and lust, lower than hogs strung up by the hocks for the kill.... I remember mostly that we cursed each other, . . . until we ran out of that vocabulary. It was a hate-fest and a good one," Edsel says. Returning from a European tour, as a representative of the United States Information Service, Edsel proceeds "to degrade degradation a notch at a time" and to throw himself into other hate-fests with Wanda. Several members of the faculty, aware of his psychological state, accuse him of slumming with Wanda, but the two continue their affair, with feelings of self-loathing and foulness. "You're in real bad trouble," Wanda tells Edsel at one point, "because you can't even love yourself." Dropped from the editorship of Tracks West, the university's literary quarterly, Edsel returns to teaching creative writing classes made up of athletes, sorority girls, faculty wives, and a hippie—who eventually sets fire to Edsel's office. With a little help from his friends, Edsel manages to escape being arrested at two wild parties engineered, or at least encouraged, by Milo University's leading sociologist. The first is an illegal cockfight, reminiscent of the grotesque scene in Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust; the second is a groupie gathering, with strobe lights, Jamaican dancers, and marijuana, which coincides with a campus visit from Akiba Mem (alias Harry Peltz), America's leading beat guru and poet. As a writer, Edsel feels compelled to dissociate himself from both Akiba Mem and Richard Wigglesworth,

WRITERS

another famous poet and publicity hound, who eventually comes to Milo to demonstrate against the dismissal of two faculty members and to spout vague generalities about love, freedom, and sex to sympathetic—and unthinking—students and faculty. Akiba Mem and Richard Wigglesworth, thinly disguised portraits of Allen Ginsberg and Robert Lowell, are associated in Edsel's mind with the corruption of language and of American life by mindless people who dominate the old professions. Watching the Wigglesworth demonstration on television, after telling the university president and the governor of the state that he has nothing to do with it, Edsel describes the counterculture theology and liturgy of such gatherings as "ill-digested gobbets of Zen and the Vedas, acid highs, hepatitic needles, electric jazz." In Edsel's view, the literary scholars, poets, scientists, and public officials have teamed up to corrupt the university, to defame poetry, and maybe to blow up the world. The novel consists of Edsel's monologues and dialogues—his lectures on poetry, his arguments with colleagues and with Wanda, and eventually his conversations with Marya Hinsdale, the woman of his dreams. In the novel's last scene, Edsel makes love to Marya, exploding "into a red, white and blue orgasm spangled with silk and iridescent stars and golden fringe." He has regained not only his potency and patriotism but also, apparently, his ability to start a new life as man and poet. It is, like Bernard Malamud's A New Life and similar fiction with an academic setting, a comic novel, even a romance, and the lovers presumably live happily ever after. Edsel Lazerow (Lazarus) is resurrected and ascends into heaven with Marya. Much of the humor of the novel—and this is probably not intentional—arises from the fact that Edsel sees through the stupidities of every-

KARL SHAPIRO / 719 one but himself, especially his compulsion to bore everyone to tears. One wonders how anyone with normal hearing can tolerate him, especially the idyllic heroine, Marya, who resembles a figure in a pre-Raphaelite painting in her beauty and serenity. Perhaps Edsel will recover his rational faculties along with his sexual faculties and cut back on the chatter, the torturous analysis of practically everything. Although he never realizes it, his intense verbalizing is like an iron screen separating him from his feelings. Mem and Wigglesworth, the other poets, are self-centered publicity hounds; but Edsel, in spite of his insistence on his own integrity, is not any better. In an effort to avoid being seduced by the media, by public relations, and by state politics, he identifies with people in power and even panders to them. He seeks the approval of the governor rather than remain quiet or take responsibility for his earlier complicity with the innocents and barbarians, "out of boredom, out of mischief, out of personal unhappiness." At the end, he turns his back on them all, selfrighteous and pretentious man that he is. His conversion to older values, presumably more humane and lasting, is not convincing, though. "Virtue Rewarded," the subtitle of Samuel Richardson's Pamela, another eighteenth-century novel, might serve as the subtitle of Shapiro's romance. But Edsel, like Pamela, has done it for a price. Although Edsel Lazerow is not always credible as a person, the novel works, generally, as a readable and revealing story because of Shapiro's extraordinary ability to pile detail on detail in a convincing and intelligible manner. The major flaw is the novel's attempt to reach beyond the confines of the story, without letting the reader in on its reasons for doing so. It is a two-dimensional comedy and succeeds in that genre until the problems of the principal characters call for a three- or four-dimensional exploration or dramatization.

Edsel contributes to the reader's understanding of Shapiro's change from "true contemporary" to "American poet," but it is not, strictly speaking, a roman a clef, and the association between Shapiro and Edsel need not be overemphasized. Both are poets, editors, and teachers at large, midwestern universities, and there are other direct associations between historical fact and fictional events. But Shapiro's statement that "Edsel is autobiographical in the sense that it has to do with my uneasiness at being the academy" is generally accurate. It has to do also with his uneasiness with the unconventional in poetry, politics, and private and social relationships. And it indicates something about Shapiro's nervousness about identifying with or adopting "bourgeois" attitudes for any length of time. It touches, in other words, upon that conflict between traditional and new forms and values that is observable in all of Shapiro's writing. In the fourth period, Shapiro, like Edsel, views American culture with a critical eye, with a brusqueness similar to that in early poems such as "University" and "The Dome of Sunday," the camera depicting "Row-houses and row lives," as the latter poems says. There are no more prose poems on nonsensical, obscene, or absurd subjects, as in The Bourgeois Poet. Although occasionally personal, erotic, and informal, the better ones tend to deal with subjects, styles, and themes from the periods of apprenticeship and the "anti-critic," rather than of "the true contemporary." He writes again about Jefferson, the model political figure, the hero; about typical American scenes, such as "Garage Sale" and "The Humanities Building"; about other writers, including Eliot and Auden; and on a theme suggested by Yeats's "Adam's Curse," "that we must labor to be beautiful." The poetry of the fourth period is uneven, as has already been suggested, but after White-

720 / AMERICAN Haired Lover, it improves. "The Sense of Beauty," for example, indicates a decline in Shapiro's ability to write about that subject in poetry; but "The Rape of Philomel," from Adult Bookstore, shows him at his best, retelling a classical myth in contemporary language of great precision and simplicity. Shapiro chose the latter poem as a fitting conclusion to Collected Poems 1940-1978, emphasizing in this way a persistent theme in his work: the natural relationship but inevitable conflict between beauty and power. The subject is a traditional one, popular with poets since the time of the Greeks; and Shapiro deals with the conflict in the midst of another culture that seems, like the earlier empire, to verge on decline if not on the edge of doom. "The feathers of these birds are stained with murder," concludes "The Rape of Philomel," as Procne, Philomel's violated sister, and the lustful King Tereus, fly "down the hallways, suddenly on wings." "Will there be anyone to chant the murderous tale of this other Thrace?" Shapiro seems to ask in this poem, where the state has taken over everything, where politics and sociology have replaced or corrupted art under the pretense of making it holy. The questions raised by this poem call attention to the fact that from apprenticeship through maturity and achievement, Shapiro's work in poetry as well as prose exhibits a continuity in purpose. In raising aesthetic questions in a context that is broadly political, he reminds the reader of his beginnings in the 1930's and of other writers who came of age in the Great Depression. Like many of them, he has retained a deep sense of the public implications of words, actions, and modes of thought. Unlike many more "personal" or confessional poets, he remains aware that speech implies an audience and that writing is addressed to a reader, two qualities that have enabled him to speak to a rather large audience while maintaining a devotion to his craft.

WRITERS

It is a hard task, but Shapiro has succeeded in accomplishing it, as he has moved back and forth between an inherited tradition and the psychological and political necessities of the present. In his poetry, there have been occasional excesses, with echoes of Whitman and Williams in the beginning and the obvious indebtedness to Eliot and Auden slightly later. The poems of World War II were sometimes formalist and rationalist to an extreme; and the love poems of the "beat" Shapiro erred in the opposite direction. But this effort to change and to purify his language has also produced some of the most memorable and remarkable poems of the time, including twenty or so that are among the best known and truly skillful lyrics in American literature. The most obvious among them, including several discussed above, are "Auto Wreck," "University," "The Fly," "The Conscientious Objector," and "The Dirty Word"; several from The Bourgeois Poet, including "Lower the Standard," "Nebraska," and "I Am the Atheist Who Says His Prayers"; as well as "The Rape of Philomel." To these poems must be added the essential essays in The Poetry Wreck: Selected Essays 1950-1970, especially those from In Defense of Ignorance. Those on individual poets, among the most influential critical statements since the essays of T. S. Eliot, helped to confirm a revitalizing change in canons of taste around 1955. There are, in addition, the interesting commentaries on his predecessors and his contemporaries, in prose and poetry—especially those on Whitman, Baudelaire, Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Lawrence, Hart Crane, Auden, Henry Miller, Saul Bellow, and Randall Jarrell. His political loyalties are indicated by his special praise of Jefferson and by his various social commentaries on the place of the library and the university in the general culture. Shapiro's achievement as a critic may be understood by comparing him with a contemporary, Paul Goodman, another poet and enfant

KARL SHAPIRO / 721 terrible, with obvious differences and surprising similarities. Like Goodman, Shapiro is able as an essayist to make unlikely or even outrageous positions understandable and acceptable when the whole world seems to be marching to another rhythm. His writings have that sense of conviction, that believable voice that overwhelms, badgers, ridicules, exposes, and finally wins the reader over. Shapiro and Goodman share other similarities: born two years apart, they grew up in large cities on the Eastern seaboard, wrote for some of the same magazines, and were both introduced to a larger public in the same volume, Five Young American Poets (1941). Both regarded themselves at various times as anarchists, with Shapiro writing a poem, "Death of Emma Goldman" (1940), and an essay, "To Revive Anarchism" (1960), from that perspective. Their theories of language, in Essay on Rime and Speaking and Language (1971) might both be subtitled, as Goodman's was, "defence of poetry." Both argued vigorously against the values of the neomodernist period and were sympathetic to the assault on the formalist, official culture of the cold war years. Yet both, about 1970, condemned the excesses of the counterculture that developed in opposition to it, Shapiro in To Abolish Children and Other Essays and Goodman in New Reformation: Notes of a Neolithic Conservative (1970). Both were appalled by what Shapiro called "the intellectual infantilism of the American radical." Having survived the hard ideological battles of the 1930's, they knew when the rhetoric of armchair radicals had grown thin in the 1960's. In their unhappiness and disillusionment, both critics began to sound, as they neared sixty, like disgruntled old men adopting a reactionary position that would have appalled them during their younger days. I have called the last period of Shapiro's career the period of "the American poet" because since 1968 he has been particularly preoccupied

with exploring the meaning of that designation and because it calls attention to an important aspect of his achievement. Some years ago, in response to a request from the French National Radio, he wrote a note on American poetry (explored much more extensively in "Is Poetry an American Art?" and "American Poet?") in which he said that the United States would probably never create a great poetry until our poets establish "some equilibrium between themselves and the nation." "I cannot say whether we shall ever have another Poe," he continued, "but this is what we need—a spirit to lead us not to and fro in the land but into our own special genius." In his poetry and criticism, Shapiro, like Poe, has led us "into our own genius," exhibiting both the dark and doubting side of Poe and the affirming flame of Whitman. In remarks about his contemporaries, Shapiro suggests several other bases for evaluating and understanding his contributions to American letters. In talking about Jarrell, Shapiro described his fellow poet in terms that can be applied usefully to himself. He was a man, Shapiro said, whose literary style and life-style grew out of his soul's conflict "between his instinct for freedom and his desire for cultural asylum." The conflicts Shapiro struggles with are similar but move in the opposite direction, between a desire for freedom and an instinct for cultural asylum. By his life-style, Shapiro has freed himself from the orthodoxies that have kept several of his contemporaries from speaking in their own voices. By his literary style, Shapiro has kept close to a culture that he wears well and lightly in his best work. His talent, including his conflicts, has given him both an appreciation and love for the tradition and a distance from it. The results are a body of work that conveys both the confusion of a world on the edge of dissolution and its expansiveness and dynamism. He captures its momentary existence and celebrates it, even as he

722 / AMERICAN WRITERS exposes the hint of weakness, decay, or dissolution, "And shows us, rotted and endowed,/ Its senile pleasure." His arguments with, yet admiration for, bourgeois values have enabled him to be both a highly skilled satirist and a lyricist of the commonplace, allowing him to understand the American experience and to show it fully, as it is. Among his achievements as a poet are his ability to dramatize the culture's strengths— the accomplishments of its bourgeois revolution—and its weaknesses—the failure to transform an economic and political system that threatens its very survival. This rendering of the national life is accomplished not in an epic poem, characteristic of a heroic age, but in lyric poems that convey the diversity, the random joyousness, and the ridiculousness of contemporary American culture. "An age's poetry does not purify the dialect, or any of that nonsense which aesthetic moralists believe," Shapiro wrote in 1967, "but an age's poetry fixes the age for those who care to gaze upon it in another age." He had said something similar in discussing Auden's poems ten years earlier, emphasizing the relationship between the longevity of a work of art and the date of its birth. The goal, fixing the age "for those who care to gaze upon it," says a lot about Shapiro's vision of what and whom art is for, now and in the future. Although less influential among younger poets than several of his contemporaries and less frequently discussed by literary critics in his later years, Shapiro continues to enjoy that happy condition of being read for pleasure rather than merely being studied. Long known for his biting wit and occasional temper, he may simply have scared away commentators for whom poetry is only academic. With many of his books still in print decades after their initial publication, he has already survived several decades of sifting and selecting among American readers. For this reason, among others,

some readers are confident that his work will survive many more. One often regards him as he regarded Jarrell: "I rush to read you, whatever you print. That's news."

Selected Bibliography WORKS OF KARL SHAPIRO POETRY

Poems. Baltimore: Waverly Press, 1935. Five Young American Poets, 2nd series, with Paul Goodman, Jeanne McGahey, Clark Mills, and David Schubert. Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1941. The Place of Love. Malvern, Australia: Bradley Printers, 1942. Person, Place and Thing. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1942. V-Letter and Other Poems. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1944. Essay on Rime. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1945. Trial of a Poet and Other Poems. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1947. Poems 1940-1953. New York: Random House, 1953. Poems of a Jew. New York: Random House, 1958. The Bourgeois Poet. New York: Random House, 1964. Selected Poems. New York: Random House, 1968. White-Haired Lover. New York: Random House, 1968. Adult Bookstore. New York: Random House, 1976. Collected Poems 1940-1978. New York: Random House, 1978. NOVEL

Edsel. New York: Bernard Geis, 1971. CRITICISM English Prosody and Modern Poetry. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1947. A Bibliography of Modern Prosody. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1948.

KARL SHAPIRO / 723 Beyond Criticism. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1953. Start With the Sun: Studies in Cosmic Poetry, with James E. Miller, Jr., and Bernice Slote. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1960. In Defense of Ignorance. New York: Random House, 1960. A Prosody Handbook, with Robert Beum. New York: Harper and Row, 1965, To Abolish Children and Other Essays. Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1968. The Poetry Wreck: Selected Essays 1950-1970. New York: Random House, 1975. LIBRETTOS, ANTHOLOGIES, ARTICLES, PLAYS, AND TRANSLATIONS

"The Question of the Pound Award." Partisan Review, 16:512-22 (May 1949). Modern American and Modern British Poetry, revised and abridged edition by Karl Shapiro, Louis Untermeyer, and Richard Wilbur. New York: Harcourt, Brace, World, 1955. The Tenor. Opera by Hugo Weisgal, with libretto by Karl Shapiro and Ernst Lert. Bryn Mawr, Penn.: Merion Music, 1957. A Telescope for the Emperor (in Japanese). Play. Eibungaku Fukei, 1:9-35 (Winter 1958). American Poetry, edited by Karl Shapiro. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1960. Prose Keys to Modern Poetry, edited by Karl Shapiro. New York: Harper and Row, 1962. The Soldier's Tale. Music by Igor Stravinsky, with libretto by C. F. Ramuz, translated by Karl Shapiro. Chicago: University of Chicago Music Department, 1968.

BIBLIOGRAPHIES Lee Bartlett. Karl Shapiro: A Descriptive Bibliography, 1933-1977. Foreword by James Woodress and checklist of criticism and reviews by David Huwiler. New York: Garland Publishing, 1979. William White. Karl Shapiro: A Bibliography. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1960.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL STUDIES Aiken, Conrad. A Reviewer's ABC. New York: Meridian Books, 1958.

Berryman, John. "From the Middle and Senior Generations." American Scholar, 28:384-90 (Summer 1959). Bogan, Louise. A Poet's Alphabet: Reflections on the Literary Art and Vocation, edited by Robert Phelps and Ruth Limmer. New York: McGrawHill, 1970. Childress, William. "Karl Shapiro." Poetry Now, 2, no. 5:1-3 (September 1975). Ciardi, John, ed. Mid-Century American Poets. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1950. Coleman, Alice. "'Doors Leap Open.'" English Journal 53:631-33 (November 1964). Cowley, Malcolm. "A Lively and Deadly Wit." Poetry, 61:620-22 (February 1943). Daiches, David. "The Poetry of Karl Shapiro." Poetry, 66:266-73 (August 1945). Deutsch, Babette. Poetry in Our Time: A Critical Survey of Poetry in the English-speaking World 1900 to 1960, 2nd ed. rev. and enl. Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, 1963. Donoghue, Denis. "Life Sentence." New York Review of Books, 17:28-30 (December 2, 1971). Eckman, Frederick. "Karl Shapiro's Adam and Eve." University of Texas Studies in English, 35:1-10(1956). Engle, Paul, and Joseph Langland. Poet's Choice. New York: Dial Press, 1962. Fiedler, Leslie. Waiting for the End. New York: Stein and Day, 1964. Flint, F. Cudworth. "Poets on the Way from Tarawa to Aldebaron." New York Times Book Review, 49, September 3, 1944, pp. 4, 13. Fussell, Edwin. "Karl Shapiro: The Paradox of Prose and Poetry." Western Review, 15:225-44 (Spring 1954). Glassberg, Rose. "Karl Shapiro: Poet Versus Critic." Ph.D. dissertation, Temple University, Philadelphia, 1972. Gunn, Thorn. "Poetry as Written." Yale Review, 48:297-305 (December 1958). Jarrell, Randall. The Third Book of Criticism. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969. Kazin, Alfred. Contemporaries. Boston: Little, Brown, 1962. Keltner, Jeanie Ellen. "Karl Shapiro: The Bourgeois Poet." Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 1973. Kunitz, Stanley. "Shapiro, Karl Jay." In Twentieth Century Authors. First Supplement. New York: H. W. Wilson, 1955.

724 I AMERICAN Lieberman, Laurence. Unassigned Frequencies: American Poetry in Review 1964-77. Urbana, 111.: University of Illinois Press, 1977. Logan, John. "Broadside Attack on the Patriarchs of Modern Poetry." Commonweal, 73:438-40 (January 20, 1961). Malin, Irving. Jews and Americans. Carbondale, 111.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1965. Malkoff, Karl. "Karl Shapiro," Crowell's Handbook of Contemporary American Poetry. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1973. . "The Self in the Modern World: Karl Shapiro's Jewish Poems." In Contemporary American-Jewish Literature, edited by Irving Malin. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1973. Matthiessen, Francis O. The Responsibilities of the Critic: Essays and Reviews. New York: Oxford University Press, 1952. Mills, Ralph J., Jr. "Karl Shapiro." In Contemporary American Poetry. New York: Random House, 1965. Nemerov, Howard. Poetry and Fiction: Essays. New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers University Press, 1963. O'Connor, William Van. "Karl Shapiro: The Development of a Talent." College English, 10:71-77 (November 1948). Reid, Alfred S. "The Southern Exposure of Karl Shapiro." Southern Humanities Review, 6:35-44 (1972). Rich, Adrienne, "On Karl Shapiro's The Bourgeois Poet." In The Contemporary Poet as Artist and Critic, edited by Anthony Ostroff. Boston: Little, Brown, 1964. Rosenthal, Macha L. The Modern Poets: A Critical Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 1960. . The New Poets: American and British Poetry Since World War II. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967. Rubin, Louis D., Jr. "The Search for Lost Innocence: Karl Shapiro's The Bourgeois Poet." Hollins Critic, 1:1-16 (December 1964).

WRITERS

Schwartz, Delmore. "The Poet's Progress." Nation, 156:63-64 (January 9, 1943). "Shapiro, Karl (Jay)." In Contemporary Authors, edited by James M. Ethridge and Barbara Kopala. Vols. 1-4, 1st rev. Detroit: Gale Research, 1967. Pp. 854-55. "Shapiro, Karl Jay." In Contemporary Poets, 2nd ed., edited by James Vinson. London: St. James Press, 1975. "Shapiro, Karl (Jay)." In Current Biography: Who's News and Why, 1944, edited by Anna Rothe. New York: H. W. Wilson, 1945. Pp. 611-13. Slotkin, Richard. "The Contextual Symbol: Karl Shapiro's Image of The Jew.'" American Quarterly, 18:220-26 (Summer 1966). Solotaroff, Theodore. "The Irrational Karl Shapiro." Commentary, 30:445-48 (November 1960). Southworth, James G. "The Poetry of Karl Shapiro." English Journal, 51:159-66 (March 1962). Spender, Stephen. "The Power and the Hazard." Poetry, 71:314-18 (March 1948). Stauffer, Donald Barlow. A Short History of American Poetry. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1974. Stepanchev, Stephen. American Poetry Since 1945. New York: Harper and Row, 1965. True, Michael. "Alive with Necessary Poems." Commonweal, 105:725 (November 10, 1978). Waggoner, Hyatt H. American Poets from the Puritans to the Present. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1968. Williams, William Carlos. Selected Essays. New York: Random House, 1954.

FILMS Karl Shapiro's America. Produced and directed by Arthur Hoyle, 1976.

—MICHAEL TRUE

Carl Van Vechten 1880-1964

c

\RL VAN VECHTEN had three more or less chronologically sequential careers—as critic, novelist, and photographer—and a fourth one spanning the other three, as discoverer and promoter of the work of others. Throughout his eighty-four years, he contradicted any pejorative suggestion in that outworn epithet, "dilettante," and returned it to its initial definition: a lover of the arts, a connoisseur. If, in the view of some critics, he was a dabbler, he dabbled productively, and the full landscape of the arts and letters of the first half of this century owes some of its order to him. Few figures in American literature demonstrated his range or possessed his vision, and any serious attention to his full achievement will support this claim. In none of his careers was he an artist of the first order, but the collective performance is invaluable and demands assessment. As a music critic, he introduced the work of Igor Stravinsky and Erik Satie to America, and he was among the first to write seriously of the music dramas of Richard Strauss; he evaluated and analyzed jazz and ragtime far in advance of anyone else; he rightly predicted that serious composers would write musical scores designed specifically to accompany motion pictures; he may have originated the personality interview through his newspaper articles on opera luminaries; and he was the first serious writer to pay

attention to ballet and modern dance in this country. Furthermore, he wrote the first book in America about Spanish music, and the first extensive essays about Negro spirituals and blues, fostering in the process the careers of Paul Robeson, Ethel Waters, and others. As a literary critic, he gave undiscovered writers like Gertrude Stein, Arthur Machen, and Ronald Firbank their initial attention in America, and he was partly responsible for Herman Melville's resurrection during the 1920's; his efforts on behalf of black artists and writers never ceased; and the first books of poets as diverse as Wallace Stevens and Langston Hughes reached print because Van Vechten brought them to the attention of his own publisher, Alfred A. Knopf. As a novelist, Van Vechten documented what he called the "splendid drunken twenties" in a loosely connected trilogy about New York and in two adjacent books, one about Hollywood, the other about Harlem. One of his other novels was characterized by W. Somerset Maugham in a letter to Van Vechten that might apply to all seven of the novels: "Most writers think that a light book is a frivolous one, and do not realize that it requires really much more thought, knowledge and culture and experience than a book dealing with the elemental emotions." At fifty-two, Van Vechten gave up writing, 725

726 / AMERICAN WRITERS turned to photography, and spent his remaining thirty-two years in cataloging the celebrated artists and writers of the century, often in connection with collections he established. These include the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of Negro Arts and Letters at Yale University and the George Gershwin Memorial Collection of Music and Musical Literature at Fisk University. He established additional archives in theater and dance at the New York Public Library, the Museum of the City of New York, and the Museum of Modern Art. In drama, his subjects began with Eugene O'Neill and ended with Edward Albee; in opera, with Mary Garden and with Beverly Sills; in art, with Henri Matisse and with Alexander Calder; in fiction, with Thomas Mann and with William Faulkner; in poetry, with W. H. Auden and with Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones). Moreover, he photographed nearly every celebrated black person in America, from W. E. B. Du Bois to Sammy Davis, Jr., and from Leontyne Price to Ralph Bunche. The catalog encourages namedropping. Van Vechten's legacy includes nineteen published books; twenty-six books with introductions or prefaces, for several of which he acted as editor; fourteen years of newspaper criticism; dozens of book reviews and periodical essays in praise of his enthusiasms; and fifteen thousand photographs. As a critic, admittedly, he lacked the objective perceptions of many of his contemporaries, H. L. Mencken and Edmund Wilson, for example; and as a novelist he failed more often than he succeeded in finding a comfortable middle ground between farce and melodrama where his wit and erudition could coexist. His photography sometimes suggests the work of an Instamatic sycophant rather than that of a Leica amateur, despite many truly superb portraits. On the other hand, he rarely miscalculated in assessing talent in others. Taken as a whole, the quality of his various

careers is as enviable as the quantity; a few wrong notes cannot undermine the success of a performance. Born on June 17, 1880, the late, and youngest, child of indulgent parents of comfortable means, Van Vechten grew up in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. The late nineteenth-century midwestern bucolic scene has often served as a friendly background in fiction; the stifling atmosphere of an urban setting has led more often to bitter indictments. Van Vechten documented that era and its milieu in his third novel, The Tattooed Countess, but by the time he wrote it, in 1924, his adolescent scorn for the emotional as well as the geographical landscape had tempered, lacing his contempt with nostalgia and decorating his memory with a finely honed irony. The Tattooed Countess draws upon Van Vechten's own upbringing and influences, the wide range of theatrical experiences to which he had been exposed at an early age, and the reading and musical training that formulated much of his taste as a critic. Cedar Rapids served as a convenient stopover for one-night stands as traveling theater troupes moved west from Chicago. By the time he left home for college, Van Vechten had already seen many of the wellknown actors and singers of the period. Richard Mansfield and Otis Skinner played in Shakespeare, and the Emma Abbott Opera Company toured regularly; in his youth, Van Vechten had also seen not only Ellen Terry and Eddie Foy and Loie Fuller and Little Egypt, but also Sissieretta Jones. This remarkable soprano, billed as "the Black Patti" after the opera star Adelina Patti, sparked Van Vechten's initial enthusiasm for black entertainment and led to his later commitment to black arts and letters in America. The Tattooed Countess recounts more directly the lap suppers, tea parties, local musical recitals, and other social endeavors of fin de siecle ("fin de seekle" in the novel) America. The

CARL VAN VECHTEN / 727 slender plot seems almost incidental to the delineation of fashion, decor, and gossip against which it transpires. In 1897, Ella Nattatorrini (nee Poore), widow of an Italian count and subsequent mistress of many handsome young gigolos, returns to her hometown in Iowa, promptly falls in love with Gareth Johns, a local seventeen-year-old, and takes him back to Paris. Before the escape, Gareth breaks the heart of his repressed spinster schoolteacher, and the countess shocks the town by smoking cigarettes, wearing makeup, and flaunting her tattoo: "Que sais-je?" "But on the wrist, where it shows!" her sister cries in dismay. "It wouldn't have been so bad if it had been on the back of t h e . . . thigh, where it could be covered." The book is subtitled "A romantic novel with a happy ending," but with equal qualification it is an autobiography as well—at least to age seventeen: I want to know everything, everything ... and ... I'm going to. ... I want to get away from this town.... I want to visit the theatre and the opera and the art galleries. I want to meet people. I want to learn. Somewhere there must be people like me. . . . Both the town and its inhabitants come perilously close to caricature, but even a cursory examination of the Cedar Rapids newspapers of the period indicates Van Vechten's deadly accuracy. Gareth escapes; Van Vechten never entirely did, in spite of his resolute sophistication. A strong sense of the past, firmly grounded in nostalgia, never deserted him. Late Victorian bell jars, portieres, and other artifacts of the 1890's gave way in the 1920's to taffeta walls and lapis lazuli bathtubs: Van Vechten's preoccupation with setting and decoration was always significant in his novels and, later, in the background and composition of his photographs.

Gareth Johns, who turns up in other novels as a celebrated writer, is a fairly consistent portrait of Van Vechten as he may be pieced together from random autobiographical fragments. Despite his disdain for Cedar Rapids and its preoccupation with gossip and fashion, it supplied a not unfruitful landscape from which to develop; and much of his interest in decor, his clear eye for detail, and his involvement with music and theater came about because of what was available to him and not in contradiction to it. Van Vechten escaped as soon as he could, not in the arms of a middleaged demimondaine, but to the University of Chicago. He studied under William Vaughn Moody and Robert Morss Lovett but wrote nothing of value. His strongest influence came from his studies in Restoration and eighteenth-century drama rather than from these professional writers. When Van Vechten turned to writing novels during the 1920's, the comedy of manners gave him a frame of reference on which to draw, in a pattern extending forward from William Wycherley and William Congreve to Oscar Wilde and Ronald Firbank. Several Lady Bracknells populate the background in The Tattooed Countess; and however provincial it may be, the novel's school for scandal is just as malicious and amusing as Richard Brinsley Sheridan's. Speakeasies in other novels replace the chocolate houses of an earlier age, but husbands still visit their spouses to recuperate from casual affairs, and women, like Millimant, "may by degrees dwindle into a wife" but only on their own emancipated terms. At least five of Van Vechten's novels are clearly comedies of manners, brittle and artificial, and therefore serve as incisive examinations of the societies they reflect. Indeed, they may be as accurate evaluations as the endeavors of cynical novelists like Sinclair Lewis, serious ones like Theodore Dreiser, popular ones like

728 / AMERICAN WRITERS Joseph Hergesheimer, or young ones like F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Tattooed Countess is set twenty-five years before the 1920's began to roar, and as an escape-from-the-village novel its rebellion is still an offstage rumble. But the signs are unmistakable. The countess, after all, is "at that dangerous age just before decay sets in," a "sex-beset moron," as Van Vechten described her to a friend, seduced by a ruthless youth whose imagination transcends all of poor Ella Nattatorrini's experience. Gareth is simply indifferent, although a more than willing participant in a love affair that will get him out of town. He is emotionally asexual, not an unfamiliar attitude in Van Vechten's fiction, especially so for the characters whose points of view would seem to reflect his own. Gareth's "hour has come," and the countess has anticipated its arrival early in the novel when the town's provincial attitudes lead her to cry, "You'd better look out! You don't know what you're doing to the next generation. They won't stand it, no one with any brains would stand it! They'll revolt! They'll break loose!" Gareth escapes at seventeen; Van Vechten lingered on two years longer before leaving for the University of Chicago. In 1903, after graduating with an undistinguished scholastic record and a bachelor of philosophy degree, he became a reporter for William Randolph Hearst's Chicago American and, as "The Chaperone," detailed the "Gossip of the Chicago Smart Set." His material, however superficial, and his style, however sophomoric, give a fair indication of his later manner. If he was star struck by the glamour of the social queens of the period, he laced his precious prose with a healthy disdain: "One of my contemporaries has it that 'Mrs. Potter Palmer continues to be feted in London in spite of the warm weather.' This shows a woeful lack of knowledge about Mrs. Palmer, who is feted in cold weather and in warm

weather, in Summer, Winter, Autumn, and Spring; in Paris, Berlin, St. Petersburg, London, or Chicago. She is always being feted. It is her fate." In 1906, after poking fun in his column at some overdressed matrons as "clothes horses" at the annual horse show in Chicago, Van Vechten was taken off the society page. He interpreted that to mean that he had been "fired for lowering the tone of the Hearst newspapers." Six months later, he went to work as a reporter for the New York Times. When he published a long article about Richard Strauss's Salome and its impending Metropolitan Opera premiere, in Theodore Dreiser's Broadway Magazine, the Times appointed him assistant to Richard Aldrich, the music critic. For the next six years, Van Vechten's work was largely devoted to documenting the private lives and public performances of opera stars. Usually based on extensive interviews, his work quickly established him as a sympathetic listener. His friendship with Olive Fremstad, the soprano scheduled to sing Salome, led to a direct involvement with several other singers as well, notably Luisa Tetrazzini, whose memoirs Van Vechten ghostwrote for Cosmopolitan magazine, Feodor Chaliapin, Mary Garden, and dozens of others. He also covered the first appearances in America of Sergei Rachmaninoff, Camille Saint-Saens, and Gustav Mahler, and he wrote the first interviews with Pietro Mascagni, Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari, and Giacomo Puccini, since Richard Aldrich did not share his enthusiasm for contemporary music. Van Vechten broadened his experience through European opera and concerts, first on a trip in 1907 during which he married Anna Snyder, a high school friend. In 1908, he returned as Paris correspondent for the New York Times for a year. He accounted for the period, drawing on both trips, in Peter Whiffle: His Life

CARL VAN VECHTEN / 729 and Works, written in 1921 and published the following year. Few books reflect the excitement and enchantment of a young man's initial response to Paris so well, although long afterward Van Vechten said he had written Peter Whiffle when he was no longer enthusiastic about Paris. That attitude is remarkably well hidden, for his description of the city and its prewar atmosphere is superbly rendered (preferably in the version Van Vechten revised for an illustrated edition of the book in 1927). On his return to New York, Van Vechten instituted a series of Monday interviews for the Times that may be the foundation for the kinds of personality interviews that now appear in many weekly journals and newspapers. They consist largely of quotations of answers that reveal his ability to anticipate, rather than judge, the right questions for the right person. One remarkable feature of Van Vechten's method lay in his ability to capture the voice of the singer he was quoting. Interviews with Mary Garden, his most frequent subject, Geraldine Farrar, or Emmy Destinn, for example, reflect entirely different personalities, not so much on the basis of what they say as how they express themselves. All this activity occurred long before the days of cassette recorders, of course; moreover, Van Vechten took no shorthand. Interpreters, first published in 1920 and reissued in 1977, is a volume of essays growing out of these interviews, and it gives a permanent record of Van Vechten's success in recreating people on paper. During the years of his Monday interviews, Van Vechten covered three significant premieres as well, through a series of articles on each: Christoph Gluck's Armide, with Enrico Caruso and Fremstad, leading to a later, extended analysis of the opera; Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier, a natural assignment because of his familiarity with Strauss's earlier operas; and Puccini's La Fanciulla del West In each case,

he was able to analyze the scores for his readers—an opportunity that did not often come his way—because of his musical training. He had studied piano in Cedar Rapids, and in Chicago he gave infrequent public recitals; he also composed a good deal of music in Chicago. Van Vechten was not an expert performer, nor was he encouraged to continue composing, but his training was broad. Theodore Thomas and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra regularly played Cesar Franck, Strauss, Claude Debussy, Petr Ilich Tchaikovsky, Maurice Ravel, Gustave Charpentier, even the American composer Edward MacDowell (whose obituary Van Vechten later wrote for the New York Times), often in advance of performances in New York. Furthermore, Van Vechten was well acquainted with a vast number of operas, for in both Chicago and New York he had joined the casts onstage and "suped," donning a robe or carrying a spear as a member of the nonsinging chorus. Because of his early, warm association with Oscar Hammerstein and the Manhattan Opera Company, he was thoroughly familiar with scores of operas—Strauss's Elektra, for example—long before the premieres, so his analyses of the music and of the singers' interpretations were, then as at present, valuable source material for musicians as well as for opera buffs. By way of an art that utilized music, rather than through music itself, Van Vechten made his most important contribution in his career as a critic. In 1910, Richard Aldrich demurring again, Van Vechten began to review dance performances, first those of Isadora Duncan and shortly thereafter those of Anna Pavlova. By 1916, when Waslaw Nijinsky and the Diaghilev Ballets offered further subject matter for Van Vechten's dance writings, he had become, by default, America's first ballet critic. Time has proven his vision true. His collected dance writings, edited by Paul Padgette in 1975, give an

730 I AMERICAN WRITERS excellent account of his range and facility. Others have already pointed out his importance, including Arlene Croce, Lincoln Kirstein, and John Martin, the last of whom assessed Van Vechten's work as the product of "a remarkably sensitive and forward-looking mind" in reviews that were "the quick and accurate judgments of an artist who happened also to be an excellent newspaper man. ..." Van Vechten had no particular understanding of the technique of ballet, but that may have worked in his favor. He described what he saw in his own prose, unhampered by terminology. A critic interpreting a visual art must use words more familiar than the French names of ballet steps; he must see like a photographer and hear like a musician, but with only his own vocabulary as the medium. In the spell of Van Vechten's own excitement, the reader understands clearly what minor miracle occurred, in 1910, when Pavlova "twirled on her toes." Van Vechten later reworked some of these reviews into extended essays about the Russian ballet, Duncan, Nijinsky, and, still later, about Spanish and black dancing. They may well contain some of the most lyric writing in the whole field of criticism: The ennobling effect of all great and perfect art, after the primary emotion, seems to be to set our minds wandering in a thousand channels, to suggest new outlets.. .. No writer, no musician, no painter, can feel deep emotion before a work of art without expressing it in some way, although the expression may be a thousand leagues removed from the inspiration. And how few of us can view the art of Nijinsky without emotion! To the painter he gives a new sense of proportion, to the musician a new sense of rhythm, while to the writer he must perforce immediately suggest new words; better still, new meanings for old words. . . . We look enraptured, we go away enthralled, and perhaps

even unconsciously a new quality creeps into our own work. Fortunately, Van Vechten's work on the New York Times occurred at the time of America's balletic coming of age. He attended the performances not only of Pavlova and Duncan, but also of Ekaterina Gelzer, Maude Allan, Loie Fuller, and La Argentinita. He traced the whole development of Isadora Duncan's dancing, from her early experiments, which he had seen in Munich in 1907, to her interpretation of the Marseillaise at the outbreak of World War I, and credited her with having freed from tradition the later Russian ballet. His account of the first performance, in Paris, of Igor Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps is well known, a vivid example of his best reporting. As a working reviewer, Van Vechten was able to use the influence of his paper to encourage popular interest, and his ability to fix the dancer on paper with analogies from his other concerns gives his dance criticism its enduring vitality. In 1913, Van Vechten left the New York Times to become drama critic for the New York Press, writing nearly daily reports of theatrical performances and weekly editorials about current productions, including the premiere of George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion (first performed in America in German), many of William Shakespeare's plays, and the first performances of two perennial favorites, Victor Herbert's Naughty Marietta and Sweethearts. In writing about The Darktown Follies and Ridgely Torrence's Granny Maumee, he became the first writer of significance to give serious attention to black entertainments and to black subject matter, discovering in them the roots of what would become a major preoccupation as well as occupation in later years, and urging the formation of a "Negro Theatre" to which black artists and writers could contribute their talents.

CARL VAN VECHTEN / 731 During that same period, Van Vechten had become involved with Mabel Dodge (later Mabel Dodge Luhan) and her salon at 23 Fifth Avenue, where art and politics mingled reciprocally. A kind of mutual affection developed almost immediately, or "a mutual stimulation with none of the usual elements of sex," as Mabel Dodge described it in her 1936 memoir, Movers and Shakers. Van Vechten's wife had divorced him in 1912 and although "occasionally his Dutch warmth went out in warm friendships for other men," he and the Russian actress Fania Marinoff were lovers for two years before they married in 1914. It was "a strange conjunction," Mabel Dodge rightly observed, "rooted in eternity, odd and everlasting." They celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary shortly before his death in 1964. His friendship with Mabel Dodge continued through the excitement of the International Exhibition of Modern Art, popularly referred to as the Sixty-Ninth Regiment Armory Show, in 1913, which introduced postimpressionist painting to America; through two engaging visits, as one of her "jeunes gens assortis," at her Villa Curonia in Florence; through his acquaintance with George Moore in England, the futurists in Italy, and Gertrude Stein in France, all of whom strongly influenced his later work; and through his escape from Europe at the outbreak of World War I. Van Vechten included many of these events and associations in Peter Whiffle with enough accuracy to give that book a degree of historical significance, although this seemingly autobiographical work—the narrator's name is Carl Van Vechten—makes no mention of his first marriage, and Fania Marinoff is referred to only once in passing. The period between his marriages is simply ignored. Perhaps the deletions from Van Vechten's own life in Peter Whiffle are as significant as the inclusions. Peter Whiffle is an invented character in a

roman a clef, although Van Vechten later claimed he had not been aware he was writing a novel during the time of its composition. Van Vechten's first biographer, Edward Lueders, was probably the first to suggest that Peter Whiffle was his author's doppelganger, although, when the book first appeared in 1922, an unknown admirer wrote that she "could not help wondering politely how much of Peter was simply what Carl Van Vechten would be." Certainly, Peter speaks often enough in Van Vechten's voice, notably during a long conversation at the Florentine Villa Allegra of Edith Dale (obviously Mabel Dodge's Villa Curonia): "Good critics, I should like to believe," says Peter, "are always loose writers; they perpetually contradict themselves; their work is invariably palinodial. How, otherwise, can they strive for vision, and how can they inspire vision in the reader without striving for vision themselves? Good critics . . . should constantly contradict their own definitions. . . . Criticism should open channels of thought and not close them; it should stimulate the soul and not revolt it. And criticism can only be wholesome and sane and spiritually stimulating when it is contradictory. . . . It is better to turn the leaf and begin afresh on a new page. Artists are never consistent. . . . Any critic who is an artist will be equally inconsistent." Van Vechten gave up newspaper criticism in 1914. Briefly, he was identified with a group of writers he called the Post-Decadents, and for a time he was regularly in the company of Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Walter Arensberg, Allen and Louise Norton, and Donald Evans, many of whom were influenced in greater or lesser degrees by Gertrude Stein's Portrait of Mabel Dodge at the Villa Curonia and Tender Buttons. These writers seem to have been less than congenial, although Van Vechten was largely responsible for getting some of their work in print in Trend, a magazine he edited

732 I AMERICAN WRITERS for three months in the fall of 1914. The attempted movement died as these disparate writers went their various ways; Van Vechten's way led to a series of essays. They were published in annual volumes, the first in 1915, entitled Music After the Great War. The music would be Russian, Van Vechten contended, basing his belief almost exclusively on the memorable performances in Paris by the Diaghilev company. Every age had had to come to terms with its own innovators, he observed; Ludwig van Beethoven and Richard Wagner, like Strauss and Debussy, had suffered under the charge that they could not write melody. About Stravinsky, whose work occupied three of the seven essays in Music After the Great War, Van Vechten explained the necessity of discovering new methods of harmony, actually "a school of disharmony," not unlike an earlier observation he had made about Gertrude Stein, who had "deliberately forgotten how to write." Disposing of most other new music with the exception of that of Arnold Schonberg ("a stone in the architecture of music—and not an accidental decoration") in "Music for Museums?" he contended that repetition did not lead to discovery but to "fossilization." If Van Vechten's generalizations swept too neatly, the result was at least clean: "It is alone the critic's point of view, well-defined, which makes him comprehensible when he disdains to be more scientific in his criticism." To too many critics, discordant simply meant different, but to Van Vechten the word suggested the kind of freedom that music required to survive. In other pieces, his championing of Russian music took more specific direction. "The Secret of the Russian Ballet" lay in the choreographer's use of dancers, not as a corps but as choirs with independent responsibilities, coordinated with the polyphony of the music, synchronized in movement rather than serving only as decoration for the principals. Forty years later he came to be-

lieve that the method explained George Balanchine's unique success with the New York City Ballet, for it insisted that all dancers dance more or less continuously and in close collaboration with the music until the two were inseparable. In Russian ballet, one might, indeed, hear the music by watching the dancers in silence. Much of the success, Van Vechten admitted, lay in the music of Stravinsky and in the roots of serial music, achieved through "terseness rather than formal 'working out'" and "dissonance through inversion." Elsewhere in Music After the Great War, Van Vechten directed his attention to stage decoration, noting that a degree of Nijinsky's success, at least, might be explained through the decor of Leon Bakst; that the practical value in engaging artists for such work—Gordon Craig, for example—gave the "charm of suggestion" more appropriate to theatrical entertainments than cumbersome attempts at realism. Stage decoration, he insisted, was a "fine art," basing that essay, like others, on earlier newspaper editorials. Van Vechten's second book, "Pastiches et Pistaches," was never published in its original form, but the contents are of some interest because they demonstrate the faults that have led more than one critic to dismiss him as an inconsequential writer. Composed of thirteen "semifictional" essays in the style, Van Vechten believed, of George Moore, "Pastiches et Pistaches" eventually found its way into print in various fugitive magazines, and beginning in 1922 Van Vechten used the title and even some of the material for a series of six contributions to the Reviewer, the Richmond, Virginia, literary quarterly to which many celebrated writers contributed without pay in the spirit of literary camaraderie. Van Vechten's material is often embarrassingly precious. After several other publishers turned it down in 1916, Alfred A. Knopf suggested a second volume of musical

CARL VAN VECHTEN / 733 essays instead. Van Vechten responded with Music and Bad Manners, the first of seventeen books published by Knopf during their long and fruitful association. The title essay was an outgrowth of Van Vechten's Monday interviews for the New York Times, an engaging collection of incidents illustrating the rudeness of musicians, blending amusing anecdotes about flamboyant opera singers—Fremstad, for instance, who threw the roast on the floor at a preperformance dinner, sneering, "Pork before Parsifair—with musical history of some interest. The value of the work lies not in its gossip, but in essays such as "Music for the Movies," in which Van Vechten rightly predicted "that the time is not far distant when moving picture scores will take their places on the musicians' bookshelves. ..." The technique of the film would undermine conventional resolution in musical but not in thematic terms, he claimed, and the future might workably employ accompaniments by Stravinsky and Strauss: "The swift flash from scene to scene, the 'cut-back,' the necessary rapidity of the action, all are adapted to inspire the futurist composer to brilliant effort; a tickle of this and a smash of that, without 'working out' or development; illustration, comment, piquant or serious, that's what the new film music should be." Elsewhere in the collection he returned to stage decoration in an essay about Wagnerian productions and the dangers in "slavish adherence" to Bayreuth tradition, urging the unit sets of Adolphe Appia and Gordon Craig again, and of the Russians, Bakst and Aleksandr Benois, and the directorial appproaches of Max Reinhardt and Konstantin Stanislavski. Finally, in "The Bridge Burners," Van Vechten took to task all academic music critics, urging them to pay attention to the Russians and defending Stravinsky against Richard Aldrich's complaint that his music required explanation. Far in advance of electronic and computer music, Van

Vechten wrote: "Machinery has changed the world. We are living in a dynasty of dynamics. A certain number of futurists even give concerts of noise machines in which a definite attempt is made to imitate the sounds of automobiles, aeroplanes, etc." He asked the critics simply to listen: "Your ears will make progress in spite of you and I shouldn't wonder at all if five years more would make Schonberg and Stravinsky and Ornstein a trifle old fashioned. . . . The Austrian already has a little of the academy dust upon him." Van Vechten rarely wrote negatively or took individuals specifically to task, although here he attacked the entire musical hierarchy for conservatism. Nothing, he later observed, was gained by negative criticism; it was only an excuse for the critic to show off. Van Vechten showed off regularly, but the thrust was nearly always constructive and his erudition always practical, however intimidating it might be because of his own strong sense of prose, coupled with too arch a turn of phrase. His third book, Interpreters and Interpretations, was also made up of a series of essays based on his Monday interviews with opera stars and others, all intensely personal, giving the clearest idea of the artists' methods, appearances, and personalities short of photographs or recordings. The second half, "Interpretations," includes a strong paper about American music, advancing the belief that in ragtime lay the whole of the foundation for the future, Irving Berlin, Louis A. Hirsch, and Lewis F. Muir being the "true grandfathers of the Great American Composer in the year 2001." At that time, Van Vechten's exposure to black music had been limited to turn-of-thecentury entertainments in Chicago by Bert Williams and his partner George Walker, to an early appreciation of the popular singer Carita Day, and to the 1913 Darktown Follies produc-

734 I AMERICAN tion of J. Leubrie Hill's My Friend from Kentucky, about which he had written extensively for the New York Press. Scott Joplin had died (in 1917), apparently unknown to Van Vechten; there is no mention of him anywhere in Van Vechten's work, even during the 1920's when he devoted so much of his energy to promoting black music. Nobody seems to have paid much attention to Joplin at the time, and in Interprefers and Interpretations Van Vechten wrote: "Curiously enough the best ragtime has not been written by Negroes, although Under the Bamboo Tree and the extraordinary At the Ball are the work of black men." Van Vechten was unaware that ragtime had more or less evolved in the 1890's; instead, he likened it to other music through its syncopation: "Nearly the whole of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony is based on it. ... But ragtime syncopation is different, its melody and harmony being separately syncopated." Van Vechten was insecure here, as he realized, pointing out that the prelude to Parsifal required the conductor to beat 6/4 with one hand and 4/4 with the other, that in Spanish music the singer, dancer, and guitarist would "vie with one another to produce a complexity of rhythm," and that Le Sacre du Printemps was built on syncopation. It was not likely, Van Vechten admitted, that one would find much resemblance between "Everybody's Doin' It" and Parsifal; ragtime was a hybrid, dependent on black and Spanish rhythms, of which both serious and popular composers might make profitable use. In another essay, on "electrical picture concerts," Van Vechten urged the orchestras accompanying the movies to play good rather than inferior music, new music rather than old; in that way, young people in need of musical education could "pick up the routine of the concert and opera world in a ten weeks' course at the Rialto or the Strand." The suggestion is not

WRITERS

so frivolous as it might at first appear; the age of television has proven the influence of audiovisual media, for good or ill. In the concluding essay in Interpreters and Interpretations, Van Vechten divided musical criticism into two classes, the first represented by critics who try to render their feelings by quoting other writers, Beethoven's Seventh Symphony inspiring passages from Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Ode to a Skylark," and the second by critics who "bristle . . . with semitechnical conjurations, abjurations, and apostrophes," avoiding all metaphor in favor of a manner "formidable, exegetical, eupeptic, adynamic ... asthenic." Both types cause indifference, Van Vechten claimed. A unique alternative, on the other hand, might represent Van Vechten himself: "He is accurate without being pedantic; he paints the human side of art. He draws us nearer to compositions by talking about the composers. When he writes of a singer it is not as if he were describing a vocal machine emitting nearly perfect notes; he pictures a human being applying herself to her art; his account is vivid, often humorous. He enlivens us and he awakens our interest. This is not altogether a matter of style: it is a matter of feeling. The style is perhaps the man!" Above all else, Van Vechten concluded, "criticism should be an expression of personal feeling. Otherwise he [the critic] has no value." In The Music of Spain and The Merry-GoRound, published within six weeks of each other in 1918, Van Vechten offered further musical essays. The former was the first book on the subject in America, and it remains an important reference work. The latter broadened Van Vechten's perspective through various literary subjects: Edgar Saltus; George Moore; modern playwrights Avery Hopwood and Philip Moeller; and several views of contemporary theater. Two essays that looked back nostalgi-

CARL VAN VECHTEN / 735 cally to personal experience are of greater significance in his own development toward fiction. In each, Van Vechten's sexual attitudes are given some play, however elliptically. In "An Interrupted Conversation," ostensibly about George Moore, Van Vechten and a friend visit a Paris brothel. When the proprietor offers girls to both of them, Van Vechten cries out, "Je suis puceau!" as his excuse for demurring. In "Au Bal Musette," he and an unnamed Fania Marinoff visit cafes and bars reflecting the world of Simone Signoret in Casque d'Or, which he so much admired in later years, but his companion's attitude is unaccounted for and his own is curiously aloof from the menacing eroticism for which he accounts. The essays are both unsatisfactory because his intentions are only tentative, although he chose to preserve them in his later collection of autobiographical essays, Sacred and Profane Memories, which followed his novels. The use of personal incident begins in The Merry-Go-Round, pointing the way toward his fiction, and on the manuscript of The Music of Spain, completed about the same time, Van Vechten noted as a possible title "The Life and Works of Peter Whiffle." Peter Whiffle: His Life and Works had begun to take shape a year earlier. In 1917, Van Vechten wrote three drafts of a piece of fiction called "Undecided Sasha," a series of incidents loosely based on the behavior and personalities of the poet Donald Evans and the playwright Avery Hopwood (whose nickname was Sasha), both intimate friends. Two years later, in an essay called "La Tigresse," Peter Whiffle first turns up as a companion. At what point the character took shape in Van Vechten's mind is difficult to determine; he later said he conceived of "a sort of loose biographical form, a free fantasia in the manner of a Liszt Rhapsody," presumably after September 1920. It is more likely that the personage, the

doppelgSnger—named Peter Whiffle or not— had been with him from his youth. There was often a companion, named or unnamed, with him in his essays. As early as 1905, in writing his Chicago gossip columns, Van Vechten was frequently accompanied by "The Angel Child," an audacious and impertinent friend who expressed naughty opinions, like some ventriloquist's wise dummy. In Van Vechten's case, then and later, the dummy was invariably glamorous, invariably male. If the relationship in Peter Whiffle is never sexual, it is at least sexually ambivalent, and in the novels that follow Peter Whiffle the characters who seem to speak most often for Van Vechten—female as well as male—are always sexually aloof. Both Sasha and Peter derive from "The Angel Child," but after Peter Whiffle was completed, Van Vechten withdrew from direct participation entirely, hiding behind the disguises of various fictional characters. Peter Whiffle himself is only tentatively fictional, and Peter Whiffle: His Life and Works may not be a novel after all. Peter Whiffle first appears in print in In the Garret, Van Vechten's last collection of essays, except for two volumes of reprints during the 1920's. In the Garret is more personal than any of the earlier books, and only two or three of the papers are devoted exclusively to music. An autobiographical account of an encounter with a religious cult in the Bahamas, "The Holy Jumpers," is of interest, and an evocative portrait of Oscar Hammerstein, redoubtable impresario of opera and inventor of cigarmaking machines, is one of Van Vechten's most successful essays. His seminal essay on "The Negro Theatre" gives the collection its permanent value. "La Tigresse," in which Peter Whiffle is first named, employs a method of digression that never entirely disappeared from Van Vechten's work, introducing materials not

736 I AMERICAN WRITERS directly relevant, even in his novels. Lengthy, discursive passages of various interests simply interrupt the flow of the narrative, and lists of words, titles, catalogs, and examples become self-indulgences. Van Vechten inserted a two-page essay on book dummies—those mock-up volumes designed to reflect the eventual appearance of a binding—in Peter Whiffle merely because it amused him. At another point in this book, when Carl and Peter are having a rambling discussion about criticism and attendant arts, Edith Dale is made to say, at considerable length, the entire contents of a letter that Mabel Dodge had written to Van Vechten following publication of his book about cats, The Tiger in the House. Van Vechten compiled his huge treatise on cats in 1920, before turning to fiction. It remains without much dispute the best book ever written about cats, but "compiled" is the appropriate verb to describe Van Vechten's method. It demonstrates the essential approach in many of his essays: to collect dozens, even hundreds, of examples from his reading on a particular subject, and then to stitch them together in his own unique prose. Divided into a number of chapters, The Tiger in the House treats the history of cats in law, music, art, and poetry. It has a series of stories about literary figures who admired cats, a chapter on traits, a chapter on cathaters—all, as he wrote to Alfred Knopf, with the history "subtly inserted like castor oil in a sweet drink." Elsewhere, he compiled a book of thirteen cat stories, Lords of the Housetops, and wrote a brief biography of one of his own cats, Feathers, for the Random House Prose Quartos. Ironically, Feathers, his most often reprinted work, is uncharacteristically sentimental, free of all his customary mannerisms, and even moving. His work in nonfiction did not cease with The

Tiger in the House, but after completing it he turned his attention primarily to fiction. A critic's arteries began to harden after the age of forty, he half-seriously believed, and "prejudices were formed which precluded the possibility of the welcoming of novelty." As a critic, Van Vechten lacked the degree of academic insight that usually marks American critical writing. He was more European, which is to suggest more personal, in writing about matters of deep concern to him, and frequently more amusing. One inevitably feels that Van Vechten genuinely enjoyed what he wrote about. There is rarely any devotion to subjects not of importance to him, and never any anger. To a friend, he once wrote, "Do not dislike people, it is a waste of time, energy, and personality. Cultivate indifference. You cannot possibly consider disliking anyone you haven't loved. It is the reverse of the shield." When he took up Arthur Machen and Ronald Firbank, for quite different reasons, his response to them was genuine and his efforts in gaining popular audiences for them in America were tireless. His unpaid press-agentry for Gertrude Stein began in 1914, with an article in Trend, "How to Read Gertrude Stein," as cogent as anything written about her during her long career; and his devotion to her continued long after her death. He interested editors and publishers in her work; he encouraged her American lecture tour; he convinced Random House to become her exclusive American publisher; he edited a volume of her selected writings and another of her unpublished plays; acting as literary executor, in collaboration with Yale University, he edited eight posthumous volumes of her unpublished writings. Time has vindicated his constancy on her behalf, now that the academies have admitted her. Van Vechten was equally capable of bringing

CARL VAN VECHTEN / 737 some degree of such devotion to less controversial figures. Before the 1920's, for example, Herman Melville's Moby Dick was largely ignored, but at the outset of its revival Van Vechten wrote: Not only is Moby Dick the greatest book that has yet been written by an American but it is also one of the greatest books that has ever been written by anybody. It is epic in its grandeur, and its style is the style of masterpieces. . . . Of only one other book produced in America can anything like as much be said and that is Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn... . Moby Dick is an allegory of man's struggle with the supernal forces of the infinite, and his final complete routing, for man is always worsted in this inequal battle. . . . Moby Dick is certainly America's masterpiece and it will still be read in a century or so when all but the student will believe that Nathaniel Hawthorne is the name of a general in the Confederate Army. . . . These observations appeared in an essay dated August 1921, only in Yiddish translation, in Die Zeit. Two months later, Van Vechten wrote in praise of Melville's later novels as well, notably Pierre, which other reputable writers at the time had accused of "raving over moral ambiguities." Van Vechten read it with two earlier novels as "a kind of tragic triptych: Mardi is a tragedy of the intellect, Moby Dick a tragedy of the spirit, and Pierre a tragedy of the flesh; Mardi is a tragedy of heaven, Moby Dick a tragedy of hell, and Pierre a tragedy of the world we live in." The Confidence Man, dismissed by others as "middle-western sketches," Van Vechten contended was Ralph Waldo Emerson in a "great transcendental satire." These assertions appeared in an essay in Double Dealer in January 1922, a date Melville enthusiasts might well follow with an exclamation mark rather than a period.

The sexual ambiguity in Melville's novels may explain part of Van Vechten's attraction, for disparate writers in whom he took interest share that particular quality in their work. Ronald Firbank's perverse fiction, of which Van Vechten made a fairly obvious imitation in his novel The Blind Bow-Boy, was frequently though not always with justification linked to his own. Henry Blake Fuller is a more telling case in point. Nearly forgotten after a brief popularity during the 1890's—both Gareth Johns and Peter Whiffle admired his Chevalier of Pensieri-Vani extravagantly—Fuller wrote several books about Italy and about Chicago that met with increasing indifference from the public. He drifted into a decade of silence after 1919, when he published Bertram Cope's Year, a novel with homosexual characters. His friends seem to have been embarrassed by it, and his readers seem not to have understood it. Critics simply ignored it. As Van Vechten realized, Fuller had chosen a subject "generally taboo in English literature," nor did "the love that dare not speak its name" get named in 1922. Van Vechten called Bertram Cope's Year an "ironic comedy" and suggested that Thomas Mann's Death in Venice was "a tragic version of the same subject." Bertram Cope is an androgynous beau ideal whose catastrophic effect on a variety of people—most profoundly on a middle-aged bachelor—is emotional rather than physical, spun in Fuller's "studiedly restrained manner." Van Vechten could name no other American writer "who could have surveyed the ambiguous depths of the problem presented so thoroughly, and at the same time so discreetly." Sex is never a "problem" in Van Vechten's own novels, but it is never exploited either; they are much involved with sex, as Edward Lueders once suggested, but they are rarely sexy. Sex is always present but always curiously neutral.

738 I AMERICAN Once Van Vechten wrote to Mabel Dodge Luhan that his intention in fiction was to "awaken unconscious echoes of the past, to render to shadows their real importance." At midcareer, several successful novels behind him, he claimed that he never thought at all about sex: "It plays around here and there, but that's not what my books are about. They seem to me to be books about a man who is alone in the world and is very sad." Whether or not Van Vechten was entirely truthful with himself, he later claimed he had to be told that Peter Whiffle was a novel. Certainly, great chunks of it read like his essays, a thread of narrative tying together accounts of his various enthusiasms and interests. As mentioned earlier, Carl Van Vechten is the narrator of a biography of a friend named Peter Whiffle, whom he meets for the first time in Paris in May 1907—the occasion of Van Vechten's first trip abroad—and not again until the winter of 1912-1913 in New York. Together they travel back to Europe for a holiday at Edith Dale's Villa Allegra in Florence. They meet again in New York, just before the outbreak of the war in Europe, and for the last time in 1919, when Peter dies, or when Van Vechten kills him off. The hiatuses, and Van Vechten's own activities during them, are worth remarking. At the beginning of their association, Peter plans to write a book that from his avowed intentions will be studied and precious, but later he opts to write the great proletarian novel. He dies having written nothing, following the period during which Van Vechten's collections of essays were published. The use of the double is not unique. In Peter Whiffle, Carl and Peter serve as each other's alter ego, and fairly conventionally so. One senses, even within the contrivance of their friendship, that they are "something of a necessity" for each other, although Van Vechten

WRITERS calls Carl "something of a necessity" for Peter. As doppelganger, Peter fulfills a number of desires and pastimes, beginning with casual affairs in Paris, surpassing good looks, and a resolute freedom from convention. The autobiographical parallels work ironically: Van Vechten's first trip to Europe was to expand his musical knowledge and to marry his first wife; Carl's first trip is given over entirely to his involvement with Peter, whose flamboyance and literary intentions perplex him. Peter's background is Van Vechten's own, transplanted from Iowa to Ohio, and anyone at all familiar with The Tattooed Countess will have no trouble identifying it, despite the change in geography. By the time they meet again in New York, the "necessity" Carl has become as "the proper outlet for his artistic explosions" leads to Peter's "necessity" for Van Vechten as well: "Alas, both for my career as a private citizen and my career as a writer I find it impossible to limit myself," he had written two years before in "La Tigresse." "I cannot get along without knowing Peter Whiffle " At the early death Van Vechten arranges for him in the book, Peter hopes he has communicated something of "sympathy and enthusiasm" and wonders what he might have accomplished had he found a new "formula," a "white magic" to communicate what he has loved. Perhaps it was necessary to lay his "Peter Whiffle" to rest before Van Vechten could move on to the more conventional novels that followed. Interestingly, Peter never knows any of Carl's friends intimately, except Edith Dale who is Mabel Dodge; nor does he ever meet any of Carl's friends at all after 1914, when Van Vechten married Fania Marinoff and began writing books. In the preface to Peter Whiffle, Carl observes that Edith Dale's "interest, in a sense, was as special as my own. Her loss was not so personal, however, nor her grief so deep."

CARL VAN VECHTEN / 739 Elsewhere, Van Vechten wrote that Mabel Dodge had "done more to encourage a point of view, if it was only by way of argument, than any one else I have known," paying tribute to her "original and extraordinary" taste, and her influence on his own taste. If Carl was "present, indeed, at the bombing of more than one discarded theory" of Peter's, so was Mabel Dodge present as Van Vechten matured. When Carl first meets Peter, he exclaims, "You must tell me who you are." They have met through Martha Baker, a Chicago portrait painter who is having trouble getting past Carl's mask; when Peter arrives, Carl suddenly has "the right expression." Several days later, following a long conversation with two new acquaintances about inspiration and art and the difference between public and critical response to art, Peter arrives. "I am glad to see you," he cries to Carl, and he is "burning for adventures." Peter then engages in a series of outrageous and amusing stunts: "all gay, irresponsible and meaningless, perhaps, but gay," Carl calls them, but they sink Peter into misery and despair. The period of Van Vechten's own unhappy first marriage is referred to, in Peter's life, as "phantom years," and in reply to Carl's later query about them, he answers, "I lived." When they renew acquaintance for the last time, Peter has aged a great deal, having rid himself of "many excrescences and extraneities, the purely adscititious qualities, charming though they might be, which masked his personality. He had, indeed, discovered himself...." during the period that Van Vechten wrote six books of essays. Of the most recent, In the Garret, Peter says, "You are becoming freer.... You are loosening your tongue; your heart is beating faster. In time you may liberate those subconscious ideas which are entangled in your very being. It is only your conscious self that prevents you from becoming a really interesting

writer.... You must search the heart; the mind is negligible in literature as in all other forms of art.... That is the lesson . . . that the creative or critical artist can learn from the interpreter, the lesson of the uses of personality." Peter then simply languishes toward death, at the end feeling he has accomplished nothing but at the same time believing that his life has not been a failure. He has communicated something of his love for "ideas and objects and people"; next to creation, he believes, affection perhaps "is everything." Peter Whiffle is not, then, a novel; it is a necessary, personal exorcism. Van Vechten never again wrote anything so intriguing, but two of his subsequent novels are of considerable historical significance: Nigger Heaven for its role in the Harlem Renaissance, Parties as an epitaph for the decade of the 1920's. The others are of some interest as well. Three of the novels might be collected as a trilogy called The Splendid Drunken Twenties, a phrase Van Vechten used in describing a narrow world "easily encompassed without the aid of a bicycle; glamorous with literary teas, encounters with the great, in speakeasies as conspicuously popular as the coffeehouses of Addison's day, and bathtubs so full of synthetic gin that ablutions had to be performed extramural." Van Vechten came to fiction when he was past forty, with none of the usual angst that can riddle young novelists. Few writers more clearly indicate the intellectual climate—or lack of it—during the 1920's. It was a period when presumably sophisticated readers could proclaim Joseph Hergesheimer America's foremost novelist, and critics like Carl Van Doren and H. L. Mencken could proclaim James Branch Cabell a "great" writer, the same adjective they used in describing Melville and Joseph Conrad. The frequently repeated story about Van Vechten's torchlight parade through the streets

740 I AMERICAN WRITERS of Manhattan in honor of Elinor Wylie's arch novel, Jennifer Lorn, has proven apocryphal, but its evolution is symptomatic of a fashionable intelligentsia eager for "fine writing." Alfred Kazin dismissed this particular quartet because it represented the "ambitious baroque luxury of a period that had finally attained a self-conscious splendor of its own." Cabell, Hergesheimer, Van Vechten, and Wylie were, in Kazin's damning title for them, "The Exquisites." All four fell into a common age group, far removed from the flaming youth that gave rise to F. Scott Fitzgerald. Cabell had been a practicing novelist for twenty years with a small audience; Hergesheimer had been a painter, then a writer, for an equal length of time, quietly turning out historical fiction in relative obscurity; Wylie had been writing poetry since 1912. By the time these three came into their momentary fashion they were, like Van Vechten, seasoned writers in their forties, ten or fifteen years past the age Fitzgerald equated with senility— when, as he was wont to say, everything would be over. Beginning with The Blind Bow-Boy (1923), the cheerfully perverse novel Van Vechten said he wrote "with the greatest of ease" immediately after Peter Whiffle, to the series of vignettes in Firecrackers (1925), to the humorless drinking and carnality of Parties (1930), Van Vechten's trilogy documents the rise and fall in New York of the decade that took its sex and liquor rather more seriously than it pretended to. Despite his own involvement, he maintained a fairly steady objectivity, even though the air of self-parody in the novels is not sufficiently paramount to suggest that Van Vechten was always aware of the essential emptiness of his material. Still, his detachment is unusually clear; in part, perhaps, because of his earlier experience as a professional writer and because of

his age. Each of the novels in its own way reflects the rebellion of the 1920's against the mores of the previous generation, but Van Vechten's critical judgment does not always seem at ease with his inventiveness. Of Firecrackers, the second of these novels, Mencken wrote: "Human life is here depicted as gay, senseless, and orgiastic. Is this realism too? Is it, in fact, a more penetrating and accurate realism than that of the orthodox realists?" If, as Alfred Kazin contended, Van Vechten was "giggling steadily at his own pretensions," the juxtaposition of content and comment is sometimes jarring. Two years earlier, in The Blind Bow-Boy, Van Vechten's worldly Campaspe established an attitude for nearly all of the novels: "a book... should have the swiftness of melodrama, the lightness of farce, to be a real contribution to thought.... How could anything serious be hidden more successfully than in a book which pretended to be light and gay?" The Blind Bow-Boy tries hard to live up to Campaspe's description, but Van Vechten's analytical mind gets in the way of his Firbankian revelry, and the seams often show. The lengthy philosophical digressions that seem inevitably right in Peter Whiffle, the outre catalogs, obscure quotations, and other digressions emerge from the action less naturally. Readers must find themselves impatient to return to Van Vechten's cheerful bildungsroman: Harold Prewett, a conservative innocent fresh from college, is deposited by his father in the midst of a sophisticated, uninhibited court of the kind Van Vechten described in his essay about the novels of Edgar Saltus, in which "there is no poverty.... His creatures do not toil. Usually, they cut coupons off" bonds. Sometimes they write or paint, but for the most part they are free to devote themselves exclusively to the pursuit of emotional experience, eating, drinking,

CARL VAN VECHTEN / 741 reading, and travelling the while." The elder Prewett has advertised for a tutor, a "young man of good character but no moral sense." Paul Moody, an effete young man who looks like Rupert Brooke, takes on the job of educating Harold, who has reached the age of twentytwo with "a slender philosophy" that there are unknowns in the world and a sense of shame that his father must be in business. "We try to keep that sort of thing in the background," Van Vechten's worldly Campaspe declares. "We try not to be aware of it. It is the smart thing to do nothing." In addition to Paul, the cast of amiable characters designed to instruct Harold include Bunny Hugg, who writes "music of the future," compositions of two or three measures' length; a Coney Island snake charmer named Zimbule O'Grady; Ronald, Duke of Middlebottom, who dresses up like a sailor but carries an umbrella and has his stationery engraved with the pronouncement "A thing of beauty is a boy forever"; and the inscrutable Campaspe Lorillard, who wears geraniums at her waist, has "a good artificial colour," and talks just like Carl Van Vechten. Harold's father has exposed his son to this essentially friendly decadence to turn him against it. Harold embraces the life he was expected to renounce, shifts from his wife of two weeks to a brief but steamy affair with the snake charmer, and, after a momentary pause over Campaspe's impassive attractions, sails for Europe with the infamous Duke of Middlebottom. The determined frivolity of the plot does not mask Van Vechten's fascination with the waywardness of love, or with what masquerades for love. When Campaspe's husband, frustrated by her remoteness—indeed, she seems uninterested in any kind of sexual alliance—turns to the snake charmer for solace, Campaspe asks rhetorically, "Cupid, why will you always be so

romantic? Will you never believe me when I tell you that I don't care in the least what you do? I should never have married you if I had planned to worry about you." For Campaspe, "Indifference is the purer method." Early in the novel, musing over a book that has bored her, Campaspe reflects: "How is it possible to read an author who never laughed? For it was only behind laughter that true tragedy could lie concealed, only the ironic author who could awaken the deeper emotions. The tragedies of life . . . were either ridiculous or sordid. The only way to get the sense of this absurd, contradictory, and perverse existence into a book was to withdraw from the reality." Following this, Van Vechten supplied a catalog of books Campaspe knows that illustrate the point, reinforced with quotations to prove it. Campaspe goes through four cigarettes during this particular internal monologue, which is not the only one in the novel. Van Vechten tried hard to be Campaspe's "ironic author," but after Peter Whiffle, The Blind Bow-Boy is a disappointment because the elements will not fuse, perhaps because they are too disparate. At one extreme, Campaspe's reflections, for all their interest, simply hold up the novel's progress; at the other extreme, Van Vechten's perversity runs away with him and yearns for shock: "I don't know what reminds me," Paul says, "but have you heard about Bunny? He's had Zimbule's name tattooed on his person so cunningly that it can only be deciphered under certain conditions." After the quick laugh, readers might wonder, too, what reminded him. If The Blind Bow-Boy was trying to be light and gay, Van Vechten did not entirely succeed in disguising its urge to instruct, even though he had "sworn before a notary public," according to the dust jacket, that no ideas were concealed beneath the surface. The voices of critic and novelist merged fully,

742 I AMERICAN WRITERS however, in The Tattooed Countess, Van Vechten's third novel and his own favorite, written in 1924. As social criticism, it shows rather than tells; its milieu is accurate without exaggerating anything, although the temptation toward parody must have been strong; compared to the marionettes of The Blind Bow-Boy, its people are often painfully real. The thinly veiled selfportrait in Gareth Johns reflects Van Vechten's own frustrations as a boy of seventeen. Ella Nattatorrini, despite her lusting after teenagers and her tattoo, is so vulnerably human that she arouses compassion far more readily than the world-weary, inscrutable Campaspe ever can. Most tellingly, Gareth's frustrated, lonely schoolteacher, Lennie Colman, demands the heart's attention. Gareth and the countess will somehow escape the town, but Lennie is rooted there, not only by "the treadmill she would be forced to walk until the end of her days," teaching school to support her parents, but by her own repression. When she finally expresses her love for Gareth, it is too late; the countess' glamour has intervened, and Gareth can see Lennie Colman only as "a sentimental old maid." The lightness of Van Vechten's touch— what Sinclair Lewis called his "insouciant flippancy"—is cruelly successful in making the realism of this "romantic novel with a happy ending" all the more bitter. Van Vechten actually subtitled Firecrackers, which followed in 1925, "a realistic novel," although it returned in manner and for some of its characters to The Blind Bow-Boy. Into the lives of Campaspe Lorillard and Paul Moody, the latter now married to an elephantine, rich widow, comes Gunnar O'Grady. Like Billy Budd or Bertram Cope or perhaps Peter Whiffle, he is a beau ideal whose mysterious appeal even leads others to believe that at times he is crowned with a halo. Everyone loves him; no one understands him, although Paul, who is

first attracted, tries hard. Gunnar reads the Persian poets in search of the perception of truth, longs to have sparred in Hell's Kitchen, and tells Paul about "a hive of thrifty English bees" that, transported to the West Indies, stopped saving their honey because there were too many flowers, and debauched themselves by stinging the natives. "Everything," Gunnar contends, "is everybody's business, . . . only you've got to make it your business and not mere vulgar curiosity in someone else's." Paul is desperate for an explanation of this "philosophy of life or a mode of living that makes you happy, or healthy, or at least amuses you...." Van Vechten's casting of Gunnar's response points up where Firecrackers is leading: "What do you want me to do? O'Grady questioned him sadly, peering at the same time out into the steel-blue atmosphere, splashed with the warm glow of the street-lamps. A feeble voice in the distance could be heard calling, Sex Weekly! Sex Weekly!" Gunnar is apparently disinterested in sex—at least he thinks he is—but eventually he loses his halo, as it were, to Paul's mistress, a conniving flapper named Wintergreen Waterbury, proving himself a prey to the same human limitations as everyone else, except, of course, for Campaspe. Gunnar's adventures unite several of the vignettes in Firecrackers, a title Gareth Johns explains as representing "the incoherence of life," like "a packet of firecrackers," the first one firing the next, until they have all exploded. Contrarily, he observes, if the first is not fired, the packet is only "a collection of separate entities, ... but if you avoid the explosions you perdurably avoid intercourse." Johns, now a celebrated novelist, speaks for his own creator, extending earlier reflections of Campaspe's about fiction: "It doesn't seem to occur to the crowd that it is possible for an au-

CARL VAN VECHTEN / 743 thor to believe that life is largely without excuse, that if there is a God he conducts the show aimlessly, if not, indeed, maliciously, that men and women run around automatically seeking escapes from their troubles and outlets for their lusts. The crowd is still more incensed when an author who believes these things refuses to write about them seriously." Firecrackers contains some memorable set pieces, and they seem, after the fact, much a part of the same packet, although in a first reading the novel seems disjointed. What Gunnar represents, rather than Gunnar himself, draws them together. At an elaborate party, the wealthy host offers some of his guests an 1804 Napoleon brandy. At first it is pronounced "marvelous," "delicious," "exquise"; then the host is not certain: "There were two carafes on the shelf. One of them certainly contains 1804 brandy. The other holds some whiskey left over from our bootlegger's latest call." The guests begin to sample both, arguing which is brandy, which is whiskey. One person insists that the brandy is scotch; another, blindfolded for the test, contradicts his own judgment; while Paul executes a few steps of the Charleston, Campaspe pronounces the contents of both bottles identical. Finally, they decide to ask the bartenders: "The servants readily agreed to decide the matter, but when George handed them the carafes it was discovered that both were empty." Elsewhere, other fads of the 1920's are given free rein: Pinchon's Prophylactic Plan, a spoof on private schools for the children of wealthy parents, is predicated on "Deep breathing while standing on the head during the simultaneous consideration of the ultimate oneness of God with humankind, . . . and identity of the somersault with the freedom of the will " Van Vechten also supplied a problem child to inspire it. Her name is Consuelo, and she speaks French, wears orchids and sables, and has an

intimidating IQ and a crush on Gunnar O'Grady. Firecrackers takes a jaundiced view of big business on Wall Street as well, when Paul goes to work out of boredom and quickly acquires plenty of money and a mistress in "an adventure replete with thrills, false trails, happy discoveries, comic coincidences. There was so much, indeed, of sportsman's luck in everything that went on there that Wall Street was prone to impress him as a kind of glorified Monte Carlo...." At the other extreme in Firecrackers is an account of the death of Ella Nattatorrini, the tattooed countess. Aging, and abandoned by a final young lover, she has returned to New York and, knowing death is near, summons a priest to give her final absolution. Then, after recounting to Campaspe her long series of opportunistic gigolos—Gareth Johns included—and what she calls her wickedness, "weary lassitude" gives way to a "grisly leer," for she is convinced that in His mercy, God is going to send her "a young, beautiful priest!" The countess cries out for her teeth, her comb, her lipstick, and she urges Campaspe to strew the bed with the tuberoses and white violets that decorate her room. "Gruesome in this ghastly makeup, horrible in its wild expression of forlorn and ungratified lust," she awaits the holy father. But even in death she is "doomed to disappointment. The priest was an old man." The scene gains its strength in part because Campaspe later finds it "inextricably complicated and confused in her mind with the thought of her own great desire" for Gunnar. The attraction is mutual but both fear "the arduous rigors of sex." Gunnar would stamp it out; Campaspe now knows "no life is possible which excludes sex." At the beginning of the novel, Gunnar has started to tell Paul about the philosophy of Hip-

744 / AMERICAN pias, then changes his mind in favor of Darwin's profligate bees who feed on their own reserves; now he tells Campaspe of Hippias, who contended "that one should cultivate everything inside oneself." Rather than risking his free will through his "awful agony of love" for Campaspe—there is no doubt about her own selfpossession—Gunnar runs away again, as he has several times earlier in the novel. Campaspe observes that his halo seems to have begun to flicker uncertainly, and even in the face of love Campaspe's preoccupation with her own implacable superiority triumphs. Van Vechten's clever vignettes and extravagant wit only partially mask an essentially selfish philosophy. The brittle ironies of Firecrackers clearly anticipate those of Parties, his final novel, but two intervening fictional excursions—one to Harlem, one to Hollywood—interrupted the trilogy. Nigger Heaven concluded one phase of Van Vechten's involvement with black arts and letters. During the early 1920's, when he had become acquainted with several black writers and the coming Harlem Renaissance, he published a number of articles and essays on spirituals and the blues, on singers as disparate as Bessie Smith, Paul Robeson, and Ethel Waters, and on black subject matter in the theater and in fiction. He also arranged for his publisher to take on Langston Hughes's first book of poems and for Countee Cullen's poetry to be published in Vanity Fair, the popular and influential magazine in which many of his own essays had appeared. All of this material as well as his subsequent writings about black artists and many of his photographs of them were collected in 1979in "KeepA-InchiriAlong"demonstrating how far ahead of his times he really was. When his friend James Weldon Johnson, the black humanitarian and writer, urged Van Vechten to turn his experience and enthusiasm into fiction, Nigger Heaven resulted, part sociological tract, part aesthetic anthropology, and

WRITERS

certainly part delineation of Harlem's erotic underworld. The novel's success with most white critics and its failure with most black ones may stem from the fascinating accounts of a glamorous milieu for sensual pleasures, although only about a third of Nigger Heaven occurs in Harlem's cabarets and bedchambers. It may have been difficult to take Van Vechten seriously, for he was well known not only as a writer of light, popular novels, but also as a dilettante, flamboyant in his dress and behavior, and a frequent patron in black nightclubs. Many familiar Van Vechten types turn up in Nigger Heaven, and at a time when black intellectuals strove to gain respect for the race and its achievements, the novel was easy to misread, reinforcing stereotypes for white readers, embarrassing black ones. Actually, Van Vechten was more successful with those characters who reminded his readers of earlier extravagant personalities. The black social queen, Adora Boniface, for example; Lasca Sartoris, the steamy courtesan; and Randolph Pettijohn, the paunchy bolita king, like the elegant whores and Harlem dandies, are vastly more engaging than his protagonists. Van Vechten's pathetic librarian, Mary, and Byron, an angry boy who atones for his lack of talent by blaming the white world for his failure to write anything of value, hardly inspire much empathy. Most of the novel is devoted to their antiseptic love affair and to literary and sociological discussions among the black intelligentsia, reinforced by Van Vechten's familiar strings of quotations and catalogs. But some readers never got past the title to discover any of this, nor so far as the footnote that explained the race's fierce resentment of the word "nigger." Early in the novel, at the conclusion of a deliberately sleazy prologue, a young prostitute "rapturously" calls Harlem "Nigger Heaven": "I jes' nacherly think dis heah is Nigger

CARL VAN VECHTEN / 745 Heaven!" Later, the irony is underlined when Byron reacts to the epithet: "Nigger Heaven! ... That's what Harlem is. We sit in our places in the gallery of this New York theatre and watch the white world sitting down below in the good seats in the orchestra. Occasionally they turn their faces up towards us, their hard, cruel faces, to laugh or sneer, but they never beckon. It never seems to occur to them that Nigger Heaven is crowded, that there isn't another seat, that something has to be done.... Harlem! The Mecca of the New Negro! My God!" Van Vechten applauds without apology and criticizes without condemning nearly every facet of black Manhattan. All his recognizable mannerisms are present, although rather more resolutely under control. Too frequently, the writing lacks his usual elegance and becomes pedantic in its zeal to justify the black intellectual. Similarly, his familiar, mannered dialogue seems stilted. The reader's eye and ear may be at fault, of course, preoccupied with the characters as blacks rather than with blacks as the characters, especially when they speak about themselves. Often enough, though, the writing carries sufficient strength, and many of its disclosures must have come as revelations: "Try Harlem, will you? Dick's lip curled cynically. I guess you won't find that much easier. Howard here is a lawyer, but the race doesn't want coloured lawyers. If they're in trouble they go to white lawyers, and they go to white banks and white insurance companies. They shop on white One hundred and twenty-fifth Street. Most of 'em, he added fiercely, pray to a white God. You won't get much help from the race." Such passages led more than one black friend to suggest that Van Vechten's honest observa-

tions would be regarded as betraying "family secrets." Against this background, Mary and Byron struggle to survive; but he is too easily enraged by iniquitous discrimination, and she is not strong enough to give him stability. Byron succumbs to Lasca Sartoris, surely Van Vechten's most sublimely erotic figure, only to be jilted by her for Pettijohn. The melodramatic conclusion, in which Byron senselessly shoots Pettijohn, who has already been wounded by a Harlem pimp, is too theatrically tidy for Van Vechten's more serious intentions in Nigger Heaven. The novel is the most thorough piece of writing Van Vechten ever achieved, and its successive drafts show the extreme care he took in its preparation. If it is not his best novel or his most satisfying one, it is sufficiently significant for its influence. Novels by Claude McKay, Wallace Thurman, Rudolph Fisher, and Arna Bontemps derive from it in a variety of ways, and a larger, white audience was created for such novels by it. Since its publication, various critics have accused Nigger Heaven of capitalizing on the lurid aspects of Harlem in the 1920's and Van Vechten on the work of young black writers. Langston Hughes dismissed such charges as "sheer poppycock," contending that "bad Negro writers were bad long before Nigger Heaven appeared on the scene, and would have been bad anyway, had Mr. Van Vechten never been born." Bad before Nigger Heaven, as Hughes claimed in his autobiography, The Big Sea, they may have been, but publicized they were not. Certainly on occasion Van Vechten was attracted to black writing, performing, or painting simply because it was black and not because it was exceptional. The residual effect of such zeal may explain some negative attitudes toward Nigger Heaven. Nevertheless, the novel went through a dozen printings in America and in England, and it was

746 I AMERICAN translated into ten languages, doubtless partly because of its notoriety. Perhaps the speed with which Van Vechten had discovered and documented black life offended many people. Perhaps, too, an age that thrived on fads is itself open to suspicion. On the other hand, his passionate commitment to black arts and letters did not cease with the end of the Harlem Renaissance. Until his death, he continued to amass material for the truly remarkable James Weidon Johnson Memorial Collection of Negro Arts and Letters, which he founded at Yale University in 1941. In 1927, the year after the publication of Nigger Heaven, Van Vechten went to Hollywood out of curiosity over the peculiar film version of The Tattooed Countess, starring Pola Negri, and called A Woman of the World. It bore little resemblance to the novel, and Hollywood proved to bear little resemblance to reality, according to a quartet of amusing essays Van Vechten wrote for Vanity Fair. Not surprisingly, his next novel, called Spider Boy, was "a scenario for a moving picture" in which a celebrated writer, fleeing New York to avoid the publicity following a Broadway success, gets sidetracked on his way to Santa Fe by an exotic movie queen who spirits him off to Hollywood to write a film for her. Van Vechten's style had grown more assured over the decade, but in Spider Boy it came dangerously close to self-parody, and despite the calculated subject matter there were lamentable lapses into Mack Sennett slapstick. It is insufficient, for example, for Van Vechten's hero, Ambrose Deacon, to balance precariously on the mudguard of a milk truck in which he is trying to escape the clutches of Imperia Starling, the movie vamp. He is required to fall "flat on his belly in the street" Afterward. Similarly, he is slammed by a reflector in one of the studios and knocked to the floor. He upsets finger

WRITERS

bowls, stumbles over his own feet, and much of the time behaves like a silent screen comedian. The sight gags in one direction are too extravagant, and the satire in the other direction is not sharp enough to be incisive. Van Vechten does manage a clear enough picture of Hollywood, if actual films produced at that time are any gauge for measuring its excesses, and several thinly disguised film stars— Pola Negri, Aileen Pringle, Lois Moran, Emil Jannings—participate in the plot and lend a sense of authenticity. Van Vechten's determinedly precious stylistic tricks even seem at home in such a preposterous atmosphere. His big words, dislocated syntaxes, theatrical dialogue, and exaggerated lists are most comfortable in Hollywood. As an indiscreet actress confides: You see, . . . most of the houses out here are made of stucco. You can kick your foot right through them. You can kick your foot through everything else here too. Nothing is real, except the police dogs and the automobiles, and usually those aren't paid for. To be concrete, there are no stenographers at the studios: they're all secretaries. Eventually, Ambrose is persuaded to write a screenplay, not without assistance: "When you write a story for the pictures," advises the producer, "always keep in mind . . . the wages of sin is death, but if the motive is moral you can get in quite a bit o' necking." Indeed, someone else will write it for him and use his name: "Where do you think you are?" asks his ghostwriter. "This is Hollywood, HOLLYWOOD, not the Louvre. Of course I know your name isn't worth a damn in pictures Everybody out here knows it/The point is they want to think it is. Why else do you suppose you're hauling in the dough?" The film itself, origi-

CARL VAN VECHTEN / 747 nally called Spider Boy, about a bareback rider in love with a ceiling walker in a circus, turns out to be Lave and Danger, the same plot but about a Russian spy in drag. Ambrose marries a pretty starlet in a wedding staged like Paolo Veronese's The Marriage at Cana, embellished with a ceiling covered in orchids, a jazz band, fireworks, a parade of peacocks and baboons, turquoise fans and platinum cigarette cases as favors, and among other wedding gifts a solid gold tea service and an embossed silver refrigerator. If Hollywood is different from the rest of the world, the bride explains, blame it on the climate. Nigger Heaven may have had a negative effect on Van Vechten's customary light touch. As if to recover some of his former equilibrium, he indulged in Spider Boy in the kind of farce dead since The Blind Bow-Boy. Two years later, with Parties, his fiction achieved a new authority, combining all the best elements of his usual insouciance with the sober realities of Nigger Heaven. It is a strange and unsettling book, uniquely his own, and in the view of more than one critic his most significant contribution to American letters. In November 1929, two weeks after the stock market crash, Van Vechten began this final part of the trilogy. The Blind Bow-Boy and Firecrackers smiled at "the splendid drunken twenties," but Parties frowned at them; perhaps it wept. Reviewers labeled it "unsavory," "sniggering," "specious," and "cheap"; only George Dangerfield, writing in Bookman, recognized it as "a tragedy of manners," damned by the "same fate . . . which overtook an earlier comedy of manners," driven by its own excesses "from the unmoral to the moral." The manipulation of various plots, which Van Vechten had attempted in Firecrackers, worked more successfully in Parties. Its vignettes actually supply the only cohesiveness because they

echo each other in stultifying repetition. All the familiar devices are at hand: recognizable personalities, thinly disguised, like Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Muriel Draper, Louise HellstrOm, Max Ewing, Aileen Pringle, Van Vechten himself; speakeasies and drawing rooms, sleazy or glamorous; scabrous jokes; exaggerated satire. Readers sobered by the stock market crash did not welcome a morality play in which nearly all seven of the deadly sins wander aimlessly from drink to drink, avoiding pause for fear of what sobriety might bring. Van Vechten chose familiar types in which to masquerade them, but people who might have grown to imitate the Pauls and Campaspes and Lascas and Peters from earlier books resented discovering themselves. Simone Fly, for instance, resembles "a gay Death." Noma Ridge does not smoke or drink and therefore "atoned for the lack of these semi-precious vices by describing in an endless monotone the various forms of her amorous transports and the characteristics of the persons with whom she enjoyed them." Donald Bliss, New York's best-looking bootlegger, gives the ladies no cause to complain if they are "clever enough to remember the old proverb, Handsome is as handsome does." King Swan stows cigarette ashes in his trouser cuffs, which is "Swan's way." Midnight Blue, an actress parodying the popular Tallulah Bankhead, "takes off her drawers mentally when she talks" and "takes them off literally when she doesn't talk." An aged German GrSfin discovers all of the Old World pleasures denied her in her youth when she discovers the decadent New World of the speakeasy. David and Rilda Westlake share a "damned faithfulness" to each other by deliberately engaging in extramarital affairs. Roy Fern is a haunted, homosexual drug addict. Rosalie Keith gives the worst parties in town, to which everybody goes. Finally, Hamish Wilding, a descendant of

748 I AMERICAN WRITERS earlier Van Vechten protagonists, is the Carl Van Vechten of Peter Whiffle, but several years older, sadder, wiser. Apparent from the first chapter, he hovers on nearly every page; sardonic and sentimental, he touches the reader only subtly because of the more flamboyant David, whom he loves. Hamish is clearly Van Vechten's "man who is alone," trapped on a treadmill that can lead only to moral suicide. Not surprisingly, David, rather than Hamish, has been involved somehow with Roy Fern. He appears to be bisexual while Hamish, as might be anticipated, seems sexless or at least asexual. Late in the novel, during an encounter with a black seeress (based on an actual encounter of Van Vechten's at Fannie Hurst's apartment), Hamish learns what Van Vechten may have come to realize through his fiction: "You do not know yourself.... You don't know where you are, or who you are, or what you are, or what you want. You are not unhappy, you are miserable. ..." Hamish must "occasionally do something, out of the way, to behave in a manner that would be considered almost bad form by some of his friends." But the attempt is futile; he cannot break away. David is the active partner here, suffering Hamish's malady, but Hamish is infinitely more tragic, unable to function independently. Despite the perversions and immorality that both dull and sharpen every situation, the novel's conclusion leaves no doubt about Van Vechten's intentions. Most of the characters gather for a final party, at the Westlake apartment, with the stock market in the process of its crash. "It's just like the opening chorus of an opera-bouffe," Simone Fly remarks, "all of us here clinking glasses like villagers on the village green." The Grafin corrects her: "Somehow, it's more like the closing chorus.... I think we're all a little tired." The singing stops only with David's hopeless coda. He is not bitter about "the life of our times" and he accepts it "as the

best we can do.... We're here because we're here, and we should be extremely silly not to make the worst of it." Those who had been making the worst of it for ten years needed no reminders. On the surface of Parties, Van Vechten's world-weary buffoonery, glittering alcoholism, and cheerful carnality hold their usual court, but his omniscience holds everything in severe check. From the first-person narrator in Peter Whiffle, through central characters in the intervening novels, Van Vechten took measured steps toward Parties. Because Campaspe in The Blind Bow-Boy and Gareth—not surprisingly a novelist—in Firecrackers are actors, their function as commentators is necessarily constricted by the demands of plot. In Parties, although the responsibility is momentarily shifted from one character to another, none is ever given to extended speculation or internal monologue; the enigmatic narrator takes that responsibility. Some chapters even open with several pages of casual exposition— about the New York season, the weather, or the lindy hop, for example—that are among Van Vechten's happiest catalogs and small essays, but they did not save Parties from failure in 1930, despite their ballast. Parties made an almost wistful condemnation of all the pleasure seekers in all of Van Vechten's novels and of himself as well. The material had run out, of course, but it is also probable that Van Vechten lacked the temperament and the artistic equilibrium to develop much further. Perhaps the artificial comedy of any period is doomed immediately after its own time, just as the Jeremy Colliers are always prepared to grind out a Short View of Immorality and Profaneness after the fact. On the other hand, if William Wycherley and William Congreve are capable after more than two centuries of delineating their own times, so is Carl Van Vechten. In the descriptive dialogue that pref-

CARL VAN VECHTEN / 749 aces Parties, a character says of himself: "I have got a good deal out of life, perhaps more than was in it." It is an observation Van Vechten might have made of himself when the 1920's finally died. In the preface to Peter Whiffle, Van Vechten quotes a letter, supposedly written to Carl by Peter, explaining how difficult it is to recover moments of vision: "To recapture them I should have been compelled to invent a new style, a style capricious and vibratory as the moments themselves. In this, however, as you know, I have failed, while you have succeeded." Van Vechten's vanity seems pardonable now, although he could hardly have made the claim so securely at the outset of his career as a novelist. His special style, always elegant, always slightly arch, evolved over the decade, but its roots stretched back to the beginning of the century. It was as recognizably his own as the buckteeth that disfigured his otherwise handsome features. "Really, those teeth," Mabel Dodge had thought on first seeing them in 1913. "They seem to have a life of their own apart from the rest of him. They are always trying to get on to the outside of his face." It might be said of his style, which he described best himself, on the dust jacket for Firecrackers: Another of Carl Van Vechten's unimportant, light novels, disfigured by all of this author's customary mannerisms: choice of a meaningless title, rejection of quotation marks, adoption of obsolete or unfamiliar words, an obstinate penchant for cataloguing, and an apparent refusal to assume a reverent attitude towards the ideals of life which are generally held most precious. Five years later, Van Vechten had completed his last novel, and two years after that, in 1932, he concluded his career as a writer with a group of quasi-autobiographical essays that he revised

from earlier versions, in Sacred and Profane Memories. It blends all his best qualities and avoids much of the studied archness that frequently weakens the novels. Many of these essays deal with his own past, and his fine sense of nostalgia decorates them handsomely. In addition to a "long autobiographical rhapsody on American themes," recounting his boyhood in Iowa, Sacred and Profane Memories includes accounts of his escape from Europe at the outbreak of World War I, originally intended as part of Peter Whiffle and then deleted; his frequently reprinted cat biography, Feathers; and amusing essays on breakfasts, the courtship of nightingales, and George Moore; finally, "Notes for an Autobiography," beginning, "I cannot remember the time when I was not trying to write, often with no reasonable amount of skill," and later remembering a question posed to him by, the poet-anarchist John Reed: "Why don't you try to write the way you talk?" With the exception of a collection of his essays about his friends—Theodore Dreiser, Mencken, Cabell, Hergesheimer, Ellen Glasgow, Stein, and others—written for the Yale University Library Gazette (1948-1952) at the time he donated their books and letters to the Collection of American Literature at Yale, he wrote little more, although his prodigious correspondence, when published, will eventually illustrate yet another facet of his protean activity. He continued to write book reviews and introductions or prefaces to account for his various enthusiasms, but during the remaining thirtytwo years of his life he devoted most of his attention to photography and to the collections he established. Posthumous collections of his writings about the dance and about black arts and letters offer incontrovertible evidence of his significance in these two fields, and some readers will continue to find his essays and novels not only entertaining but enlightening.

750 / AMERICAN Dorothy Parker once complained that "Carl Van Vechten writes with his tongue in someone else's cheek." He took that as a compliment, and long afterward observed that she had delivered her epigram "probably not without envy."

Selected Bibliography WORKS OF CARL VAN VECHTEN Music After the Great War. New York: G. Schirmer, 1915. Music and Bad Manners. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1916. Interpreters and Interpretations, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1917. The Merry-Go-Round. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1918. The Music of Spain. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1918. In the Garret. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1919. Interpreters. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1920. The Tiger in the House. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1920. Peter Whiffle: His Life and Works. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1922; revised 1927. The Blind Bow-Boy. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1923. The Tattooed Countess. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1924. Red. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1925. Firecrackers. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1925. Excavations. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926. Nigger Heaven. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926. Spider Boy. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1928. Parties. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1930. Sacred and Profane Memories. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1932. Fragments from an unwritten autobiography. New Haveij: Yale University Library, 1955. The Dance Writings of Carl Van Vechten, edited by Paul Padgette. Brooklyn: Dance Horizons, 1975. Portraits, The Photography of Carl Van Vechten. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1978.

WRITERS'

"Keep A-lnchiri Along': Selected Writings of Carl Van Vechten About Black Arts and Letters, edited by Bruce Kellner. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979. WORKS EDITED BY CARL VAN VECHTEN

Lords of the Housetops: Thirteen Cat Tales. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1921. Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolai, My Musical Life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1923; revised 1942. Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein. New York: Random House, 1946. Stein, Gertrude, Last Operas and Plays. New York: Rinehart, 1949. The Yale Edition of the Unpublished Writings of Gertrude Stein. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1951-1958. Eight volumes published under the general editorship of Van Vechten, with an advisory committee of Donald Gallup, Donald Sutherland, and Thornton Wilder.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Cunningham, Scott. A Bibliography of the Writings of Carl Van Vechten. Philadelphia: The Centaur Bookshop, 1924. Jonas, Klaus W. Carl Van Vechten: A Bibliography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1955. Kellner, Bruce. A Bibliography of the Work of Carl Van Vechten. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL STUDIES Andrews, Clarence. "Le Comte de Cedar Rapids." The lowan, 19:12-14, 48-50 (March 1972). Beach, Joseph Warren. The Outlook for American Prose. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1926. Clark, Emily. Innocence Abroad. New York: Alfred A.Knopf, 1931. Coleman, Leon D. "Carl Van Vechten Presents the New Negro." Studies in the Literary Imagination, 7:85-104 (Fall 1974). Gloster, Hugh M. "The Van Vechten Vogue." Phylon: The Atlanta University Review of Race and Culture, 6:310-14 (Fourth Quarter, 1945).

CARL VAN VECHTEN / 751 Gordan, John D. "Carl Van Vechten: Notes for an Exhibition in Honor of his Seventy-Fifth Birthday." Bulletin of the New York Public Library, 59:331-66 (July 1955). Helbling, Mark. "Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance." Negro American Literature Forum, 6:39-47 (July 1976). Huggins, Nathan Irvin. Harlem Renaissance. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971. Hughes, Langston. The Big Sea. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1940. Jablonski, Edward. "Carlo Patriarch." James Lyon. "Evviva Carlo." American Record Guide, 26:776805 (June 1960). Kazin, Alfred. On Native Grounds. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1942. Kellner, Bruce. Carl Van Vechten and the Irreverent Decades. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1968. . "Alfred Kazin's Exquisites: An Excavation." Illinois Quarterly, 38:45-62 (Fall 1975). -. "Baby Woojums in Iowa." Books at Iowa, 26:3-18 (April 1977).

. Friends and Mentors: Richmond's Carl Van Vechten and Mark Lutz. Richmond, Va.: Boatwright Memorial Library, University of Richmond, 1980. Kirstein, Lincoln. "Carl Van Vechten, 1880-1964." Yale University Library Gazette, 39:157-62 (April 1965). Lueders, Edward. Carl Van Vechten and the Twenties. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1955. . Carl Van Vechten. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1965. Luhan, Mabel Dodge. Movers and Shakers. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1936. Schneider, John. "A World of Whiffles." Wagner Literary Magazine, 3:26-42 (Fall 1962). Schuyler, George. "The Van Vechten Revolution." Phylon, 11:362-68 (Fourth Quarter, 1950). Stein, Gertrude. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1933. —BRUCE KELLNER

Kurt Vonnegut 1922—

/

tury. Both his great-grandfathers, Clemens Vonnegut, Sr., and Peter Lieber, arrived in 1848, and both eventually found their way to Indianapolis, Indiana. Both the Liebers and the Vonneguts prospered and became prominent in a flourishing German-American society. Peter Lieber bought into a brewery in the 1860's, and with a combination of business acumen and political awareness made his fortune. By the end of the century he retired in style to Germany, leaving his son Albert to run the brewery and to indulge his rather extravagant tastes. Meanwhile, Clemens Vonnegut's son Bernard had become an architect, as did in turn his son Kurt. They were cultured men who revered the arts, especially poetry and music. Both families, then, became well established professionally and socially, and when, on November 22, 1913, the two were joined by the marriage of Kurt Vonnegut and Albert Lieber's daughter, Edith Sophia Lieber, it was a gala occasion. From this marriage came three children: Bernard, born in 1914; Alice, born in 1917; and Kurt, Jr., born on November 11, 1922. As Vonnegut notes in the reflections on his family in the introduction to Slapstick, the children were born into a large, prospering family that offered the support of many close relatives and the security of a preserved cultural heritage.

si Between Time and Timbuktu Kurt Vonnegut writes: "I have always rigged my stories so as to include myself, and I can't stop now. And I do this so slyly, as do most novelists, that the author can't be put on film." And he does indeed include himself in all his novels, perhaps not always "slyly," but often indirectly and sometimes in the most complex fashion, where the intrusion may not seem obvious. In his fiction—and one senses the same is true in his life—he is an interesting mixture of extrovert and retiring private person. Those contrary impulses add to the complexity, and to the interest, of Vonnegut's presentation of self in his writing, as he successively (and sometimes concurrently) explores and celebrates self, seeks cathartic release, declares personal doubt, deeply held belief, and passing whim, yet also hides and evades, shielding a private self behind irony, persona, and all the other tricks of narration. But whatever their variations in expression, the autobiographical elements in Vonnegut's writing remain so important a source of plot, character, theme, and even technique that they are worth exploring at some length before proceeding to their manifestations in the works themselves. Vonnegut's forebears came to the United States during the extremely heavy wave of German immigration of the mid-nineteenth cen753

754 I AMERICAN WRITERS The security of family and shared culture is something for which Vonnegut was later to yearn nostalgically, because it was already fading when he was born—perhaps even before. Less than a year after his parents' marriage came World War I and, in its wake, the antiGerman feelings that swept the United States. One consequence of this sentiment was the prohibition of courses in the German language in many schools. This wave of prejudice was to have marked economic and social consequences, although Vonnegut himself dwells most on the psychological damage to his family's self-esteem and its heritage of language and culture. The postwar anti-German sentiment gave added impetus and bite to a more universal process implicit in the period that Vonnegut also laments: the general erosion of distinctions of place and heritage in an increasingly mobile, homogenized America. Other blows were to follow. Prohibition ended the Lieber income from brewing and the Great Depression brought a halt to building and hence unemployment to Vonnegut's architect father. Looking back on those years, Vonnegut has said that the time of the Great Depression was not particularly hard for him. His family never went hungry, and although they moved to a new, somewhat smaller house (designed by his father) their life-style was not crimped. Yet there were consequences. His father was unemployed, Vonnegut says, for ten years, and during that period he apparently became more and more withdrawn and tentative in his manner. It was something Vonnegut seems never to have forgotten, and his fiction abounds with characters who fall into self-doubt when they lose productive social roles. The strains on Edith Vonnegut were considerable, too, and she perhaps felt the family's financial decline most acutely, having known the style of her flamboy-

ant father before the war. In an attempt to bring in money, Edith began writing stories for magazines, taking writing courses, studying the accepted styles, and sending her work off. None of her stories was published, but her attempt seems to have made an impression on her younger son. Again, Vonnegut speaks of the Great Depression as not imposing any real hardships on him, and the childhood memories he most often recalls are happy. In interviews he speaks of growing up with his brother and sister, noting particularly that Alice shared his sense of humor. There seems to have been a lot of laughter; he recollects how, as the youngest of the family, he found the surest way to get attention was to be funny. Family movies show him as a toddler always playing the clown. He also speaks, especially in the introduction to Slapstick, of enjoying the comedians of the day on radio and in film, and of the lasting impression made on him by Jack Benny and the team of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. A somewhat different effect of the Great Depression shows up in Vonnegut's education, and this, too, proved to be lasting. Whereas Bernard and Alice had governesses and then went to private schools, Kurt went to public schools, graduating from Shortridge High School. Shortridge was the first high school in America to have a daily newspaper, the Echo, and Vonnegut became one of its correspondents. The connection with news writing was to continue. When Vonnegut went to Cornell University, he wrote for the Cornell Sun, and in 1946 he worked as a police reporter for the Chicago City News Bureau. The circumstances that steered him to Shortridge and its daily paper, then, led Vonnegut into the practice of writing working prose regularly and for the critical eyes of his peers. His style as a fiction writer owes much to this apprenticeship.

KURT VONNEGUT / 755 After Shortridge, Vonnegut went to Cornell in 1941, majoring in biochemistry more because his scientifically minded family expected it of him, he says, than out of any great interest. In any case, Pearl Harbor was to resolve his various uncertainties about both his own future and the European war, and by March 1943 he was in the army. Vonnegut's enlistment came as a final blow to his mother, who had already become increasingly prone to depression. He sought a special leave to return home for Mother's Day the following year, but the night before he arrived she died of an overdose of sleeping pills. Vonnegut's most direct references to this occurrence come in Breakfast of Champions, but there are other indications of its impact in his recurrent references to the mental health of his characters and himself, and conceivably in his portrayals of women and of conjugal relationships. The trauma of even this loss seems to have been overshadowed by another episode that was to have a major influence on his later literary career. Like other writers he was to draw on experiences of army life, the war, and even of being taken prisoner, but the unique one was to come at Dresden. In December 1944, he was captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge and was subsequently held prisoner in Dresden. There, on the night of February 13, 1945, he was sheltered in an underground meat locker while the Allies unleashed one of the most relentless air raids of the war. A firestorm was created that essentially annihilated the historic half-timbered city and left some 35,000 people dead. After the raid, the prisoners emerged to the blasted landscape that Vonnegut describes so vividly in Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). One would expect this rapid and dramatic series of events to have a profound effect: the shock of battle, of being lost and taken prisoner;

the anxiety and privation of being a prisoner of war (his weight fell from 175 to 134 pounds); the Dresden raid and its aftermath, the horrors intensified when the prisoners were employed to dig through the rubble for corpses. The carnage of that raid must have had a multiple impact on Vonnegut. In the first place he experienced the receiving end of what his own side in the war could do. Was this the work of the "good guys"? Then again the victims were Germans like his own relations on both sides of the Atlantic. Perhaps such thoughts would not come until later, after the more general revulsion at the horror inflicted on the innocent had subsided. It would be natural, then, for Dresden to seem the quintessence of the absurd and the meaningless in life. It provides a symbol for all that human compassion and reason cry out against, all that they struggle against accepting. For Vonnegut, the experience seems to have been all these things and to have become the subject about which he felt compelled to write and yet with which he still found it hard to come to terms. Wars, fires, and final catastrophes of various kinds appear in his fiction as Vonnegut nudges closer to what he finally confronts in Slaughterhouse-Five. Later, Vonnegut sought to put the Dresden experience into perspective, claiming that it had less influence on his life than SlaughterhouseFive would suggest. Perhaps it was easier for him to make such a disclaimer after whatever therapeutic benefits accrued from writing about Dresden. Perhaps, too, characteristic modesty urged him to back away from something he might have felt was already being sensationalized. Nevertheless, the importance of the event to his fiction, if not to his life, seems undeniable, as apocryphal disasters, visions that embody the symbolism of Dresden, haunt novel after novel. Vonnegut's resistance to exaggerating the im-

756 I AMERICAN WRITERS portance of a "short-term event" does reinforce the point, though, that earlier, less dramatic experiences influence his fiction quite as significantly. By September 1945 Vonnegut had returned to civilian life. He married Jane Marie Cox on September 1, and enrolled as an anthropology student at the University of Chicago. As noted earlier, he worked as a police reporter for the Chicago City News Bureau during this period. He left Chicago without a degree when his M.A. thesis, "Fluctuations Between Good and Evil in Simple Tales," was rejected. By this time he had attended four colleges without earning a degree from any of them. In 1947 Vonnegut moved to Schenectady, New York, to work as a public relations writer for the General Electric Company. The job, the plant, the town, and the personnel that he encountered here were to provide much material for his fiction in later years. Initially, though, it provided well-paid employment that enabled him to draw on both his journalistic experience and the scientific emphasis of his education. These elements seem to have combined when he began writing fiction. Dresden was the subject he felt compelled to write about, but finding the form through which to approach it proved difficult. In the meantime Vonnegut began more modestly with short fiction and with the closer-tohome novel Player Piano, which drew heavily on his Schenectady environment. His first story, "Report on the Barnhouse Effect," was accepted by Collier's in 1949 (it appeared in February 1950). As even its title suggests, the story combines the reportorial and the scientific, as does much of the fiction that followed. The combination led to his being categorized as a science fiction writer, an appellation that he rues, but that most consistently manifests itself in his use of distanced, objectified narrative per-

spectives and his recognition of the social, cultural, and psychological implications of technological innovation. Years later Vonnegut spoke disparagingly of being a public relations man, enjoying the salary but not the frequent need to camouflage truth and mislead newspaper reporters with whom he readily identified. (In novels, public relations writing is presented as the artist's ultimate prostitution of his talent and as the philistine's vision of a writer's highest achievement.) Such reservations, along with his success in placing short stories, led to his deciding to leave General Electric to devote himself full time to writing. In 1951 Vonnegut moved to Cape Cod, where he lived for some twenty years. His stories, meantime, were being accepted by Collier's, Cosmopolitan, Esquire, Ladies' Home Journal, and the Saturday Evening Post. He later called them "work I sold in order to finance the writing of the novels." While they hardly deserve such easy dismissal, the short pieces have attracted little critical attention and remain less important artistically than the novels. But their place in Vonnegut's literary career should not be overlooked. They were his primary works through the 1950's; at as much as $2,700 a story, they provided most of his income; and they brought him into contact with figures in the publishing world, such as Collier's editor Knox Burger and literary agent Kenneth Littauer, who aided and influenced him. Littauer encouraged Vonnegut in the direction of telling stories, shaped narratives with a beginning, middle, and end. The beginning point for this kind of writing still suggests the earlier journalism; Vonnegut speaks of seeking out subjects for stories in the way that a cartoonist might—or, one must think, as a reporter might search out "the story." The range of subjects used for Vonnegut's

KURT VONNEGUT / 757 short stories is remarkably varied. Some deal with the fantastic and futuristic—an astronaut who enters the "Thanasphere," where the dead converse with him—others with the homespun—the unreachably beautiful young woman who turns out to be "plain folks"; yet some characteristics remain constant. They are thematically consistent in espousing traditional middle-class values, the kind of ethics that would "play in Peoria." The future and the fantastic invariably serve to vindicate these values, while the struggler's dreams of an exotic, charmed life always fade to reassert the solid worth of the mundane one. Perhaps inevitably, such stories are frequently tinged with sentimentality and nostalgia, traits that reappear in the novels, where they are rather more closely controlled. These traits continue to have an important function in Vonnegut's writing, contributing to the humor, to feeling, and to human warmth, frequently by countering the coldness of an alien world. They bring to the stories an implicit revelation of self and a declaration of theme that later become more explicit in the novels. Their quality may be uneven, but the stories are rich in variety as well as in entertainment. Vonnegut learns fiction writing in them, and they are unified in a way the longer narratives sometimes are not. Yet one reason the novels surpass them is that, as Vonnegut's career progresses, it becomes increasingly apparent that he flourishes in the looser, more comfortably digressive, and more easily intruded upon narration of the novel. Player Piano (1952), Vonnegut's first published novel, enjoyed at best a mixed success. Certainly it was not the money-maker the short stories were, although the original Scribner edition was followed by two others within two years: the Doubleday Science Fiction Book Club edition in 1953, and a Bantam paperback with the new title Utopia 14 in 1954. The latter

two editions brought mixed blessings. They increased sales, but they further categorized the author as a science fiction writer, something that threatened to exclude him forever from consideration as a mainstream American novelist. Vonnegut worked on another novel during this period, the unfinished Upstairs and Downstairs, but seven years passed before a second was published— The Sirens of Titan in 1959. The popular story of the book's genesis—that at a cocktail party Knox Burger asked Vonnegut why he didn't write another novel, and he responded that he was and proceeded extemporaneously to spin off the plot of Sirens—is scarcely more interesting than the actual background of it. By the mid-1950's Vonnegut was placing short stories frequently in the better-paying magazines. His career seemed to be developing successfully, although not in the medium of the novel. As the decade advanced, there were some ominous setbacks. The failure of Collier's in 1957 presaged a decline in the market for short fiction that the weekly family magazines had provided. There were sharp personal setbacks, too. In October 1957 Vonnegut's father died. For a year, he found it impossible to write. Then in 1958 the double tragedy that he discusses in the prologue to Slapstick—the almost simultaneous deaths of his sister Alice and her husband— occurred. Vonnegut adopted three of the orphaned sons, doubling the size of his family. He found himself faced with greater responsibilities at the very time when his market was declining. One response was to shift more attention to the science fiction magazines. Another was to return to the novel, this time writing specifically for the paperback market. Here he was aided by Knox Burger, who had also moved to paperback publishing. The Sirens of Titan and Mother Night (1962) were both written to pa-

755 / AMERICAN WRITERS perback contracts. Another paperback publication of this era, written like Mother Night to a Fawcett contract, was the short story collection Canary in a Cat House (1961). The twelve stories had all been published previously, and all but one were later reassembled in Welcome to the Monkey House (1969). Although these paperbacks helped ease Vonnegut's financial plight, they did little at the time to advance his career. They went unreviewed, and whatever notice they received served only to entrench his reputation as a science fiction writer. The Sirens of Titan was reissued as a hardcover in 1961, but went largely unnoticed, except by a small college underground. The next novel, Cat's Cradle (1963), although begun with the paperback market in mind, appeared first in hardcover. Samuel Stewart, who had been with the Western Printing Company when it printed The Sirens of Titan, was now with Holt, Rinehart and Winston and helped arrange for them to publish the new book. So Vonnegut was at last launching novels in hardcover again, but once more the book could be labeled science fiction. Sales were very small, as they were for the next book, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965), another Holt, Rinehart and Winston hardcover. Vonnegut's feelings about his dilemma as a writer who seemed doomed not to be taken seriously find their way into both these novels in the portraits of writers and the preoccupation with financial inequality. These two motifs come together most strikingly—and poignantly—in the figure of Kilgore Trout, the science fiction writer whose struggles in obscurity reflect, with comic distortion, those of the author. First encountered in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Trout reappears in later novels. Once again Vonnegut moved toward new activities. He began writing nonfiction, including book reviews, travel pieces, and other essays, a

number of which were subsequently collected in Wampeters, Foma, & Granfalloons (1974). These are of interest not only because they would appear in some respects to reach back toward Vonnegut's earlier journalism but because they relate to the evolution of his technique in fiction writing. On the one hand is the fact that Vonnegut's later fiction has tended to incorporate increasing amounts of reportage, of factual material drawn from contemporary events, into its fictional world. The other interesting aspect of these pieces is that though nonfictional they characterize their narrator (or author). In fact, a great deal of their interest lies in this revelation of authorial perspective and personality. It is at about this time that the autobiographical content of the novels becomes overt, to the point that Vonnegut introduces himself directly as a character in his next novel, SlaughterhouseFive. These two latter changes, the personal prefaces and the introduction of self as character, are coincident with another new direction that Vonnegut took. In 1965 he accepted a two-year appointment to the Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa. Vonnegut claims that one of the things he learned there was that it was not, as editors had told him, wrong to speak directly of himself in his fiction. He now wrote personal reminiscence into a preface for a hardcover reissue of Mother Night, and was to use that device for all his subsequent fiction. Vonnegut's stay at Iowa brought him into contact with teachers and students, some of whom were active fiction writers themselves, like novelists Verlin Cassill, Richard Yates, William Murray, and Vance Bourjaily. Even among the academic critics there were genuine admirers like Robert Scholes. Vonnegut seems to have hoped the appointment would lead to a permanent position, and certainly he could have used such financial security. No such appointment was forthcoming, but

KURT VONNEGUT / 759 a Guggenheim fellowship in 1967 made possible a return to Dresden, so that somehow out of the total experience of 1965-1968 the way was cleared at last for Vonnegut to get at his original motivating subject of Dresden. At the same time Dell and Avon reissued paperback editions of his novels. By the time Slaughterhouse-Five was released in 1969 Vonnegut was already rising rapidly in popularity. The sales of that novel, and the motion picture based on it, were to confirm his popularity and to assure the recognition that had eluded him for almost twenty years. In particular, that recognition came from the academic world, where it may well have originated in the students' ranks and worked its way up. Invitations and honors came rapidly to Vonnegut. He spoke at a symposium on the novel at Brown l/niversity in 1969, to the graduating class at Bennington in 1970, and, in the same year, was invited to teach creative writing at Harvard (and three years later at the City College of the City University of New York). He was the subject of many published interviews, was at last granted an M.A. in anthropology by the University of Chicago (when Cat's Cradle was accepted as his thesis), and received honorary degrees, including an L.H.D. from Indiana University in 1973. He also received the Literature Award for 1969 from the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and in 1975 served as vice-president of the association. Simultaneous with this public recognition came disruption in Vonnegut's personal and literary lives. His six children were old enough to leave home. The big Cape Cod house seemed emptied, and perhaps his melancholy at the scattering of the family cohered with a certain postnatal depression accompanying the completion of Slaughterhouse-Five, his "Dresden" book. He spoke of being "through with novels," with "spooks in a novel" rather than flesh-andblood characters: "It's plays from now on." And

in the prologue to Happy Birthday, Wanda June (1970) he tells of his effort to write himself a new family in a company of actors. The play (which ran for five months off-Broadway) represented a new direction for Vonnegut, although the script itself owed much to one written (but never published) fifteen years earlier under the title "Penelope." By 1971 Vonnegut had separated from his wife and moved to New York. The next year brought another personal trauma when his son Mark suffered a schizophrenic breakdown while living on a commune in British Columbia. In 1975 Mark published his account of this episode in The Eden Express. Vonnegut, meanwhile, seemed to be uncertain about what direction to steer his work. In 1972 a screenplay based on his fiction, Between Time and Timbuktu, was produced by National Educational Television and was published by Delacorte. Despite his earlier proclamation, a new novel, Breakfast of Champions, was published the following year. As if this title were not enough to signal the dawn of happier days, Vonnegut added the subtitle Goodbye Blue Monday. In part Vonnegut treated this seemingly whimsical book as a self-indulgen^ birthday present to himself, and in part he intended it as a clearing out of old ideas, obsessions, and characters. It did look like an attempt at a new start, but although it enjoyed better sales than any of his previous books it drew generally weak reviews. The next year Wampeters, Foma, & Granfalloons, a collection of speeches, reviews, essays, and interviews that the author categorizes as "opinions," was published. In it Vonnegut addresses the issue of finding himself very much in demand for public statements and of having his opinions on many issues, including politics, sought. Because he speaks so directly on many topical subjects in his fiction, and because of the nature and popularity of the novels, Vonnegut

760 I AMERICAN was finding himself increasingly in demand as a speaker and more and more perceived as a "guru" figure by the younger generations. It was a role in which he was not particularly comfortable, and he reduced his public appearances. Wampeters responds to this continuing interest in the man behind the novels, the author who speaks in the prologues or who intrudes with increasing frequency in the fiction. The presence of Wampeters between Breakfast of Champions and the next novel, Slapstick (1976), seems appropriate in that it underlines the character of these two novels. Wampeters contains both the autobiographical and what might be called the documentary, the kind of factual (or editorialized) reportage found in "Biafra: A People Betrayed" or "Brief Encounters on the Inland Waterway." The two novels, even more than Slaughterhouse-Five before them, emphasize these two elements of autobiography and documentary. In truth the earlier novels did so, too, but in a markedly different way. There the autobiographical elements were not explicit and the documentary element was, in effect, blended rather than spliced into the fiction. That is, in a novel like Player Piano the fiction, if not always rendered in the traditional terms of realism, has a strong factual base. The Ilium Works, for example, draw heavily on the Gerieral Electric plant in Schenectady in which Vonnegut had worked. In the later works much of the realism is distilled, as it were, into direct reportage. Spliced into the fictional narrative are elements from the surrounding factual context—the author saying "that was me" in the midst of the action of Slaughterhouse-Five or giving lectures on strip mining in West Virginia in Breakfast. At the same time, elements of the fictional are heightened and separated, rather than blended and given the marks of plausibility. The sevenfoot-six neanderthaloids, variable gravity, and

WRITERS

miniaturized Chinese of Slapstick, for example, are frankly declared fantasies presented as givens in a setting that is presented as plausible and that is equally studded with references to historical events and persons. In some respects the technique might be seen as related to what happens in SlaughterhouseFive when Billy Pilgrim watches a war movie on television. Because of his ability to ^travel in time, he is able to watch the film forward and backward. Forward it seems to be straight documentary coverage of an air raid. Backward the same factual material is transformed into a comic fantasy (of aircraft magically resurrecting shattered cities, sucking up metal fragments to be returned as ore to the earth) that nevertheless retains thematic relevance. Both the documentary and the fantastic in these novels often appear in the form of inclusions from other sources—an imaginary story by Kilgore Trout or an actual book on a factual subject. The documentary fantasy form is at its best in Slaughterhouse-Five and at its most misunderstood in Slapstick. The negative reviews of the latter, many of which might have been measuring it by the wrong standard, understandably disappointed Vonnegut and might have contributed to the delay in the publication of the next novel, Jailbird (1979). This book is technically akin to the previous three works but thematically closer to earlier novels, which it also resembles in tone and narrative style. By the end of the 1970's Vonnegut had been publishing for thirty years. In that time he had to his credit nine novels, two collections of short stories, a play, the teleplay Between Time and Timbuktu, the work gathered in Wampeters, Foma, & Granfalloons, and numerous other short stories, essays, reviews, introductions, and addresses. In October 1979 a highly effective musical adaptation of God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater opened at the Entermedia Theater in

KURT VONNEGUT / 761 New York, produced by Vonnegut's daughter Edith. Another work that almost claimed Vonnegut's authorship was Venus on the Half-Shell; the title is Vonnegut's, invented for a novel by Kilgore Trout. When a book with the same title and opening line appeared, claiming authorship by Kilgore Trout, many assumed that it was the work of Vonnegut. In fact it was written by Philip Jose Farmer. Perhaps this episode underscores the separation of Vonnegut from Kilgore Trout and proves that his career has indeed taken him beyond the kind of self-doubt and public failure as writer projected into that bumbling but lovable figure. When Vonnegut wrote Player Piano those fears were evident, although the figure of Kilgore Trout was not. Rather, any doubt about his resignation from General Electric to embark on a literary career is divided between the protagonist Paul Proteus and a writer who remains a minor character. The latter we know simply as "Ed," the husband of the brunette who has turned to prostitution rather than have him compromise his artistic integrity by writing a book that will sell. His first novel has been rejected for being twenty-seven pages too long, being too intellectual, and having an antimachine theme. Moreover, he has refused psychiatry: "... And my husband says somebody's just got to be maladjusted; that somebody's got to be uncomfortable enough to wonder where people are, where they're going, and why they're going there. That was the trouble with his book. It raised those questions, and was rejected...." Finally, Ed has refused to report to work as a public relations writer (which actually has a higher rating in his society than novelist). By a kind of comic inversion, this episode says a lot about Vonnegut's own situation. Ed writes "beautifully"; Vonnegut is soon to begin self-

deprecating jokes about his style. Ed writes antimachinery novels; Vonnegut is already beginning to encounter the disfavor of his society by writing about technology. The description of why Ed wants to remain "maladjusted" is not the inverse of Vonnegut's position; rather, he frequently seems to share that stance as the proper one from which to view society's upsidedown values. Obviously, Vonnegut had made some of the compromises that Ed is refusing: he had written public relations material, he was now aiming short stories at a commercial market, and at times things must have been precarious enough to raise questions about the integrity that led him from General Electric to full-time fiction writing. In Ed, then, we find the forerunner of Kilgore Trout, Philboyd Studge, and the other personae that Vonnegut uses to tease his own role. Yet it is in the figure of protagonist Paul Proteus that Vonnegut may actually reflect upon his own situation most searchingly. Proteus becomes more than the minimum character necessary to serve Vonnegut's theses, even in a book in which ideas clearly dominate over characterization. There is psychological realism to Paul's uncertainty about his career, about the sources and nature of the changes stirring in him. Doubts about the job mix with questions about his general values and even about his marriage, until he reflects "perhaps that suspicion was part of what he was beginning to think of as his sickness." Vonnegut makes it hard to separate the external choices facing Paul from the inner, psychological ones. Other characters, as well as Paul himself, suspect that he may be going through a personal reorientation, not to be taken seriously as a reevaluation of his social and professional environment. Doubts such as these possibly worked at some level, conscious or unconscious, in Vonnegut while the novel was being written. He had, after

762 / AMERICAN WRITERS all, made an abrupt change in life-style that proved economically risky and that in its own way involved turning away from his involvement in a technological society. Just as Paul Proteus does, perhaps he recoiled, half-seriously, half-laughingly, from becoming like Ed Finnerty and breaking with former friends and their world tb become the iconoclastic outsider. And perhaps he retains, like Paul and'Finnerty, an affection for what he has turned away from; as they remain emotionally tied to their machine-designing heydays, Vonnegut never abandons his interest in the scientific and the technological and in their impact on society. There is even the suggestion that Paul's social rebellion is in fact the expression of a wish to destroy his father. Father-son relationships develop into a continuing motif in Vonnegut's work, to be addressed in direct autobiographical terms in the later fiction and involving Vonnegut as both father and son. It might be noted here that just as Paul turns away from emulating his engineer-manager father, Vonnegut has departed from the scientific educations and professions of the males in his family. Paul Proteus—"protean" in fulfilling several roles in the novel—may be seen as expressing not only his creator's social criticism but, indirectly, his psychological searchings as well. This kind of autobiographical exploration is not as clear or direct as it becomes in later prefaces or novels; nor is it embodied in one or even two characterizations. As noted, both the writer Ed and Paul Proteus can be seen as having some autobiographical basis. And so, perhaps, may Ed Finnerty. His breezy irreverence reflects a side of Vonnegut expressed most fully twenty years later in Breakfast of Champions. Kilgore Trout, when he arrives, may take as much parentage from this unkempt Irish outsider as from the writer Ed. Not only character, but also the relationship of character, the tfery structure of the novels,

often serves the autobiographical bent. As Vonnegut acknowledged later, many of his stories involve a two-men-and-one-woman triangle, just as Player Piano does. In this first novel the triangle takes on a curious blurring. Paul and Anita are the two obvious corners; the third would appear to be Dr. Lawson Shepherd, since he is the boy who eventually gets the girl and who, as the exemplary^ company man, personifies the attitudes and aspirations Paul comes to reject. Finnerty, the opposite of Shepherd in everything from personal hygiene to ethics, represents Paul's other choice and so might also be viewed as, or as a part of, the third corner. And Paul's father might also be lurking somewhere in that corner, as the role others would have Paul emulate and whom Paul himself feels he does come to emulate in his moment of rebellion. Curiously, Anita is fascinated with the figure of Paul's father, identifying him with Paul in their earlier years but then coming to see him as resembling Shepherd when her faith in Paul wanes. So perhaps the third person remains, like the autobiographical personification, splintered in this book. The basis for the pattern, Vonnegut reminds us, is in his childhood family: older brother Bernard, the scientist; sister Alice; and himself the youngest. A related device that becomes characteristic of Vonnegut is the use of an outside observer as a commentator who provides a fresh, unconventional, but revealing perspective on society. Obviously, the device is not original with Vonnegut, but it is one in which he delights and that relates to the matter of his intruding himself into his novels. These observers do not necessarily reflect aspects of Vonnegut personally, but they frequently are spokesmen for his point of view. Often they come from another time or country or planet; invariably their viewpoint will be somewhat zany if not, at least in the eyes of conventional society, downright crazy. Some-

KURT VONNEGUT / 763 times several characters will share in this observer role to a degree, but one person, distinguishable in his detachment, will remain the principal. In Player Piano, Paul is one such observer whose sanity is viewed as suspect, particularly when his judgments are arrived at by detaching himself and nostalgically going back in time. Revealingly, those judgments are the ones obviously approved of within the moral framework of the book. Ed Finnerty, of course, is considered suspect as a drunk, and the collective evaluation of the other Ed, the writer, is summed up by the shah of Bratpuhr's saying that "some of the greatest prophets were crazy as bed bugs." Ironically, the shah is the outsider in this novel and the one viewed by the other characters as totally out of touch. Yet repeatedly Vonnegut uses him to deliver the devastating final assessment of various episodes illustrating technological Western life. The pattern is suggestive in a number of ways. When the sanity of Vonnegut's commentators on society is persistently made uncertain throughout his novels it may suggest that their judgments are being undercut. That, indeed, typifies Vonnegut's manner in his refusal to be dogmatic, his almost frustrating insistence on considering both sides, and his propensity to deflate any pretense comically. But the apparent craziness of all these commentators suggests that the social norm is insane, or that where craziness is bliss 'tis folly to be sane. At the same time, some of the observers— those we might call "partially detached," like Finnerty, Ed, and Proteus—are the very characters seen to embody autobiographical elements. Their craziness, therefore, comes to reflect on the author himself, partly by design as a zany eccentricity adopted as a narrative stance and partly, perhaps, showing a more serious concern about his own emotional stability. The latter emerges subsequently in prefatory

ruminations about depression, his mother's suicide, and schizophrenia. Ed in Player Piano, as already noted, maintains that the socially critical writer needs to be "maladjusted," and crazily perceptive artists appear regularly in the novels. Varying degrees of "maladjustment" or insanity are widespread in Vonnegut's worlds, again demonstrating the questionable sanity of the "normal" and the emotional cost of life in contemporary society. At this beginning point in his career as a novelist, Vonnegut is most concerned with the kind of structure and characterization that best serves his social criticism. Yet besides the broader social view, the need remains for the kind of personal expression that apparently finds an outlet in the ways considered here. Despite the autobiographical elements in the character of Paul Proteus, this is not the kind of first novel in which the whole focus is on a distinctly autobiographical protagonist. Such novels tend to be long on "life," on immediacy and verisimilitude, but short on generalization and conclusion on the larger patterns in life. Vonnegut searches for a form that will combine both dimensions. Such a form needs to be inclusive, and one of the comments most often made about Vonnegut's style is that it is tight in its clipped phrases and curt sentences but looser in its larger structure, sometimes rambling and digressing. The latter observation often ignores the thematic unity between parts, but points up Vonnegut's problems in organizing the kind of novel he needs. In Player Piano the organization seems ingenious if perhaps extravagant in execution. In order to encompass the full range of social commentary he desires, Vonnegut creates a series of parallel subplots, each of which needs human scale. That is, the consequences to the individual human being of the way each segment of society operates need to be registered on a particular person. Even a protagonist as protean as

764 I AMERICAN Paul cannot stretch to all these situations, so Vonnegut places a barometric figure in each subplot. All have names beginning with H: Haycox, Hacketts, Hagstrohm, and Halyard. The initials reflect the structure; Paul Proteus at the center of Player Piano, with the H plots clustered around. Some form of "clustering" will continue to fascinate Vonnegut until he is able to perfect it in Slaughterhouse-Five. In the first novel it seems useful if at times diversionary and slow; in the next novel, The Sirens of Titan, he achieves a remarkable fluency by turning to a purely linear structure in which the protagonist, like that of the traditional picaresque novel, enters a succession of different worlds in turn. One other significant pattern in the structuring of Player Piano deserves mention as a characteristic to be traced in the subsequent novels. It involves the classical mythic pattern of the hero's descent into a netherworld to be resurrected as a rejuvenated being and hailed (often ironically) as a messiah figure. Paul's journeys across the river to Homestead are viewed as a social descent but, more important, lead him into the underground Ghost Shirt Society and its subterranean hideout. He emerges with new purpose and identity, becoming at least the titular leader of the rebels. In the public role he fails; but privately, in coming to terms with himself and arriving at values that permit him self-respect despite society's rejection, he succeeds. Variations of the pattern recur, frequently having in common the fact that the protagonist, like William Shakespeare's King Lear, comes to feel through this progression more compassion for the "poor naked wretches" of society. Vonnegut's social consciousness is, naturally enough, discernibly shaped by autobiographical experience. Childhood memories of the Great Depression and particularly of seeing his father

WRITERS

unemployed and directionless contribute to the populating of his novels with unfortunates who ask, "What are people for?" Paul's attempt to answer that question leads him to social rebellion and steers Vonnegut's other messiahs to their own socially unconventional stances. For all that, there is plenty of orthodoxy to Player Piano. Even as an antiutopian novel it owes much to a widely popular forebear, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932). In their rejection of a Utopian future, the novel and its protagonist both show much nostalgia for earlier, simpler times. Some of that nostalgia is undercut as delusory and sentimental; but, as observed earlier, sentiment in Vonnegut is often the symptom of human feeling, and the nostalgia reveals his commitment to fundamentally middle-class, traditional values. Vonnegut's complaint, here and subsequently, is that middle-class Americans now so often betray those values. The importance of family is argued by the failure of the families portrayed—Paul and Anita, the Hagstrohms— and by the artificiality of the substitutions—the paternalism of Kroner and his wife's insistence that everyone call her "Mom." Friendship and loyalty are praised by their inversion in the cannibalistic treachery of "Dog-Eat-Dog" Lawson Shepherd, but above all in Paul's refusal to betray his friend Ed Finnerty. There is also approval of pride in work, of ingenuity and initiative and tinkering, and of the job as a source of fulfillment and identity. Above all, we see here the beginnings of Vonnegut's absorption with treating people who lack such fulfillment and identity with understanding and dignity, according them value as human beings. Vonnegut eschews the word "love"; certainly romantic or conjugal love repeatedly fails in his fiction, just as it does here with Paul and Anita. But in Paul's loyalty to Finnerty, or by bad example in Shepherd's ex-

KURT VONNEGUT / 765 ploitation of a colleague, Vonnegut's advocacy of compassionate respect, or of what he himself later calls "common human decency," emerges. Player Piano hardly sets the pattern for the rest of Vonnegut's novels, but it does contain many recurring threads of theme, characterization, imagery, and autobiographical content that deserve attention here. In certain respects it remains his most conventional novel, the least likely to surprise a reader new to Vonnegut. Its impact derives from its content, from the force of its message, not from its form, which seems to echo antiutopian novels and even other social criticism of the Babbitt or Main Street tradition of Sinclair Lewis. With its plot and subplots, its lively humor and moral earnestness, its nucleus in the growth of its protagonist but its range extended over its widely inclusive social commentary, Player Piano seems to be pulled in many directions, to remain somehow unsettled, unresolved in its attempt to encompass all that it might be. For all that, it rewards rereading with the pleasant realization that it is, after all, better than one had remembered. Despite its limitations, the characterization invites involvement, the social commentary seems refreshingly free of cynicism, and the very inclusivity of topic and mood provides substance. The Sirens of Titan is separated from Player Piano by seven years and by a considerable garnering of writing experiences, as recounted earlier. The second book makes its differences apparent at once. Its narration has a natural fluidity beyond that achieved in Player Piano, and at times it is positively lyrical, as in the description in chapter eight of the planet Mercury: The planet Mercury sings like a crystal goblet. It sings all the time. One side of Mercury faces the Sun. That side

has always faced the Sun. That side is a sea of white-hot dust. The other side faces the nothingness of space eternal. That side has always faced the nothingness of space eternal. That side is a forest of giant blue-white crystals, aching cold. It is the tension between the hot hemisphere of day-without-end and the cold hemisphere of night-without-end that makes Mercury sing. Mercury has no atmosphere, so the song it sings is for the sense of touch. The song is a slow one. Mercury will hold a single note in the song for as long as an Earthling millennium. There are those who think that the song was quick, wild, and brilliant once— excruciatingly various. Possibly so. The dialogue sounds noticeably more natural. The space opera, the form on which Vonnegut draws, is episodic and lends itself well to honest storytelling in its straightforward, linear unfolding of plot. The form gives Vonnegut's imagination free rein; its world seems less doggedly tied to reality than that in the antiutopian novel, and less didactic. In terms of the balancing elements observed in his later fiction, described as "documentary fantasy," this novel could be seen as essentially fantasy. (Player Piano is more nearly documentary in its presentation of social commentary.) The Sirens of Titan makes its comments metaphorically, in effect, through the use of the science fictional. Tralfamadorian robots in control, for instance, show a mechanistic universe. In consequence, Sirens seems the more profound novel, probing philosophically rather than sociologically, and to a greater psychological depth. Yet the fantastic world of Sirens instructs easily, like Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland— which it resembles from the time Malachi Constant steps through the tiny door in the wall of

766 I AMERICAN WRITERS the Rumfoord estate until the last smile of Winston Niles Rumfoord fades, like that of a Cheshire cat, into the chrono-synclastic infundibulum. Of the characteristic patterns noted in Player Piano, the one that most obviously undergoes development is the mythic descent and return, which is no longer implicit but is presented directly and literally. Malachi is tested on Mars and descends into the caves of Mercury, from which he returns as the messiah of the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent, only to be condemned and made its scapegoat. As an attempt to universalize Constant as prototypical individual in the contemporary, existential world, Sirens far exceeds the mythicizing of Paul Proteus. The father-son relationship also reemerges, with the protagonist again seen in both roles. Most of the emphasis falls on the relationship between Malachi and Chrono, who find it hard to show—or feel—any love for each other. The father's eventual effort to reach out toward a son who has gone off with the Titanic bluebirds is poignantly rendered—and Malachi fares better than most fathers do in Vonnegut's early novels. The autobiographically based triangle reappears with Rumfoord, Malachi, and Beatrice. Again the father seems to intrude into this relationship; Rumfoord is paternally manipulative of Malachi, and their "contest" over Beatrice partakes of the Oedipal. Once again the conjugal relationship appears blighted. In neither the Beatrice-Rumfoord nor the Beatrice-Constant "marriage" is there any romantic love, yet the kind of love that ultimately exists between Constant and Beatrice is quite moving. It grows painfully and slowly between two people who have suffered much and have little reason to trust or admire each other. But their love, again what Vonnegut might call "common human decency," affords the model of how human beings in an indifferent, incomprehensible, and frequently painful universe

can extend themselves in each other's service and treat each other with compassion, respect, and dignity. "You finally fell in love, I see," said Salo. "Only an Earthling year ago," said Constant. "It took us that long to realize that a purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved." The emotional restraint evident in the depiction of male-female relationships recedes considerably once again in the portrayal of male companionship. The relationship between Stony and Unk seems to go on where Finnerty-Proteus left off. Like the friendship between Salo and Rumfoord it involves betrayal. Even so, that kind of friendship, that kind of "human" bond—though obviously touched with irony because Salo is a robot—provides some of the warmest, most satisfying moments in this novel, the more so because they are poised against a background of cold space and inhuman actions. Even Salo's being a robot serves to distinguish and intensify the human qualities of the kind of behavior affirmed by the close of this novel. The use of an outside observer to comment on social behavior occurs again; that observer is, of course, Salo. Although a robot from a remote, futuristic society, Salo provides anything but a frigidly aloof perspective, even though he can see the shortcomings of much that he observes. By giving his observer "human" fallibility and emotions, Vonnegut removes the cynicism usually implicit in this technique—a welcome reversal in this novel where the people are all too often coldly cynical and unfeeling. Other motifs in this novel will reappear: Tralfamadorians, Rumfoords, a dog with a bark sounding like a brass gong, physical handicaps to create equality, and, above all, religion. Rumfoord's Church of God the Utterly Indifferent is the first of Vonnegut's experiments in

KURT VONNEGUT / 767 the creation of a religion that will reconcile people to an indifferent universe and lead them toward mutual help rather than performing as if for some ever-watching eye in the sky. The religion is lampooned, but Vonnegut has a serious point behind his satire, as he does when he amplifies the subject of religion in Cat's Cradle. "Gimcrack religion" is not the only appealing escape examined; regression into a personal or social past again offers itself. In Player Piano revulsion with the present and with what trends suggest of the future leads to nostalgia for the past—for Homesteaders the old-style Victorian bar, for example, and for Paul the Gottwald farm. In Sirens the caves of Mercury offer Boaz a secure womb in which he can tell himself "you a good boy" and go to sleep. In both novels, and subsequently, Vonnegut makes clear that he feels sympathy toward the impulse but also recognizes its dangers. Time becomes important in other ways in this novel. The structuring of narrative time is carefully done, using three tenses. First there is the assumed literal present, the time in which the reader lives—call it T. The narrator speaks from a future time— T2. He looks back on an intermediate time, a future closer to T than to 77—call it n. Understanding 71 explains how people came to think as they do in 77. In effect, then, the narrator is explaining 77 to T. The narrative technique relates to theme and to the perception of time as relative. Or, as the Tralfamadorians put it, "everything that ever was always will be, and everything that ever will be always was." This idea recurs in Slaughterhouse-Five, where it affects structure'more dramatically and where its implications of inevitability contribute, as here, to the portrayal of a universe in which compassionate human behavior is imperative. The first two novels both use omniscient third-person narrations. In the novels that fol-

low, Vonnegut moves closer to including himself directly with the introduction of first-person narration. He makes an interesting intermediate step in Sirens in his use of Rumfoord. As the one who knows what is going on and who informs the other characters, he becomes a secondary narrator within the book (and, at times, in his manipulations of character and situation, almost a surrogate author figure). And, as the voice of its more pessimistic and cynical elements, he preserves the neutrality of the basic narrative voice and hence the tone of the novel. In Mother Night, something of this technique is repeated through the ambiguity of the firstperson narrator, the Howard Campbell that was and the one that is, the playwright and the spy, or the two sides of a schizophrenic personality. Cat's Cradle extends the technique through Bokonon, who as character continues Rumfoord's role as inventor of religions, prophet, historian, and social manipulator, and who as secondary narrator assumes an even bigger role as author of the books that are at the heart of the novel and its philosophy. Bokonon voices some of the novel's most important yet most cynical ideas, allowing both narrator Newt Hoenikker and author Vonnegut to remain at some distance from that cynicism and preserve the book's comic tone. In the next three novels Vonnegut seems to settle into a style of his own, somewhere between the antiutopian mold of Player Piano and the science-fiction cast of The Sirens of Titan. For all their differences in tone and setting, Mother Night (1962), Cat's Cradle (1963), and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965) share much in content and form. Where Player Piano with its multiple plots tries to examine the plight of contemporary human beings in numerous social settings, The Sirens of Titan backs away to a cosmic view of the human being's existential situation. Mother Night returns to close-up reality, por-

768 I AMERICAN traying firsthand (and first person) the dilemma of a single human being caught up in a historical situation illustrative of the general condition rendered metaphorically in Sirens. Ultimately, the protagonist Howard Campbell cannot survive in that world. Cat's Cradle, shifting to a much brighter tone, looks at what it might take to keep going. In their attempts to survive, however, Campbell and Bokonon both compromise their morality. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater tests moral survival. It asks whether, even if "love" is too much to ask for, the more modest "common human decency" is possible. In Sirens, Boaz wants to "do good without doing any harm" while unwittingly killing thousands of harmoniums, and the road to the Ilium Works seems to have been paved with similar good intentions. These three books (Mother Night, Cat's Cradle, and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater) examine the intentions and accomplishments of a series of "saints" and "villains." Classifying these characters as either saints or villains proves difficult, above all to the characters themselves, and often seems to depend on where the viewer is standing. (There is the story of Vonnegut's agreeing with his father that there are no villains in his fiction.) Campbell, Bokonon, and a number of lesser characters stand convinced of the imperative of evading reality (if indeed that can be registered accurately) through some kind of make-believe. Bokorton's religion rests on "foma," harmless lies that make life more tolerable and that afford a basis for community and caring. Most of Vonnegut's "solutions" involve some degree of deception, from tacit endorsements of Christianity (in which he does not believe) to the artificially extended families proposed in Slapstick. The problem rests in the distinction between harmless lies and cruel hoaxes. Is Bokonon benefactor or tyrant? With cheerful cynicism he leads his flock to suicide. Where are

WRITERS

the dividing lines between him and a fanatical religious cult leader or even a national tyrant whose comforting lies may lead their communities to self-destruction? Equally fundamental is the question of how harmless such lies can remain to the self. As Vonnegut moralizes in his introduction, "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be." Campbell argues that he survived Nazi Germany through "that simple and widespread boon to modern mankind—schizophrenia." And certainly schizophrenia (or other mental illness) pervades these novels, often, as with Sylvia Rosewater's "samaratrophia," as the ultimate self-deception of a mind no longer able to face the terrors of contemporary life. The theme of inverted values continues, though, so that the society's judgments of what is sane or moral in the protagonist often reflect back on itself. Nowhere is this truer than with the eccentrically altruistic Eliot Rosewater. Inevitably the theme of harmless deceptions also leads to writers and other artists. The topic—the artist as con artist, as confidence man, as magus—is not new. When Rosewater becomes patron to Arthur Garvey Ulm he tells him to write "the truth." Ulm eventually overcomes his writer's block only to write pornography. The "Editor" in Mother Night tells us that Campbell's being a writer meant that the demands of art alone were enough to make him lie, and to lie without seeing any harm in it. To say that he was a playwright is to offer an even harsher warning to the reader, for no one is a better liar than a man who has warped lives and passions onto something as grotesquely artificial as a stage. In Cat's Cradle not just The Books of Bokonon but other literature is several times presented as "foma." Even poor Kilgore Trout is seen as a kind of harmless liar, at least by Sen-

KURT VONNEGUT / 769 ator Lister Rosewater, who hires him as a public relations man to rationalize Eliot's behavior. Yet writers are also viewed positively as these books progress. In Cat's Cradle they provide healing laughter: "I just can't help thinking what a real shaking up it would give people if, all of a sudden, there were no new books, new plays, new histories, new poems . . . " [says Philip Castle]. "And how proud would you be when people started dying like flies?" I demanded. "They'd die more like mad dogs, I think— snarling and snapping at each other and biting their own tails." I turned to Castle the elder. "Sir, how does a man die when he's deprived of the consolations of literature?" "In one of two ways," he said, "petrescence of the heart or atrophy of the nervous system." "Neither one very pleasant, I expect," I suggested. "No," said Castle the elder. "For the love of God, both of you, please keep writing!" In God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, science fiction writers are Eliot Rosewater's visionaries, who alone understand not just the future but, more important, the present. The increased interest in writers in these books coincides with that period in Vonnegut's career when he niight understandably have been preoccupied with his own role as a writer. His short-story market had begun to fail, and he turned to writing paperbacks. He may have experienced some doubts about the direction of his career and indeed felt himself faced again with the kind of ethical self-examination most writers confront, given the commercial necessity of compromise. Vonnegut also probes the artistic morality of the author. In one filmed interview he laughed at the notion of some "damn fool" moved to tears over a fiction on a sheet of paper. But al-

though he sees the funny side of this situation— perhaps because he does—he obviously feels the moral responsibility that must go with this extraordinary power. Later, when more famous, he showed some discomfort at having such power over his young followers. Equally, Vonnegut reveals a strong interest in the author's relationship to the created characters and the moral implications of that relationship. That theme initially receives attention through surrogate author figures. There is Rumfoord, who manipulates characters to his own plots; then Campbell, who makes characters of the real people he meets, including, finally, not just his beloved Helga but himself; and Bokonon, though to a lesser degree. All, like Boaz in Sirens, have good intentions but end up hurting people. In Breakfast of Champions Vonnegut proposes why people mistreat each other: As I approached my fiftieth birthday, I had become more and more enraged and mystified by the idiot decisions made by my countrymen. And then I had come suddenly to pity them, for I understood how innocent and natural it was for them to behave so abominably, and with such abominable results: They were doing their best to live like people invented in story books. This was the reason Americans shot each other so often: It was a convenient literary device for ending short stories and books. In all of this, Vonnegut explores not just his personal role as artist, but the role of all artists—the role of all of us as artists shaping our own and others' lives—and, perhaps, by projection, the role of the ultimate artist, God. For Vonnegut, an atheist, the last stage remains metaphor, another avenue to the "What are people for?" motif, a means of describing a world in which if there were a God he dould surely be only a whimsical, cynical, detached figure in the mold of Bokonon.

770 / AMERICAN Eliot Rosewater is not an artist. In fact, he even cautions his heirs on the futility of investing in the arts as a way of helping the less fortunate. But he does play a deific role in Rosewater County and loves science fiction writers. His identification of himself with Shakespeare's Hamlet is telling. Obviously the question of whether he is really mad hovers over each of these figures, and each drives the woman he loves crazy. Like Hamlet, Eliot wants to be sure he is doing the moral thing rather than simply following the dictates of his father, and ends up hurting innocent people out of the very desire not to. And each finds himself confronted with a time that is "out of joint" and tries "to set it right." In this way there is a transition from the surrogate author figure to, as it were, the other side of the coin, the author as character. Eliot tries to control some aspects of life within a limited sphere but finds, like Hamlet, that "There's a divinity that shapes our ends, / Rough-hew them how we will." The author-as-character line continues into Slaughterhouse-Five, where Vonnegut interjects himself as a character—"That was me"— and also has, in Billy Pilgrim, a protagonist who is partly autobiographical and even more allusive. In Breakfast of Champions Vonnegut gives the theme its most overt treatment not only by speaking of giving his characters their freedom (after a graphic demonstration of his ability to manipulate them), but also by making himself an author who appears within the book as a character. This "Chinese boxes" treatment of a theme that begins in Sirens emphasizes a vision of a life that imitates art, in which the artist is in turn the character, and in which no ultimate, verifying reality appears. The previously established patterns of autobiographical influence take on interesting forms in these three novels. The two-men-and-onewoman triangle, for example, becomes ambiguous in Mother Night partly because everyone

WRITERS

has a dual identity. Even the "nation of two" that Campbell and Helga create grows in population as they assume the roles recorded in his Memoirs of a Monogamous Casanova. The Helga resurrected after the war turns out to be her sister Resi, so that there may even be a twowomen-and-one-man triangle here, as well as one formed by two Campbells (public and private) and Helga/Resi. The other candidates for third man—Major Frank Wirtanen and George Kraft—also have double identities. In Cat's Cradle the pattern appears straightforwardly autobiographical: older brother Frank, middle sister Angela, baby brother Newt, even to having the older brother a scientist and the younger one a writer. (Vonnegut's making Newt a midget looks forward to Slapstick, where he makes the twins, whom he identifies with his sister and himself, giants.) By Rosewater the triangle has again weakened: Norman Mushari is Eliot's natural antagonist and also lusts after Sylvia, but the dominant third person remains the father, Lister. This accords with the steady growth of another previously noted motif in the three novels—that involving the father figure. In Mother Night, Kraft and Wirtanen both relate paternally to Campbell. Felix Hoenikker in Cat's Cradle may parody Vonnegut's father in some respects, although Vonnegut has claimed the late Dr. Irving Langmuir of General Electric as a source for this characterization. Senator Rosewater is compelling, at once an embodiment of all that the son rebels against and a figure for affection. In some respects, including his desire to see Eliot's marriage succeed, he departs from the usual blocking role of the senex in comedy—as do several second men of these triangles. Some ambiguity exists, then, about this second male figure, including whether it is based more closely on the father or on the older brother. Such blurring has a general psycholog-

KURT VONNEGUT / 771 ical validity; it also accords with what Vonnegut cheerfully reveals in the preface of Slapstick when describing how Bernard, as older brother, makes all the arrangements when they travel together. A rigid correspondence between these real and fictional relationships remains improbable, but informing glimpses of connections do occur. Mother Night becomes the first of Vonnegut's novels to be written in the first person. Its "Editor's Note," signed Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., although that is obviously a persona, moves the novel another step closer to direct personal expression. Having been told by colleagues at the University of Iowa that there was nothing wrong with introducing himself directly into his fiction, he added an introduction to the novel in 1966 that takes the last step beyond that of his two personae. The first of the prefaces that are to become integral to his novels, it speaks about family, his German ancestry, being a prisoner of war, and Dresden. It reveals aspects of Vonnegut's life that add autobiographical significance to the novel, but even more important, it points up how tjie novels will progress inevitably toward direct address of those motivating subjects. Cat's Cradle also uses a first-person narrator, one who mimics the narrator of Moby Dick as a way of signaling the fictiveness of his story and, indeed, of himself. Within his narrative is another, The Books of Bokonon, vital to the message of Cat's Cradle, so that once again Vonnegut uses the veils of double personae while moving closer to being philosophically declarative. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater moves away from direct authorial expression in form, but the content compensates. There is much of Kurt Vonnegut in Eliot Rosewater, one feels—in his wide-ranging observations on American society and the lives of individuals within it, in the almost childlike freshness of his way of looking at

things, and even, perhaps, in the mixture of compassion and frustration expressed in Eliot's characteristic, "Goddamn it, you've got to be kind." Another Vonnegut surrogate, Kilgore Trout, has a major and largely serious role in the ending of this book and provides Vonnegut with additional access, especially where Trout explains the sanity of Eliot's actions within the context of a society pervaded by mental and physical malaise. In content, these novels move progressively closer to the author's traumatic Dresden experience. Much of Mother Night is set in wartime Germany, and perhaps some of the ambiguities that divide Campbell reflect feelings of an author who, being of German descent, wonders how he might have acted had he been on the other side. "If I'd been born in Germany," he reflects in the introduction, "I suppose I would have been a Nazi, bopping Jews. ..." Vonnegut was not born in Germany, and instead of participating in one kind of holocaust got caught in another, the firebombing of Dresden by the Allies. There he witnessed apocalypse; his own world almost literally ended (significantly, when Bokononists commit suicide they say, "Now I destroy the whole world"). The Dresden to which Vonnegut surfaced was destroyed, and in that act, in the technical and moral ability of human beings to commit such an act, he saw implicit ultimate destruction. Those are things he talks about in Cat's Cradle, in which Newt Hoenikker sets out to write a book on Hiroshima called The Day the World Ended and ends up witnessing doom wrought by ice-nine. In Rosewater the theme of apocalypse, particularly that aspect of it which connects social, physical cataclysm with individual, psychological collapse, reappears in Eliot's vision of the destruction of Indianapolis by firestorm at the moment of his breakdown. The theme is en-

772 / AMERICAN larged in the novel by the crucial episode in which Eliot kills German auxiliary firemen in a burning building and by Kilgore Trout's story of the destruction of the Milky Way. Both stories contribute to the nature of Eliot's breakdown; he feels guilt over killing the firemen and had been reading Trout immediately before his vision. Each story points in an opposite direction from Indianapolis-becomeDresden: the killing of the firemen to the poignant, personal level, the science fiction tale to the dumbfounding prospect of total annihilation. All three novels reveal autobiographically based content in ways other than allusion to World War II. Cat's Cradle, for instance, might be seen as an expression—albeit a comic one—of the Vonnegut family's tradition of atheism, something he refers to several times. Yet surely that remains less important than the effort to characterize an absurd universe in which individuals need help—psychological, economic, and social—to make life endurable and to give it purpose. Similarly, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater addresses economic issues and their effect on the psychologies of people, reminding us of the financial erosion of the Vonnegut family, his mother's struggle through the Great Depression, and the withdrawal of his unemployed father. These topics inherit an emotional force by drawing on personal experience, but are objectified and broadened to assume a general significance. Vonnegut's adaptation of autobiographical material and his development of a style permitting him to be more confident in establishing an authorial presence in the novels move him closer to the long-sought confrontation with Dresden in Slaughterhouse-Five. In the first chapter of Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut likens himself to Lot's wife, who looked back on the destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah:

WRITERS

And Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was. so human. So she was turned to a pillar of salt. So it goes. People aren't supposed to look back. I'm certainly not going to do it anymore. He suggests that one should not look back, that past feelings are hard to recapture, and that the novel fails to close with its subject. Yet the book actually succeeds remarkably well in encompassing his Dresden experience, giving its personal trauma expression but emphasizing its universal human significance. That demands Vonnegut's most daring artistic innovation. Out of the evolving form of the previous three novels he derives the structure that at last can bear his originally motivating subject. Nowhere is this evolution more apparent than in the establishment of a narrative perspective. The novel is, in fact, a first-person narration, although glancing at any page in the middle chapters may make it seem to be both third-person and omniscient. The integration of authorial presence is more complete than that achieved through the combined effects of the "Editor's Note" and 1966 introduction to Mother Night. Vonnegut speaks about himself, his experiences, and the writing of Slaughterhouse-Five not in a separate preface or introduction but in the first chapter. He returns again in the tenth and final chapter. In between he declares himself periodically as someone present in the action of the novel, as by saying "that was me" or "I said that." This narrative presence makes a crucial impact on the novel's tone. The reminiscences, the discussion with the O'Hares, the openness in declaring his difficulties with the subject all authenticate Vonnegut as narrator. His authentic-

KURT VONNEGUT / 773 ity is vital to the telling of this extraordinary story, to making compelling a tale from which the rational mind recoils. The narrative presence is also established as an involved and compassionate one—the voice recounts this story not simply with objectified detachment or stern moralizing, but with something like an understanding yet urgent resignation. Paradoxical, yes, but evident in the injunctions like "Listen," which reveal the narrator's compulsion—like Billy Pilgrim's—to tell his story, and in the apparent acceptance of the inevitable and the repetitive in the weary, but not unfeeling, "So it goes." The first person, then, affords Vonnegut the kind of direct expression necessary to authenticate the novel and, no doubt, to satisfy his need for catharsis. To have continued throughout with a first-person narrator-protagonist, though, would almost certainly have restricted the novel's scope and meaning, limiting it much more closely to a personal recollection. Clearly, Vonnegut wants the emphasis to fall not simply on himself, on his experience, or even on Dresden alone, but on the symbolic meaning of Dresden to all human beings. An omniscient, third-person narration might serve well the description and analysis of social events or the human condition, as it does in Player Piano. But that perspective remains too distant, too detached for achieving the combination of the personal and the symbolic relevance of the event that he now wishes to portray. In Slaughterhouse-Five Vonnegut creates the best of both worlds for himself: a first-person frame, one to which he can allude throughout and that builds a narrative presence into the novel, and the use by that narrator of a seemingly omniscient, third-person voice throughout most of the story. The narrative stance just described and a protagonist like Billy Pilgrim—a figure omnisciently described and apart from the narrator—give Vonnegut the two dimensions his

novel needs. Linking Dresden to other holocausts like Sodom and Gomorrah or Hiroshima and Nagasaki—and even to single deaths— universalizes it, as do the other connections, such as comparing himself to Lot's wife or the young American troops to the Children's Crusade. The narrative stance, then, furthers Vonnegut's effort to integrate the personal, the autobiographical, or the factual with the objectified, the universal, or the mythical. The same kind of evolution is evident in the novel's central character, Billy Pilgrim. Looking back to Player Piano, one sees Paul Proteus as the first of those changing, multiroled protagonists, the "protean everymen" of whom Pilgrim is the ultimate. But his role has been extended in two directions: he is both more directly autobiographical and more profoundly universal. Most of what Billy Pilgrim goes through as a soldier and a prisoner in Germany resembles closely what Vonnegut himself experienced. His is the presence through which we share the Dresden experience, the "eyes" through which we see it (appropriately, he later becomes an optometrist). The innocent receptivity of his childlike vision makes him the perfect vehicle for the author, and it often accords with Vonnegut's own habit of reexamining what convention has accepted by looking at it in the simplest possible way. Finally, the "I was there" reminders connect author and protagonist in circumstance and sympathy. In all, Pilgrim becomes the most autobiographical of Vonnegut's protagonists to this point without being "like him" and while retaining fully the capacity of his predecessors to be representative. Perhaps the name Billy Pilgrim itself implies that he represents an Everyman in a contemporary Pilgrim's Progress. Like his predecessors he is protean, assuming many roles in the course of a novel that affords glimpses of him at every stage of his life. As beguiled man-child he

774 / AMERICAN is likened to those swept up in the Children's Crusade. In innocence, vulnerability, and eagerness to please he is likened to Adam and Eve. Several times Billy's description appears in terms of allusions to Jesus Christ, particularly as silently suffering victim. Christ is also introduced into the book by Vonnegut's old technique of the outside observer—who in turn uses another favorite technique, the story within the story. In the hospital Billy talks to Eliot Rosewater, who is reading a Kilgore Trout novel named The Gospel from Outer Space in which an extraterrestrial visitor offers fresh interpretations of how Christianity does and should work on earth. The method enlarges, by including this supposed cosmic view, and there is also a kind of literal universalizing (as with Malachi Constant, the space wanderer) in making Billy a traveler in time and space. If Billy Pilgrim seems at once personalized in his closeness to his creator and objectified as a universally representative figure, that duality appears again in the content of the novel. In some ways, Slaughterhouse-Five remains intensely personal, not only in its focus on events experienced by the author but also in its constant recapitulation of material drawn from the previous novels. Characters (as noted above), phrases, and images recur in number, making this work self-consciously "Vonnegutian" in nature. At the same time, the central event of the novel—the bombing of Dresden—is historical and therefore public and accessible. The same is true of the many other historical allusions. In using them Vonnegut invites connection to amplify the notion of recurrent pattern in the human situation. His reuse of his own materials has a somewhat similar effect. It is as if the previous works cohere in this one to suggest that what they have all pointed toward and what they all mean, ultimately, achieve fruition here.

WRITERS

Recapitulation also becomes an important part of the structure of Slaughterhouse-Five, which is one of its most fascinating aspects. Vonnegut invites us to see it, as he says on the title page, as "a novel somewhat in the telegraphic schizophrenic manner of tales of the planet Tralfamadore." The tales of Tralfamadore are recounted in short books made up of clumps of symbols: " . . . each clump of symbols is a brief, urgent message—describing a situation, a scene. We Tralfamadorians read them all at once, not one after the other. There isn't any particular relationship between all the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time." As with much else in the novel, there is an element of comic parody here, but equally much that seems apt. Vonnegut's novel, with its short chapters and paragraphs, its short sets of sentences or paragraphs with space between them, has a physical resemblance to the Tralfamadorian model. Many of these juxtaposed segments do not relate directly (sequentially or thematically) but do, taken together, build a total meaning, perhaps not quite like the Tralfamadorian novel but certainly going beyond mere montage. Although Vonnegut cannot arrange for us to read all of the novel's segments simultaneously, the effect that he achieves comes remarkably close. Events from two basic time spans (19441945 and 1968) and from other points in Pilgrim's life are intermixed. His life is not revealed chronologically, by beginning in medias res, or by flashback; rather, we know its end

KURT VONNEGUT / 775 from the start and the parts are filled in, from all segments of his life, as the novel progresses. The portrait of Billy Pilgrim is completed on the basis of coincidence of time and event rather than of sequence and causality. Thus the form relates to the Tralfamadorian conception that everything that happens always was and always will be. At one point an American prisoner of war asks an offending guard, "Why me?" "Vy you? Vy anybody?" the guard responds. (The Tralfamadorians would say, "Because that is the way the moment is structured.") This vignette captures not only Vonnegut's perception of an essentially existential universe but also his challenge to the traditional realistic novel, which would show its audience, if not the character, exactly why. Vonnegut cannot use the traditional form of the novel in the presentation of life viewed in contemporary terms because it conforms to assumptions of cause and effect and rigidities of time and substance that he questions. In particular, he needs a form that recognizes duration as a fourth dimension. This is a view of reality that he has sought to incorporate into his fictio from the start. It means that object or character 15 its history, not something that exists and has a history. In contrast with the portrayals of Proteus and Constant, the nonlinear characterization of Pilgrim emphasizes that he is not simply an established identity who undergoes a series of changes, but all the different things he is at different times. The same principles that govern character govern event as well. Dresden is "led up to," as it were, by events that precede and follow it. It is surrounded by allusions to other catastrophes and to other events with comparable victims. Its being is its history, so that it ceases to be a single event with a single explanation or meaning. It is as Kurt Vonnegut and Billy Pilgrim see it, as those stunned German guards see it, as the weeping civilian couple sees it, in all the am-

biguity that this implies. The relationship between parts in the novel resembles the relationships in life—relative, ambiguous, and frequently subjective. Part of Vonnegut's artistry shows in his giving his peculiar brand of realism a strong pattern in its apparent randomness. A subtitle describes the novel as A Duty Dance with Death, and it seems appropriate, since there is a kind of sweeping circularity in its movement. Dresden, death, is always at the center; it begins where it ends, with the author speaking; throughout, characters appear and reappear; and the historical allusions suggest cyclic repetition. War and catastrophe recur in Vonnegut's novels. If war serves as his metaphor for the larger human condition, and holocaust functions as its ultimate consequence, it is in Dresden that Vonnegut finds the quintessential embodiment of those perceptions. It becomes the keystone of all that he has to say about human behavior or the nature of human existence. Although it remains the trauma that could shock Vonnegut personally into a unique awareness, in its public, historical perspective it must stand as the symbol of all that most revolts, bewilders, and terrifies us. This combination of personal involvement, historical authenticity, and symbolic meaning invests the Dresden of Slaughterhouse-Five with an impact more profound than that in Vonnegut's previous world-ending catastrophes. In all respects Slaughterhouse-Five remains an integrative novel. It relates author-narrator and protagonist closely, draws all the historical and fictional events of its plot into a web around Dresden, and connects all its ideas to that central symbol. In recapitulating themes, characters, episodes, and phrases from previous works, this novel retrospectively confirms their direction. It fulfills their aspiration. Slaughterhouse-Five integrates the personal

776 I AMERICAN WRITERS and the public to achieve a unique richness; it remains its author's most intensely cathartic novel but also carries perhaps his most compelling social message. To do so it combines personal reminiscence and public history, the plausibly fictional and the wildly fantastic. One might well ask how, in a novel with historical basis and serious purpose, there is a place for flying saucers and time travel and Tralfamadorians. But it is precisely through this combination of fact and fantasy that Vonnegut can render the nature of the reality he perceives. The "documentary," as confirmed by David Irving's The Destruction of Dresden and the historical account of the Children's Crusade, seems no less farfetched than the "fantasy" of Kilgore Trout's The Gospel from Outer Space or the Tralfamadorian version of how the world ends. Thus in the documentary-fantasy technique the two elements measure each other's dimensions, characterizing reality, in fact, by its unreality. It becomes a form for dealing with reality in which fact seems as bizarre as fantasy. It also seems worth noting that the fantastic elements contribute to the novel's humor, and that another way in which this book may be seen as integrative is that while it remains deeply moving it is frequently funny. That completing the long-sought book on Dresden would leave Vonnegut fulfilled yet drained seems predictable. "I felt after I finished Slaughterhouse-Five that I didn't have to write at all anymore if I didn't want to," he says in Wampeterst Foma, & Granfalloons. "It was the end of some sort of career." Later, he speaks rather differently: The importance of Dresden in my life has been considerably exaggerated because my book about it became a best seller. If the book hadn't been a best seller, it would seem like a very minor experience in my life. And I don't think

people's lives are changed by short-term events like that. Dresden was astonishing, but experiences can be astonishing without changing you. It is not the sudden but dramatic incidents that shape one's life, he maintains, so much as the longer-lasting events. He points to the Great Depression and his family as having supplied such influences. Vonnegut's denial of Dresden as a major influence seems understandable, especially after the doubtless therapeutic benefits of having at last confronted it artistically. But although there seems little question of its overwhelming importance to his artistic motivation, there is little doubt that the influences on his earlier life had supplied much of the material and motivation for his previous work and became increasingly important afterward. Meanwhile, as noted earlier, Vonnegut said he would write no more novels and suggested, "The play's the thing...." The play was Happy Birthday, Wanda June (1971), a rehash of one written fifteen years earlier with the title "Penelope." One of its most interesting aspects is its almost feminist theme—this from a writer who by his own admission has few important or fully delineated female characters and even fewer satisfactory conjugal relationships. The play enjoyed a successful run off-Broadway, and has been performed elsewhere. Its ending, which underwent several revisions, remains its most troubling feature. If it attempts to show a new hero vanquishing the old hero, it fails. Harold Ryan, in spite of representing a lot of things we do not like, has a force and a vivacity that make him a compelling presence, while Dr. Norbert Woodly lacks these qualities and needs to have been given more substance earlier in this play. Penelope, on the other hand, has that substance and succeeds dramatically in her opposition to Ryan. But she is gone at the end and is not part

KURT VONNEGUT / 777 of the final confrontation. So the dynamics of opposition and conflict in the play remain unbalanced. Perhaps the imbalance is meant to show that the new age has no heroes, although the play seems to argue for a new type of unaggressive hero. More than that, in Penelope the play goes far toward offering the new woman who might be the counterpoise to Ryan, but at the end its own logic gets shaky and seems to falter. The structural imbalance in the play, if viewed in the light of his novels, might be explained by the very thing that Vonnegut says led him back to novels. Part of his statement forms the opening of this essay, and in it he says that he has always included himself in his novels and must continue. He cannot do so on film or in drama. Perhaps at heart his play lacks balance because it lacks Vonnegut's presence, because it lacks one of those protagonists in whom he invests so much of himself. The lack of a psychological investment of this kind, which evidently made the play unsatisfying to its author, is the very thing that gives it its structural shortcoming. The lesson is how important to form as well as content are the autobiographical elements of Vonnegut's fiction. Vonnegut's return to the novel with Breakfast of Champions (1973) shows the infusion of self made overt. In fact, authorial indulgence becomes one of the novel's themes. Vonnegut describes the book as a fiftieth birthday present to himself, a great "clearing out" of his mind that will dispense once and for all with the repeated ideas and characters and catch phrases. One character "liberated" by the end of the novel is Kilgore Trout, who now shares the dilemma of his creator, being suddenly both "fabulously well to do" and famous. Like Vonnegut, Trout often views things afresh by reducing them to their simplest terms, and they often share the technique of taking one of these simplified perceptions to an extreme. Vonnegut

calls this technique "solipsistic whimsy." One consequence of Trout's indulging it is that another character in the novel, Dwayne Hoover, buys the notion that everyone but him is a robot that he can attack at will. Obviously, all of this relates to Vonnegut's uncertainties about being taken as a "guru" and his concerns with the moral responsibilities of writers, of being (like Trout) taken seriously when he is trying to be funny and vice versa. Breakfast of Champions appears heavily autobiographical, as if Slaughterhouse-Five had burst a dam for Vonnegut. It contains some forthright ruminating over his own frame of mind and his anxieties about depression and suicide. He speaks of his mother, mentally disturbed and a suicide and therefore still a rather frightening figure to him: "'You're afraid you'll kill yourself the way your mother did,' I said. 'I know,' I said." There are affectionate allusions to his father (some of his characteristics are transferred to Kilgore Trout) and even to his grandfather. And the novel ends with Trout's calling—perhaps echoing Vonnegut's own wish—"Make me young!" Besides these inclusions of self, there is the most obvious one of all, his appearance as a character, so that he exists both outside and within the fiction as he sits in a Midland City bar watching his own characters and debating what to do with them. I had made him up, of course—and his pilot, too. I put Colonel Looseleaf Harper, the man who had dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki, Japan, at the controls. I made Rosewater an alcoholic in another book. I now had him reasonably well sobered up, with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous. I had him use his new-found sobriety, to explore, among other things, the supposed spiritual and physical benefits of sexual orgies with strangers in New York City. He was only confused so far.

775 / AMERICAN I could have killed him, and his pilot, too, but I let them live on. So their plane touched down uneventfully. More solipsistic whimsy, perhaps, but a comment on the roles of writer and fiction in the contemporary artistic world (an arts festival comprises the novel's central public event) and particularly on his own changed role. Again, Trout reflects that change, and so remains an autobiographical character in part. Dwayne Hoover perhaps represents those solid middle-class origins with which Vonnegut never loses touch, and he may also reflect some of the author's anxieties about mental stability, sharing with him the disturbing suicide of a close female relative. Even the fraudulent artist Rabo Karabekian becomes at least a mouthpiece for Vonnegut. He expresses the ideal of recognizing individual worth that counters the novel's pervasive solipsism. That solipsism, which leads to seeing others as mere robots or as characters in fiction to be conveniently dismissed, constitutes the personal and social malaise that this novel attacks. The drawings in Breakfast are more "solipsistic whimsy," included to demonstrate theme but also to indulge that very impulse. They contribute to an apparent breeziness that characterizes much of the novel but that also has been misunderstood, since it overlies a serious and carefully constructed moral framework. The documentary-fantasy aspects of this book and of the next, Slapstick, have also elicited negative responses. In Breakfast the fantasy is supplied (not for the first time) by Trout: that all other human beings are robots. This fantasy projects to an extreme a prevalent social attitude documented frequently in the treatment of slaves, blacks, women, and prisoners, and less conspicuously but nevertheless insistently in the treatment of many other people. In

WRITERS

Slapstick the two central characters are hideous neanderthaloids, fantastic creatures about whom everything is exaggerated—age, height, numbers of nipples and fingers. Their treatment is used as a measure against which to judge normalcy in the treatment of relatives and others, especially in the ability to love and to accept differentness. Slapstick has an intensely autobiographical introduction, recounting much from Vonnegut's past and present life and underlining his return to topics that predate Dresden in his experience. Family, the Great Depression, the question of what people need to make life more tolerable are the issues that this novel addresses in its hyperbolic fashion. The topics relate to Vonnegut's earliest ones, and in tone this novel reaches back toward them, partly because of its authorial stance. An autobiographical prologue precedes a first-person narration by the central character, which in turn ends with omniscient third-person narration. Partly because Vonnegut describes this as "the closest I will ever come to writing an autobiography," so that we look for him in Wilbur Swain, the impression of the author's presence is sustained in the narration. The intrusion of self remains implied, particularly in the last section, much more in the manner of the earlier novels. The declaration of Slapstick's autobiographical nature may be misleading. At the least, one needs to note Vonnegut's qualifier that it describes "what \\fefeels like to me." The casting of himself and the sister whom he acknowledges as an influence, and an audience in the form of neanderthaloids, may underline the kind of closeness in separation from the rest of the world that young siblings can achieve. Other things—sharing the same jokes and discoveries, feeling brighter as a pair than alone, the inevitable separation, the sense of loss in the other's death, even perhaps the distance from parents

KURT VONNEGUT / 779 who have trouble communicating love—may all reasonably have an autobiographical basis. But the depiction of "how life feels" remains primary, the sense of being constantly confronted, like Laurel and Hardy, with tests of one's agility and inventiveness, "bargaining in good faith with destiny." It is a painful world, one characterized by his dying sister's saying, on hearing of the death of her husband, "Slapstick." And it is a lonely world, against which he poses a solution drawn from his childhood and his experiences visiting Biafra—the extended family. Proclaimed on campaign buttons, "Lonesome No More" becomes the motto of Swain's presidency, to be enacted through a system that Vonnegut had proposed to Sargent Shriver in 1972 and recollected in an essay published in Wampeters, Foma, & Granfalloons: I wanted Sarge Shriver to say, "You're not happy, are you? Nobody in this country is happy but the rich people. Something is wrong. I'll tell you what's wrong: We're lonesome! We're being kept apart from our neighbors. Why? Because the rich people can go on taking our money away if we don't hang together. They can go on taking our power away. They want us lonesome; they want us huddled in our houses with just our wives and kids, watching television, because they can manipulate us then. ... We're going to vote in George McGovern, and then we're going to get this country on the road again. We are going to band together with our neighbors to clean up our neighborhoods, to get the crooks out of the unions, to get the prices down in the meat markets. Here's a war cry for the American people: 'Lonesome no more!'" That's the kind of demagoguery I approve of. The tone of loneliness that pervades Slapstick continues implicitly in Jailbird (1979), in which the protagonist, typically, has lost his wife and is scorned by his son. Loneliness re-

mains the dominant condition of the individual, particularly the elderly, in Vonnegut's description of contemporary society. These three novels focus on related aspects of contemporary American life. Breakfast reflects the spirit preceding the nation's twohundredth birthday in pondering what America was and had been. In characteristic style it reexamines with childlike simplicity national emblems, symbols, songs, and mottoes, creating hyperbolic distinctions between pretense and reality, intention and achievement. Slapstick examines the social malaise in broad terms, using a futuristic setting. Jailbird repeats the theme but again narrows the focus, observing a particular—and real—presidency and the effects of the American system on two elderly people. It is a world of conglomerates and mergers, of thirst for power and acquisition, yet at the same time a world of the lonely and dispossessed. Thematically, Jailbird shows its kinship to God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. The RAM JAC Corporation is its Rosewater Foundation and Mary Kathleen its Eliot, but much of its emphasis falls on the other side of the coin—or fortune. Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti serve Jailbird as Slapstick uses Laurel and Hardy, there are glimpses of American union history, and various episodes debate the achievement of socioeconomic equality. The prologue makes clear that just as Laurel and Hardy came out of his personal past, out of Vonnegut's memory of childhood in the Great Depression, so do Sacco and Vanzetti. They are arrived at through more recollections of his father and his uncle Alex, and of their acquaintance, Powers Hapgood. So the economic circumstances that colored his childhood less by deprivation than by their psychological impact on his parents reappear. It is in this respect that Jailbird has autobiographical content.

780 I AMERICAN In the first chapter, the narrator-protagonist says that years as well as people are characters in the book, "which is the story of my life," and goes on to elaborate dates—like 1929—that shape his story. Hence Jailbird may be seen as another autobiography in treating the mileposts of recent history that provide the context for Vonnegut's, and many another American's, life. The prologue, however, remains the only overtly autobiographical part of Jailbird, continuing the serialized self-portrait contained in the prefatory chapters to the later novels. Again this technique helps establish a narrative tone for the novel. This prologue differs in that while the first half is autobiographical, in part devoted to explaining the wellsprings of the novel's theme, the second half is fictional, providing an invented background for events in the novel. The body of the novel, too, mixes fact and fiction; Roy Cohn, Richard Nixon, Charles Colson, and others join with fictional characters; and events and places undergo a similar mixture. Finally, an index lists the real and the invented with like authenticity. No longer does the real frame the fictive—the mix of the two has become more pronounced and complete. We sense the same thing in individual episodes; Mary Kathleen as bag lady seems "realistic" until it comes to her huge tennis shoes and all their contents, which lead to her reclusive existence. Such mixes of the reportorial and the fantastic keep recurring; real places, people, and events combine with nonexistent bird species, space travelers from Vicuna, and so forth. Yet these incongruities, like the flourishing restaurant in the derelict Arapahoe Hotel, draw attention to the economic disparities in society that are the novel's theme. The reception of these last three novels, spaced over the ten years after publication of Slaughterhouse-Five, has been mixed. All have

WRITERS

enjoyed good sales but have received mixed reviews. Two consistent complaints have been that the style of these books is extreme, approaching self-parody, and that they seem thin, lacking the substance or the urgency of the earlier work. Certainly in Breakfast of Champions the prose is curt and clipped, and the repetitions and catch phrases conspicuous, but that is in character with the novel's purpose and has been less true of the subsequent books. One does sense a lessening of intensity, as if the motivation for the first six novels were diminished. Of course, by this point the spur of fame must have dulled, and Vonnegut had worked for thirty years as a publishing author. At the same time, one wonders to what extent circumstances contribute to an author's catching an audience's ear. There seems little doubt that the late 1960's provided the ideal setting for the antiwar, antiestablishment themes and the tireless questioning in Vonnegut. The climate a decade later was less receptive, not necessarily to the themes or questions, one senses, but to the experimentation in form that accompanied them. Perhaps Vonnegut is still haunted by some variant of the old reluctance to take seriously a writer who writes anything resembling science fiction. Ironically, Vonnegut can be seen as standing firmly within American literary tradition. As early as 1970, Leslie Fiedler argued that Vonnegut was in the mainstream of fiction, that confluence of myth and entertainment from which the more esoteric High Art novel of the first half of the century had wandered. A case can also be made for finding in Vonnegut's novels those characteristics that have been used to distinguish the European (especially British) novel from the American novel— "romance novel" or simply "romance." The American Novel and Its Tradition (1957) by Richard Chase remains a landmark work that conveniently spells out some of these character-

KURT VONNEGUT / 781 istics in its introduction. In contrast to the novel, Chase argues, the romance "feels free to render reality in less volume and detail." It tends to prefer action to character, and action will be freer in a romance than in a novel, encountering, as it were, less resistance from reality. . . . The characters, probably rather two-dimensional types, will not be complexly related to each other or to society or to the past.... Character itself becomes, then, somewhat abstract and ideal, so much so in some romances that it seems to be merely a function of plot. The plot we may expect to be highly colored. Astonishing events may occur, and these are likely to have a symbolic or ideological, rather than a realistic, plausibility. Being less committed to the immediate rendition of reality than the novel, the romance will more freely veer toward mythic, allegorical, and symbolistic forms. Examples of such characteristics suggest themselves readily; there is hardly need for a reiterative demonstration. Recognizing this traditional context for Vonnegut's work seems every bit as important as observing the influence of more contemporary arts—films, cartoons, television—on his technique. Similarly, the content and attitudes in his work are as firmly grounded in that tradition as they are reflective of modern technology and scientifically educated thinking. Yet Vonnegut has rarely been seen in these terms. Considering Vonnegut's fiction in light of the characteristics traditionally ascribed to the romance can be helpful. For instance, in the matter of characterization, it helps to explain some of the problematical aspects of those protean protagonists. Assessed by the criteria typically used in evaluating characters in a novel, these people often seem burdened with too many roles and change too much without a very deep psychological accounting for the changes. The lat-

ter seems particularly troublesome in view of the moral consequences of the changes. Viewed in terms of the romance, with its ancestry in allegory, the moral dimensions of these characterizations may be seen somewhat differently. Here the characters may act as embodiments of qualities (or the vehicles whereby they are tested) rather than as full-depth characters in whom those qualities are explored. That is, they are characters who might embody, or become a means to exploring, pride and prejudice, rather than characters in whom we find a psychologically profound portrayal of individual confrontation with pride and prejudice, as we do in Jane Austen's novel. Thus the moral ambiguities in the consciousness of Mother Night's Howard Campbell may be less important to Vonnegut's design than what the character enables Vonnegut to say on the moral issues the book raises. Vonnegut is able in this example to proclaim a simple moral in a book containing perhaps his most complex characterization. In the same way, the documentary-fantasy techniques may irritate at both extremes when the reader expects a traditional novel. The documentary seems too literal, violating fictitiousness, while the fantasy appears too farfetched, shattering plausibility. Yet these extremes are not atypical of the "astonishing events" that in the romance may have "a symbolic or ideological, rather than a realistic, plausibility." The romance has been viewed as a natural product of the American Puritan heritage, with its emphasis on allegory and symbol. Vonnegut himself has evinced some pride in his family heritage of atheistic humanism and shows some distaste for anything resembling Puritanism. Nevertheless, the basic middle-class values that his fiction inevitably endorses have some Puritan origins, and his method involves a Protestant sense of personal revelation. The latter is evident in the fact that, as we have seen, the fiction draws heavily on autobio-

782 I AMERICAN graphical material and shows the continuing urge toward direct authorial expression. The idea at the core of a book often draws on firsthand experience, the personal repeatedly enters directly through characterization and narration, and the sustaining motivation in the first six novels appears to be the strong desire to express himself on his experience in Dresden. Sometimes an almost evangelical urge to make a point emerges—declared in such repeated injunctions as "Listen." The commentary in Player Piano on the uses of automation and the decrying of strip mining in Breakfast of Champions are two examples. Vonnegut obviously recognizes this aspect of his work, not only in his later uncomfortable rejections of the "guru" role but from the start within the fiction itself. From Player Piano onward there are references to preachers, propagandists, and public relations men, all of whom have roles approaching or intersecting with those of the writer. The dangers of proclaiming personal revelation are repeated in portrayals of preachers and churches from the tyrannical to the harmlessly farcical, and in writers from the uncompromising Ed in Player Piano to the solipsistically whimsical Kilgore Trout in Breakfast of Champions. Yet Vonnegut's need to include himself in his fiction has remained and seems, in fact, to have motivated some of his best work. The real strength of Vonnegut's work comes from the subordination of the personal to the public. One senses the author's need for an outward channeling of his emotional responses, for a coming to grips with personal trauma and casting it in terms comprehensible to himself by making it comprehensible to others. Thus the need to symbolize, to universalize, overtakes the private, cathartic impulse. Yet in Vonnegut one need does not simply yield to the other; the autobiographical origins and authorial presence remain to intensify and

WRITERS

personalize what has been generalized. Perhaps some of Vonnegut's experience can be seen as archetypal for the twentieth century, but he has in any case a breadth of experience and knowledge that contributes to his keen insight into the nature of our times, and he has found the appropriate public symbols. Vonnegut has created those symbols out of his own experience, drawing from the same source the ability to speak feelingly on some generally shared aspects of the human experience in this age. His characteristic frankness and simplicity cut through the conventionalizing of that experience. The best of his work may rest largely on this ability to explore honestly the conditions general to our time and simultaneously, through investment of himself in his work, to achieve a sympathetic bond with his reader.

Selected Bibliography WORKS OF KURT VONNEGUT NOVELS

Player Piano. New York: Scribner, 1952. The Sirens of Titan. New York: Dell, 1959. Mother Night. Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett, 1962. Cat's Cradle. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1963. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1965. Slaughterhouse-Five. New York: Delacorte/Seymour Lawrence, 1969. Breakfast of Champions. New York: Delacorte/ Seymour Lawrence, 1973.

KURT VONNEGUT / 783 Slapstick or Lonesome No More. New York: Delacorte/Seymour Lawrence, 1976. Jailbird. New York: Delacorte/Seymour Lawrence, 1979. COLLECTIONS OF SHORT STORIES AND ESSAYS

Canary in a Cat House. Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett, 1961. Welcome to the Monkey House. New York: Delacorte/Seymour Lawrence, 1968. Wampeters, Foma, & Granfalloons: Opinions. New York: Delacorte/Seymour Lawrence, 1974. PLAYS Happy Birthday, Wanda June. New York: Delacorte/Seymour Lawrence, 1971. Between Time and Timbuktu. New York: Delacorte/Seymour Lawrence, 1972.

BIBLIOGRAPHIES Klinkowitz, Jerome. "The Vonnegut Bibliography." In Vonnegut in America, edited by Jerome Klinkowitz and Donald L. Lawler. New York: Delacorte/Seymour Lawrence, 1977. Pp. 217-52. Klinkowitz, Jerome, and Stanley Schatt. "A Kurt Vonnegut Checklist." Critique, 12, no. 3:70-76 (1971). . "The Vonnegut Bibliography." In The Vonnegut Statement, edited by Jerome Klinkowitz and John Somer. New York: Delacorte/Seymour Lawrence, 1973. Pp. 255-77.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL STUDIES "An Account of the Ancestry of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., by an Ancient Friend of His Family." Summary, 1, no. 2:76-118 (1971). Burhans, Clinton S., Jr. "Hemingway and Vonnegut: Diminishing Vision in a Dying Age." Modern Fiction Studies, 21:173-91 (Summer 1975). Fiedler, Leslie A. "The Divine Stupidity of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr." Esquire, 74:195-97, 199-200, 202-04 (September 1970). Giannone, Richard. Vonnegut: A Preface to His Novels. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat, 1977.

Goldsmith, David H. Kurt Vonnegut: Fantasist of Fire and Ice. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1972. Greiner, Donald J. "Vonnegut's SlaughterhouseFive and the Fiction of Atrocity." Critique, 14, no. 3:38-51 (1973). Hansen, Arlen J. "The Celebration of Solipsism: A New Trend in American Fiction." Modern Fiction Studies, 19:5-15 (Spring 1973). Harris, Charles B. Contemporary American Novelists of the Absurd. New Haven, Conn.: College and University Press, 1971. Pp. 51-75. Irving, John. "Kurt Vonnegut and His Critics." New Republic, 181:41-49 (September 22, 1979). Klinkowitz, Jerome. "Kurt Vonnegut, Jr." In Literary Disruptions: The Making of a Post-Contemporary American Fiction. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975. Pp. 33-61. . "The Literary Career of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr." Modern Fiction Studies, 19, no. 1:57-67 (Spring 1973). Klinkowitz, Jerome, and Donald L. Lawler, eds. Vonnegut in America. New York: Delacorte/Seymour Lawrence, 1977. Klinkowitz, Jerome, and John Somer, eds. The Vonnegut Statement. New York: Delacorte/Seymour Lawrence, 1973. Lundquist, James. Kurt Vonnegut. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1977. May, John R. "Vonnegut's Humor and the Limits of Hope." Twentieth Century Literature, 18:2536 (January 1972). Mayo, Clark. Kurt Vonnegut: The Gospel from Outer Space.... San Bernardino, Calif.: The Borgo Press, 1977. Olderman, Raymond M. "Out of the Waste Land and into the Fire: Cataclysm or the Cosmic Cool." In Beyond the Waste Land: The American Novel in the Nineteen-Sixties. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1972. Pp. 189-219. Reed, Peter J. "Kurt Vonnegut, Jr." In Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 2. Detroit: Gale Research, 1978. Pp. 493-508. . Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. New York: Warner Paperback Library, 1972. Reissued New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1976. Schatt, Stanley. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Boston: Twayne, 1977. Tanner, Tony. "The Uncertain Messenger: A Study of the Novels of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr." Critical

784 I AMERICAN WRITERS Quarterly, 11:297-315 (Winter 1969). Reprinted in City of Words. New York: Harper and Row, 1971. Pp. 181-201. "Vonnegut." Critique, 12, no. 3 (1971); special number. Vonnegut, Mark. The Eden Express. New York: Praeger, 1975.

INTERVIEWS [Hayman, David, David Michaelis, George Plimpton, and Richard L. Rhodes.] "Interview: Kurt Vonnegut." Paris Review, 18, no. 69:56-103 (Spring 1977).

Klinkowitz, Jerome. "The Vonnegut Bibliography." In Vonnegut in America, edited by Jerome Klinkowitz and Donald L. Lawler. New York: Delacorte/Seymour Lawrence, 1977. Pp. 228-31. (The designated pages contain a listing of interviews.) "Playboy Interview." In Wampeters, Foma, & Granfalloons: Opinions. Pp. 237-85. Scholes, Robert. "A Talk with Kurt Vonnegut, Jr." In The Vonnegut Statement, edited by Jerome Klinkowitz and John Somer. New York: Delacorte/Seymour Lawrence, 1973. Pp. 90-118. —PETER J. REED

Yvor Winters 1900—1968

Y

years old, he wrote knowingly to Harriet Monroe about how the spectacle of poor poetry and worse criticism made him lose his patience; writing criticism was not good for his spirit. This infamously ill-tempered critic was not beyond self-awareness; he often joked, in both poems and essays, at his own expense. Although he declared himself an absolutist in intellectual matters, his politics were never reactionary, and his critical arguments are in fact usually pragmatic. Unlike Yeats or Eliot or Allen Tate, in literary matters he was wholeheartedly and enthusiastically of his times. Winters was born in 1900 in Chicago. His father, an independent businessman, achieved moderate financial success through real estate transactions, commodities exchange, and other activities. In several poems Winters speaks with fondness of him, though "A Vision" (1930) suggests that his feelings for his mother were quite different. (His mother took him to seances when he was a boy; and he seems to have often associated her with demonic power. He twice published a poem [in 1934 and 1940] spoken by a werewolf to the "wolf-bitch who suckled me." In both printings this hateful poem is followed by "A Petition," in which he apologizes for the first poem: "It was not I that spoke: / The wild fiend moved my tongue.")

VOR WINTERS is commonly thought of as a stingy critic, and rarely thought of as a poet. He yielded little. He was convinced that T. Sturge Moore and Robert Bridges were greater poets than William Butler Yeats, that Frederick Goddard Tuckerman and Jones Very deserve more credit than Ralph Waldo Emerson, that Fulke Greville wrote greater poems than John Donne did. This cantankerous fellow would give little ground. Perhaps most damaging of all, in the eyes of modern readers, he routinely dismissed his antagonists as fools—which made his readers think, quite wrongly, that he also held in contempt the poets he criticized. He did not hold to the liberal notion that different claims are seldom mutually exclusive, when viewed from the proper perspective. He was an avowed absolutist who came to disapprove of free verse and of the presentational mode of modern poetry. These positions made it almost inevitable that his contemporary readers would mistakenly think of him as a reactionary. He is one of the great poet-critics of America, and his virtues as well as his obvious limitations are thoroughly misunderstood. Before Winters was a critic he was a poet, an important one. Like Matthew Arnold, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound, he wanted to spend his best efforts in poetry. When he was nineteen

755

786 I AMERICAN Before Winters began his schooling, his family moved to Los Angeles and remained there for nearly a decade. In 1913 they returned to Chicago, where Winters attended high school and then spent a year at the University of Chicago. At the university's poetry club he met the novelist Janet Lewis, whom he married in 1926, and his longtime friend Glenway Wescott. He had become a serious reader of poetry and the little magazines in 1914 in Chicago, where Poetry, the best magazine on the subject, was then published. But illness forced him to leave the university for the Southwest. After a long convalescence, he taught elementary and high school students in a couple of coal-mining towns in New Mexico, and then resumed his studies, at the University of Colorado. In 1925, he received his M.A. in Romance Languages and began teaching again, this time French and Spanish at the University of Idaho. Two years later he entered the Ph.D. program in English at Stanford; and a year later he was appointed instructor in that department, where he remained throughout the rest of his career. As he liked to remark, in the lively 1920's he "was not in Paris, nor even at Harvard." Winters' first and best book of literary criticism, Primitivism and Decadence, appeared in 1937, long after he was recognized as a poet; by then six collections of his verse had been published— The Immobile Wind( 1921), The Magpies Shadow (1922), The Bare Hills (1927), The Proof (1930), The Journey (1931), and Before Disaster (1934). He knew himself to be a poet long before he became a critic, and poets he thought of romantically, as was then the fashion. The Priesthood We stand apart That men may see The lines about our eyes.

WRITERS We perish, we Who die in art, With that surprise Of one who speaks To us and knows Wherein he lies.

In 1920, when this poem came out in Poetry, Winters was thinking his way through received terms of what it was going to mean to be a poet. This young man from Chicago considered the subject a good deal while he lay quite alone for more than two years in a New Mexico sanitarium trying to recover from that poet's disease, tuberculosis. Poets of "The Priesthood" are bound to each other by the religion of art, and they are isolated from others by the authenticity of art. The poet is a standing reproach to those who deny the suffering displayed about the poet's eyes. By 1924 Winters argued strenuously in prose for the poet's right to sanctify his art: "The artist whose deity is art, has a religion as valid and as capable of producing great art as any religion of the past or as the recently defined religion of money. As a conscious and intelligent being, no other religion will be possible for him, and he cannot, because of his religion, be called a decadent, a heretic." Winters was adapting a conventional yw de siecle notion to his own purposes; from the beginning to the end of his career he thought of poetry as "the richest and most perfect technique of contemplation." This was always his reason for taking poems and criticism seriously. Nearly all the poems in his first two collections were written during these years of convalescence in New Mexico. Solitude, inaction, and what he once called (in regard to Marianne Moore) "the hypersensitivity of convalescence" are the major themes, though the treatment was not obviously personal. The first line of "Alone" (one of the two best poems in the first book)

YVOR WINTERS / 787 hints at Winters' uneasiness about the personal subject matter of these poems: I, one who never speaks, Listened days in summer trees, Each day a rustling leaf. Then, in time, my unbelief Grew like my running— My own eyes did not exist, When I struck I never missed. Noon, felt and far away— My brain is a thousand bees. The movement from "I" to "one" shows an inclination to turn private experience toward a general significance; in the appositional clause, the "I" is being generically categorized from an external perspective. This displaced perspective holds the first two stanzas firmly in place: the poem reflects upon past experience. The appositional clause of the first line indicates that the speaker continues to be silent, but the remainder of the first two stanzas prepares the way for a disengagement of the solipsistic past; it would have been easy to judge the past critically in the last two lines. Yet the poem closes, with a metaphorical leap, in a terrifying present, for there has been no escape from solitude, and the speaker's mind is left a scramble—though not so scrambled that the poem is left in disarray. This is one of the most carefully structured of Winters' early free-verse poems. A ghostly rhyme scheme flits through the lines: trees / bees, leaf / unbelief, exist / missed. And in the last line of each stanza is a shadow, too, of the iambic line. More importantly, Winters brings each stanza to a powerful close, with a plainly memorable line. The movement from one stanza to the next in both cases takes the poem forward in time; the third and seventh lines solidify the first two stanzas and chisel out the temporal contours of the poem. Even such a

specific matter as the placement of the caesura is handled so as to stress the orderliness of the poem. With one clever exception, the only caesuras occur after the first syllable of the first line of each stanza, breaking off the most elementary poetic unit—the initial syllable, the "I." The exception is the pause after "in time": that one extra pulsation nicely approximates the stretching out of time in this process of selfabsorption. These details are worth noticing. This is a poem about the hazards of solitude. The first two lines distinguish between speaking and listening: the speaker of the poem is (paradoxically, of course) a passive listener for whom one day, like one leaf, is indistinguishable from another. The poem is thematically surprising in its claim that absorption in sensual experience doubles back upon itself until one doubts the very existence of the sensual world. The speaker cannot miss because the target ceases to exist for him; nor can he measure a miss because his eyes do not exist. In writing about this subject, Winters implicitly stresses certain paradoxes. In the first line the speaker claims that he is always silent, and in the last he says that his brain is a scramble, even though his utterance is markedly well structured. Many years after writing this poem, Winters defined the imitative fallacy as a mistaken notion that poems about experiences of disorder ought to be disordered. In this early poem, it is plain that Winters would go only so far with the notion that form ought to imitate content. The placement of the caesuras does imitate the sense of the poem, but the overall structure of the poem resists and qualifies the poem's subject. The structure of the poem is an achievement that stands against the experience of buzzing disarray. Very far from seeming insincere, the poem could only have been written, Eliot would argue along with Winters, by someone who needed to put this

788 I AMERICAN terrifying experience into a controlling shape; the technique, as Pound said, proves the sincerity. The very best poem in Winters' first book is "The Immobile Wind," which first appeared in 1920. Blue waves within the stone Turn like deft wrists interweaving. Emotion, undulant, alone. Curled wings flow beyond perceiving. Swift points of sight, mystic and amorous little hands, The wind has drunk as water swallows sifting sands. The wings of a butterfly Feel of the wind Tentatively, as men die In thought, that have not sinned. Rather few of Winters' poems reflect the process of elaborating the poem, but this is an exception. He seems to be meditating on a section of rock with blue specks in it. He imagines the specks as waves, wrists, emotion, wings, points of sight, hands, sands, and again as wings. These interpretations are cast at the stone, one after the other, but one (in line 4) stands out: he sees his own emotions departing from him, like wings on the wind. The heart of this sanitarium poem lies in the last stanza, in that one word, "Tentatively," derived from tentare, to try or test. The poem tries various equations: specks = waves = wrists, and so on. Winters tries various figures, committing himself to none. There is no risk of sinning, none even of error, for no choices are made: all options remain open. In "Alone," Winters examined the hazards of purely sensual experience; in "The Immobile Wind," he moved to the opposite danger, the risks of indiscriminate thought. Both

WRITERS

sorts of promiscuity, mental and sensual, lead to the same dead end. Throughout his career, Winters felt the pull in both these directions—sensuality and mentality, body and mind. The adjustment to these rival forces was his lifelong major theme; by any measure this is a large, intellectual subject. After the short book of six-syllable poems based on Amerindian models, The Magpie's Shadow (1922), he returned to this theme in the strongest poems of The Bare Hills (1927). The poems in this book were written while he was living in Madrid, New Mexico; Boulder, Colorado; and Moscow, Idaho; they all focus on the western landscape. April The little goat crops new grass lying down leaps up eight inches into air and lands on four feet. Not a tremor— solid in the spring and serious he walks away. In this humble poem, the modifiers are simple and direct—"little," "new," "eight," "four," "solid," "serious "—as though the subject required nothing in the way of poetic treatment to make it worthy of attention. As a descriptive poet, Winters aspired to "a speech without idiom and a style without mannerism, that the clarity of ... perception may not be clouded by inessentials." In fact, this poem resides largely in one word; that last adjective, "serious," nudges the poem beyond anecdote and description. Winters attributes to the goat a motive that is meant to cover too the coming

YVOR WINTERS / 789 of spring and the natural process in general; one word makes that attribution convincing. Winters customarily managed syntax and rhythm confidently in descriptive poetry: the goat comes to steady rest in that secure fifth line—with its four syllables. The words are perfectly paced through these short free-verse lines. The poem is a small but deft achievement. Late in 1922, Winters submitted to Poetry the poem he then considered his best, but Harriet Monroe rejected it. Jose's Country A pale horse, Mane of flowery dust, Runs too far For a sound To cross the river. Afternoon, Swept by far hooves That gleam Like slow fruit Falling In the haze Of pondered vision. It is nothing. Afternoon Beyond a child's thought, Where a falling stone Would raise pale earth, A fern ascending. This poem sets limits to the sort of poetry Winters had learned to write well, which is one explanation of its importance. Early in his career Winters thought of himself as an imagist. He reprinted the first poem of his first book, later entitled "A Song of Advent" (1920), as the opening to four omnibus collections of his poetry.

On the desert, between pale mountains, our cries— Far whispers creeping through an ancient shell. This is surely modelled after the most famous and programmatic imagist poem, Pound's "In a Station of the Metro" (1913). The trick is a total and unabashed investment in a single poetic resource, metaphor. Pound sees the faces of the metro crowd as petals on a bough; Winters sees the mountain hollow as a seashell, throwing back on us the illusory echo of our own blood. In 1924 he described this technique as especially privileged: " . . . two perceptions, coming together with an almost infinite speed across the mental distances that naturally lie between two separate observations... cause a kind of mental vibration that is known as aesthetic emotion." The first two lines of "Jose's Country" start out with the imagist strategy: the horse's flying mane becomes dust, which really flowers in the second strophe, when the horse's hooves are seen as fruit. These twelve lines are excellent descriptive verse. Winters singles out details from what seems considerable distance, and this gives the impression of strenuous and exact effort on his part; and he manages to locate himself firmly in relation to what he sees. Most important (and he would do this again in later, greater poems) he indirectly conveys the oppressive silence of haze, the blankness of this dry landscape. The figures—the flowers, the sound, the fruit—all tell what this landscape lacks. The phrases and clauses sit comfortably in these short lines: no line break interrupts a phrase or clause, yet no single line is syntactically complete. But the thirteenth line breaks that rhythm with a single sentence of categorical judgment. (Winters later used this breaking trope in two of his most important poems: "That is illusion.... That

790 / AMERICAN was the ocean" ["The Slow Pacific Swell"]; "This was hallucination" ["Moonlight Alert"].) He tries to dismiss the first two strophes because they are without meaning. Afternoon is simple beyond a child's thought. If seeing the mane as flowery dust was once impressive, by the poem's close he remembers that an inert stone, falling senselessly, could make the dust seem to flower. The title poem of this volume, "The Bare Hills," pushes this perspective all the way. The man who is closest to this austere landscape is dully brutish, uncivil: . . . he sat down and ate the bread as if he ate rock, while he ground his buttocks. He got up and smiled and went upstairs to meet the monstrous nakedness of his own face with unchanged step. This earthen man communicates through only the blandest gestures ("and smiled"), for he is locked in the reflection of his own face. Pure sensuality holds one away from language and thought. But the judgment of the thirteenth line of "Jose's Country" does not stand unqualified—which is part of what makes this a fine poem. The last line starts the metaphorical process going again, with a fresh revision of the second line. And the fragmentary syntax of the last five lines rather perforates the tight, declarative syntax of that bleak thirteenth line. In the end, Winters will not quite surrender what he fretfully sensed was an intellectually limited method of writing. In fact, for the next few years Winters forcefully denied the lesson he feared he was learning—that certain methods, and especially the imagist method, have inherent limits: "It is infantile to say that [a poet]

WRITERS

can do this or that only with this or that technique" (1924); "I believe that Mr. Tate goes too far in intimating that the imagistic method is of necessity limited in its possibilities: the possibilities of any method depend not on itself but on the poet who happens to find himself adapted to it..." (1927). The poems of The Bare Hills reveal, however, an awareness that he was pressing against technical as well as intellectual limitations. Two poems from this book, "The Cold" (1925) and "The Rows of Cold Trees" (1924), both of which he reprinted in his four omnibus collections, suggest that he was fitfully trying to move beyond descriptive poetry. His uncertainty about this move can be heard in the rhythms. "The Cold" is by far the better of the two poems: Frigidity the hesitant uncurls its tentacles into a furry sun. The ice expands into an insecurity that should appal yet I remain, a son of stone and of a commentary, I, an epitaph, astray in this oblivion, this inert labyrinth of sentences that dare not end. It is high noon and all is the more quiet where I trace the courses of the Crab and Scorpion, the Bull, the Hunter, and the Bear— with front of steel they cut an aperture so clear across the cold that it cannot

YVOR WINTERS / 791 be seen: there is no smoky breath, no breath at all. Winters felt stretched across an old dichotomy: the chilly vacancy of the senses and the abstract exercises of the mind—stone and commentary. The descriptive poet is paradoxically left trying to chart what cannot be seen, the constellations, hypothetical fauna, at noon, because with winter the sensible world is running its natural but inhuman course toward vacancy. In these early poems he felt no middle ground; a poet could only oscillate between these two modes of writing, description or commentary. The sentences dare not end, because only emptiness remains when writing is done. The fascinating thing here is that the lines of these two poems are in fact ending and noticeably facing vacancy. Despite Winters' ability to handle free-verse rhythms unusually well, this poem is poorly, desperately enjambed: lines eight through fifteen are rhythmically inert, which is clear as soon as any one line is heard, even momentarily, as a single unit. The worst deficiencies of "The Rows of Cold Trees," which Hart Crane admired, are rhetorical: "I have walked upon / the streets ..."; "I have / walked among the tombs. ..." The last strophe of this poem shows, though, as "The Cold" does too, the direction in which Winters was pushing. It was the dumb decision of the madness of my youth that left me with this cold eye for the fact; that keeps me quiet, walking toward a stinging end: I am alone, and, like the alligator cleaving timeless mud, among the blessed who have latin names. The lines of this poem are even more uncertain than those of "The Cold," but in both poems one can hear Winters calling for a larger

form, a line that would encompass the sort of commentary of this last strophe. He is having problems of enjambment; the line endings waver because he does not yet know what sort of line he needs to write, though he had an inkling, even as early as 1924. The last strophe of "The Rows of Cold Trees" and the first five lines as well (that is, the most powerful and discursive sections of the poem) and most of the lines of "The Cold" move (over the line endings) to an iambic beat. As early as 1924, Winters seems to have sensed that, in order to develop the side of his writing that he spoke of as "commentary," he would turn toward traditional metrical forms. But before he made that difficult and unfashionable move, he took one last try at developing his free verse into larger units. Thomas Parkinson points out that the "Fire Sequence" (1927) is the turning point in Winters' writing. Winters was writing this lyric sequence while he was corresponding with Hart Crane, who was then at work on The Bridge. They exchanged manuscripts and suggestions. When the correspondence was over, Winters had severely criticized Crane's poem and had failed after two years' effort to shape a book of his own around the "Fire Sequence." Only four of the poems shown to Crane, it seems— "Bison," "November," "The Bitter Moon," and "The Deep"—appeared in Winters' next book of poems, The Proof XI930), and none of these was included by Winters in his Collected Poems (1952). For Winters, the sequence was a profound disappointment. Parkinson observes that Crane, however, never noticed that he and Winters were working on similar projects—though Winters certainly did. The first three poems of Winters' sequence attempt to collapse distinctions between continental ("Coal: Beginning and End"), personal ("Liberation"), and social activity ("Return of Spring"); the story of one is the story of them all. This is the major the-

792 / AMERICAN matic connection between Winters' and Crane's sequences, though there are more particular ones: Winters' attention to "the shrieking/ steel amid the wilderness of spring" registers an antipathy to the history of industrialism similar to that of Crane's phrase, "the iron-dealt cleavage"; Winters' focus on "the Slav" and Crane's sense of the Genoese washerwoman indicate both poets' understanding that American history is a story of immigration and racism; and both of them (Crane in "Cutty Sark" and Winters in "Bill") tried to bring into verse the drunken idioms of the individual who takes on his own shoulders the failure of collective goals. Winters was not imitating Crane, and Crane was deliberately imitating Eliot. But to Winters' eye, his own failure and Crane's were not wholly distinguishable. His most severe critical essay, "The Significance of The Bridge by Hart Crane: or What Are We to Think of Professor X" (1947), was written in recognition of the fact that his own writing turned away from Crane's example only after obvious failure. Winters burned his letters to his wife, Janet Lewis, but he preserved Crane's letters. He knew that he learned from Crane's mistakes and that that should be part of the record. Winters' father had hoped that his son would become a doctor, or at least take over his business. But he accepted his son's decision to study literature at Stanford, and his munificence gave Winters one year free to devote entirely to his studies and his writing; then Winters became a full-time instructor, with as many as 150 freshman themes to grade weekly. His first few years at Stanford were crucial, and his book The Proof (1930) gives a graphic account of the changes he went through in those years. The book, dedicated to his father, is divided into three sections: the first consists of nineteen freeverse poems, most of them descriptive; the second has ten sonnets; and the last comprises eleven metrical poems, most of them in qua-

WRITERS

trains or other short stanzaic forms. The very best poem, "The Empty Hills," opens the third section auspiciously, but it should be approached through "The Fable," the last sonnet of the second section. Beyond the steady rock the steady sea, In movement more immovable than stasis, Gathers and washes and is gone. It comes, A slow, obscure metonymy of motion, Crumbling the inner barriers of the brain. But the crossed rock braces the hills and makes A steady quiet of the steady music, Massive with peace. And listen, now, The foam receding down the sand silvers Between the grains, thin, pure as virgin words, Lending a sheen to Nothing, whispering, Flower-surface sucked away, discriminate. I found a fable here, but it is gone. The mind alone is mind, and it must wait. Winters developed some misgivings about this poem. The first line of the first sonnet in this section suggested that the use of metrical form was going to allow a direct approach to serious subjects: "Death. Nothing is simpler. One is dead." Grimly blunt perhaps, but this poem shows Winters in perfect control of his statement; the many metrical variations indicate great assurance. "The Fable" is different. The sonnet section of the book draws to a close with a convincing dissolution of the sonnet form: this poem is in blank verse; and the eighth line, the volta, is not only split in two but is also one foot short. The first twelve lines of the poem suggest that the fable concerns Winters' familiar theme: the tension between matter and mind. The ocean erodes mental structures and is best resisted. But as the waves recede, so does Winters' confidence; in the last two lines, he ad-

YVOR WINTERS / 793 mits that the mind cannot function on its own. The last quality attributed to the ocean, "discriminate," complicates the dichotomy. The word is used adjectivally in its etymological sense of separate, but as a verb it customarily refers to the essential operation of the brain. The ocean retreats, then, taking with it the ability of the brain to perform its normal function. The sheen of matter, at the least, allows the mind to elaborate meanings, fables; when the wave ebbs, the fable is gone. The poem is cast in this partly dissolute sonnet form in order to suggest just how enamored Winters really was of the "Flower-surface" of the material world. When he reprinted the poem in his Poems (1940), he nearly destroyed it by leaving off the last three lines; having committed himself to a more balanced, less plaintive version of this "fable" in "The Slow Pacific Swell" (1931), he seems unwilling to let the ocean heave its potent sway over the mind. Unfortunately, only the truncated version of this poem is known to most of Winters' readers. The next poem in both The Proof and the Collected Poems, "The Empty Hills" (1929), describes the area around his father's home in Flintridge, Pasadena; it is the first of two remarkable poems about the very distinctive southern California landscape. The grandeur of deep afternoons, The pomp of haze on marble hills, Where every whitewalled villa swoons Through violence that heat fulfills, Pass tirelessly and more alone Than kings that time has laid aside. Safe on their massive sea of stone The empty tufted gardens ride. Here is no music, where the air Drives slowly through the airy leaves. Meaning is aimless motion where The sinking hummingbird conceives.

No book nor picture has inlaid This life with darkened gold, but here Men passionless and dumb invade A quiet that entrances fear. A number of themes from other poems in The Proof are drawn together here. Most obviously, the poem develops three key terms— music, meaning, and motion—from "The Fable." In this landscape, meaning and motion are not alternatives vying with each other—motion is the only meaning here; conception is left to the hummingbird, which spends all of its en1 ergy in motion. The poems in both of the other sections ("The Red Month," "The Vigil," and "Apollo and Daphne" are examples) depict natural processes as physically violent; Parkinson observes that Winters had been especially affected by the mechanistic physics of Jacques Loeb. When Winters refers to the air driving through the leaves, he is speaking literally: throughout this book, he examines the natural process on the molecular level; on that level, heat is violent. Conversely, from the bird's-eye view, the Pasadena hills are riding on a sea of stone. Part of his accomplishment in this poem is maintaining both these analytical perspectives—molecular and geological—at once, though the main force of Winters' technical power is felt elsewhere: in the way the syntax is varied and stretched over the metrical grid of these stanzas. When he began to write metrical verse, Winters was a sufficiently mature and sophisticated poet to realize that metrical norms are not simply to be fulfilled. In both "The Fable" and "The Empty Hills" he plays his wiry syntax against the backdrop of stanzaic patterns whose demands are simple and routine—the sonnet, the quatrain. The particular achievement of "The Empty Hills," however, is Winters' analysis of the quality of suburban life in southern California. The dominant quality is emptiness,

794 I AMERICAN and the diction ("pomp," "swoons") and imagery ("kings," "music") quietly associate this emptiness with pretension and theatricality. "Grandeur" and "pomp" are qualities of human culture; they depart from southern California without notice—for this is a community, the last quatrain claims, without culture. The mute landscape possesses a dignity that the people abjure. The last two lines claim, with very tight phrasing, that men are attracted to this powerfully silent and vacant landscape by their fear of all that culture comprises: social distinction ("grandeur" and "pomp"), music, meaning, books, and painting. This landscape has the power to drug the fears of those who are without passion, without language. Just one year after The Proof appeared, Winters published The Journey and Other Poems, his greatest single collection of poems. He developed amazingly in what seems to have been a single year; in 1931 he was a new poet. One small sign of the change is that he had the confidence to begin and end the book with poems that display an aspect of himself that had not appeared earlier in his verse: both of these poems were written by a critic. The first, "The Critiad," is "A Poetical Survey of Recent Criticism"; Winters has his fun with nearly everyone. Speaking of Morton Dauwen Zabel and Edmund Wilson, then editors of two journals that routinely published Winters, Poetry and the New Republic, he says: Men with less mind than Blackmur or than Burke, And so just able to find steady work, Meticulous with influence and date, They hesitate, suggest, and hesitate, Not seldom right, always a trifle late. His point of course is serious. He was convinced that he lived in a great era of verse writing. Critics then had the opportunity and responsibility to help direct contemporary poetry; to leave the job of judging to posterity was, for

WRITERS

Winters, a lack of nerve—and that would surely damage those talents that could profit from instruction. And without sound criticism, the great poets, the best models, may not even be read: And meanwhile Hardy, that heroic oak, Is still found dull, Williams a standing joke, And Bridges simple; Sturge Moore goes unread; Miss Crapsey and Miss Moore alike are dead. On any bargain counter you can buy Old Stevens for a quarter: let him lie. Now Mina Loy's hard rhetoric is nought, Waits naked in a night of print, unsought. Malice, suspicion, calculating hate Are meted justly out to Allen Tate. Each metaphysic foetus judges best. Great poets all! God give them all good rest! Winters had resisted thinking of himself as a professional critic until 1931, but with the publication of The Journey he had achieved his poetic style and could then afford to identify himself as a teacher and critic. In the last poem, "December Eclogue," he gives a candid, compelling account of his own daily activity as a heavily burdened instructor of English and a wearied polemicist: Nights that I've spent alone with pen and page, Mastering shadows of our daemonic age, For innocence to fumble, fill the mind. And I am sunk in stupor, gone half-blind. Such are my country nights! By the full moon I cool the blood that coffee heats too soon, Coffee and critics, and the mouldering fire. For academic rites outlive desire, And Controversy's very self is dead— Bred in the heart, she perished in the head. This isxnot the sort of personal experience that poets of Winters' generation and later have felt comfortable describing in their poems; to admit in a poem to an academic career entails

YVOR WINTERS / 795 considerable risk. Suicide, cruelty, alcoholism, or promiscuity—these are now the more common, conventional admissions. The still powerful common taste is for picturesque poets. Winters knew that to capitulate to such base taste often involves a dishonest and cowardly betrayal of one's own class. He was never ashamed or even timid about being an intellectual and an academic poet, and before 1931 he had learned to take pride in his activity as a critic. At the same time, he showed another kind of candor, one that should be easy to admire: What has he found there? Life, it seems, is this: To learn to shorten what has moved amiss; To temper motion till a mean is hit, Though the wild meaning would unbalance it; To stand, precarious, near the utter end; Betrayed, deserted, and alone descend, Blackness before, and on the road above The crowded terror that is human love; To still the spirit till the flesh may lock Its final cession in eternal rock. This is the middle stanza of "The Grave," a poem written after his father's death, and the writing is very powerful. The courage to speak plainly about the meaning of life was extremely rare among Winters' contemporaries; it rests upon a conviction that poetry engages the grand, perennial, urgent human issues. Winters speaks his mind—and the sense of a speaking voice in 1931 is convincing—without coyness, without irony or evasive figures, about what every person wants to know, what life is, or seems to be. This stoical, dignified, and measured statement will bear comparison to the writing of the greatest poet-critic in English, Samuel Johnson. < And the earnestness that enabled Winters to write so directly is exactly what warrants such lofty comparison. Between the opening and closing poems of The Journey are six extraordinary poems—

"The Slow Pacific Swell," "The Marriage," "On a View of Pasadena from the Hills," "The Grave," "The Journey," and "A Vision"—that assure Winters a permanent place in American literary history; two of these are the best poems of his career. This is the first strophe of "The Slow Pacific Swell," the second poem in The Journey: Far out of sight, forever stands the sea, Bounding the land with pale tranquillity. When a small child, I watched it from a hill At thirty miles or more. The vision still Lies in the eye, soft blue and far away: The rain has washed the dust from April day; Paint-brush and lupine lie against the ground; The wind above the hill-top has the sound Of distant water in unbroken sky; Dark and precise, the little steamers ply— Firm in direction, they seem not to stir. That is illusion. The artificer Of quiet, Distance, holds me in a vise And holds the ocean steady to my eyes. None of Winters' earlier poems is quite like this; in 1931 he was writing with his full powers. The play of syntax, lineation, and rhyme holds these lines together in a unit coherent enough to be spoken of as a paragraph. Winters was concerned that the poem have just this sort of structural unity, which must be why he composed the poem in three fourteen-line stanzas, although this suggestion of stanzaic structure is superfluous. The very first lines of the poem lay claim to a full, unrestricted diction: words such as "forever," "pale," "small," "soft," and "distant" were debased coinage in 1931; Winters redeemed these words from stale poetic diction by employing them in this context of exact, fresh description (lines 6 and 7) and tough concision. This commanding poetic style is used in the first stanza, as Winters says, to recreate an illusion, a child's perception. The exact description and the present-tense verbs following the

796 I AMERICAN colon convey that childish vision. When the third-from-last line pulls the stanza up short, the sense of illusion applies not only to the ships that seem to stand still but also to the entire vision of a peaceful sea. Only distance can make the material world seem peaceful; examined closely (as it was in the 'Tire Sequence"), matter is thoroughly violent with entropy. In the second stanza Winters recalls a time when he overcame that distance and nearly drowned: .. .The skull Felt the retreating wash of dreaming hair. Half drenched in dissolution, I lay bare. I scarcely pulled myself erect; I came Back slowly, slowly knew myself the same. That was the ocean. ... There is no illusion of presence here; the experience was sufficiently terrifying that Winters does not try to bring it back to immediacy with present-tense verbs. The experience stays in the past as a reminder of a lesson: to know himself means knowing the difference between himself and the ocean; to confuse the two (which confusion the romantic iconography—"dreaming hair," "Half drenched in dissolution"—represents as a cultural and not just personal error) can be fatal. Human beings are not just matter, like the ocean; nor are they merely mammals, like the whale, which is described gorgeously at the close of the second strophe. Seeing the whale rise majestically and sink mysteriously convinces Winters that he himself is no Ishmael: "A landsman, I. ..." Yet the next three lines of this last stanza express a desire for cautious proximity to the sea. I would be near it on a sandy mound, And hear the steady rushing of the deep While I lay stinging in the sand with sleep. From thirty miles away, the imagination can romanticize the sea; Winters wants to stay at

WRITERS

the shore's edge, where he can know the sea for what it is without being overwhelmed by its power. As a child, he could only imagine the sound of the water (lines 8 and 9); now he wants to live with its sound. Sleeping on the sand is Winters' way of repeating the experience of immersion (in stanza 2), when the water "like sand" pressed his "dreaming hair" to the deck. Once this measured relation to the sea has been expressed, Winters begins to unveil the allegory of the poem. The land represents the unfeeling ("numb") but precise security of a life led by the mind; the sea, of course, represents all the dark, unconscious ("Sleeping"), blind, chaotic power that the mind cannot master. The poem is written in praise of having it, after some discriminating adjustments, both ways. "On a View of Pasadena from the Hills" is Winters' greatest achievement and a wonderful poem in absolute terms. "The Empty Hills," published just a year earlier, was the first attempt to write this extraordinary landscape poem, as "The Fable" was an early attempt at "The Slow Pacific Swell." The death of Winters' father that year seems to have been the impetus for three of the eight poems of The Journey—"On a View," "The Grave," and "A Vision." One of the effects of this loss was the opening up of new subject matter for Winters, whose tendency, like Wallace Stevens', was to return repeatedly to the ideas that mattered most to him. With impressive honesty, "On a View" examines urban, technological progress. Before 1931, Winters had considerable success with descriptive poetry and with intellectualhistorical and philosophical themes; some of the best of his later poems, like "On a View," deal with cultural-historical subjects. The poem opens in the less than half-light before the early dawn. Winters describes with great exactness the way the light varies across the hilly landscape. Nowhere is it plainer that he is a western, nonurban poet:

YVOR WINTERS / 797 That summer crater smoked like slaking lime, The hills so dry, so dense the underbrush, That where I pushed my way the giant hush Was changed to soft explosion as the sage Broke down to powdered ash, the sift of age, And fell along my path, a shadowy rift. These excellent lines come from familiarity with a strange locale; Winters spent most of his boyhood in southern California. But they come too, of course, from William Wordsworth, who presides rather grandly over much of this poem. (The occasion of the poem—a return to a landscape known physically as a child—is almost Wordsworth's special property; and several thematic and verbal echoes of Wordsworth here are too obvious to deserve remark. The last two lines quoted, though, are Wordsworthian in another sense: they place the caesura just after the third foot and before an appositional phrase beginning with an article, which is a Wordsworthian metrical signature—"We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!") Winters renders the particular strangeness of this landscape partly by showing how it is at times and in particular areas lush, at other times or just over a hill, powdery dry. This aspect of the Los Angeles landscape comes, in the course of the poem, to be overlaid by the competition of trees, deer, and concrete. One of the most striking things about Winters' descriptive language, and about his mature poetry in general, is that he makes traditional poetic diction render his unusual perception with extreme accuracy: Below the windows, the lawn matted deep, Under its close-cropped tips, with dewy sleep, Gives off a faint hush, all its plushy swarm Alive with coolness reaching to be warm. This is an act of poetic renovation, but also of muscle-flexing. No conventions of poetic diction could be more obvious to Winters' readers than

the once Miltonic and later eighteenth-century habit of converting a noun into an adjective by adding a "-y" and pairing that manufactured modifier with another noun. Winters invokes this formula twice here in a passage based on close observation and intimate knowledge of the coming of light to this landscape, where the dews are in fact quite heavy. There are other seventeenth-century techniques worth noting here: the prosodic elisions of "towers," "shadowy," "tremulous"; and the rhyming of primary- and secondary-stressed syllables ("perplexedly" / "living tree"). These techniques of diction and prosody situate Winters' effort in a complicated relation to literary history: his readers should understand that this poem derives from a tradition of landscape poetry, in particular the prospect poem that throve in the seventeenth (most notably in John Denham's "Cooper's Hill"), eighteenth (Alexander Pope's "Windsor Forest," Thomas Gray's "Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College"), and nineteenth centuries (Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Lines Written Among the Euganean Hills," John Keats's "I Stood Tiptoe Upon a Little Hill"). Winters goes out of his way to remind his reader of the importance of Wordsworth as a model here, partly because Wordsworth worked so hard to isolate himself from the very conventions of poetic diction that Winters exploits. Winters had no sympathy with the argument of the preface to Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads (in fact, he ignores this crucial document of literary history). All corners of the language, Winters thought, could be occupied by a contemporary poet. (Pound and Eliot held this position too.) Conventions rule out no word, but they do load some with the weight of history. Winters prides himself here on being able to heft a heavy load of poetic conventions into his greatest poem; "On a View" cries out for elevation above a number of the famous poets Winters thought overrated—Pope, Gray, Wordsworth, Shelley,

798 I AMERICAN Keats. There is a sense, in "On a View," of beating the opposition at its own game. This particular landscape is especially marked by cultural aspirations. Winters does not explore the ways in which the Spanish displaced and subjugated the native population, nor the ways in which Xnglo-Americans have more recently displaced the Latin-American culture; these themes would wait until "The California Oaks" (1936). He is more struck by the fact that the recently imported palm trees have yet more recently been eliminated, though the nonnative acacia and eucalyptus trees now obscure the hills from view. These matters are telling, because they reflect the southern California tradition of supplanting the native. Winters' father's garden is still young, terraced against the sloping, eroding hill, and the glass house has no more convincing claim to native authenticity than does William Randolph Hearst's San Simeon. Still, Winters frankly expresses his sympathy for his father and his father's friends: Too firmly gentle to displace the great, He crystallized this vision somewhat late; Forbidden now to climb the garden stair, He views the terrace from a window-chair. His friends, hard-shaken by some twenty years, Tremble with palsy and with senile fears, In their late middle age gone cold and gray. Fine men, now broken. That the vision stay, They spend astutely their depleted breath, With tired ironic visage wait for death. The judgments expressed in this poem are, above all, poised. The first line of this particular passage might almost have come from Johnson's poem "On the Death of Dr. Richard Levet," so discriminating is the epithet "firmly gentle," so understanding is Winters of his father's social humility, even after the archness of the next line has been taken into account. His

WRITERS

father's friends have suffered mainly time and suburbanization, and not all that much of time, though they are thoroughly broken now. The last line of this passage turns back against the confidence that allowed Winters himself the irony of the line about his father's late-crystallized vision; these men wear an irony more easily justified, probably more knowing than Winters' own. These are some of the people who have imposed their fantasies on the landscape, for a little while, and now they are passing, like the palms, like the deer. Here is the last strophe of this great poem: Cement roads mark the hills, wide, bending free Of cliff and headland. Dropping toward the sea, Through suburb after suburb, vast ravines Swell to the summer drone of fine machines. The driver, melting down the distance here, May cast in flight the faint hoof of a deer Or pass the faint head set perplexedly. And man-made stone outgrows the living tree, And at its rising, air is shaken, men Are shattered, and the tremor swells again, Extending to the naked salty shore, Rank with the sea, which crumbles evermore. Winters saw the home of his father's imagining sit hardly lived in, like a newly manufactured museum piece, and saw too his father's friends gone prematurely feeble, "shaken" by the growth of Los Angeles concrete; he knew too that the brush and trees described so well in the second, third, and fourth strophes were being edged out by the new freeways. Yet the automobiles are genuinely "fine"; they drone like the bees hiving in these suburban villas. The omnidirectional sprawl of Los Angeles is part of a long-continuing process, like erosion, that must run its course. Judgments cannot be final; no one's hands are clean. The poem ends with a sense of the inevitability of the historical

YVOR WINTERS / 799 process, and this was to be Winters' great theme in many of the best of his remaining poems, especially those about World War II. Winters was able to write "The Slow Pacific Swell" and "On a View of Pasadena from the Hills," his two best poems, only because he found a new form. All of the poems in The Journey are written in heavily enjambed iambic pentameter couplets. The first poem in the book, "The Critiad," might make one think that Dryden and Pope were the models for this use of the couplet, but that was not the case. Neither of them used enjambment in a way comparable to that of Winters. One critic claims that Winters pretty much invented this style in which enjambed couplets accrete into verse paragraphs, but that is not quite right either. Winters often spoke of his deep admiration for Ben Jonson's use of the couplet, and in his early years at Stanford he studied Jonson with his mentor William Dinsmore Briggs. These are the last ten lines of Jonson's "To Heaven": I know my state, both full of shame, and scorn, Conceived in sin, and unto labor born, Standing with fear, and must with horror fall, And destined unto judgment, after all. I feel my griefs too, and there scarce is ground, Upon my flesh t'inflict another wound. Yet dare I not complain, or wish for death With holy Paul, lest it be thought the breath Of discontent; or that these prayers be For weariness of life, not love of Thee. Winters admired this poem immensely ("The poem has no faults that I can discover..."), largely for technical reasons. He said in 1967: The heroic couplet is used in these respects with a skill that one can seldom find equalled within similar limits by Dryden or Pope. The relationship of sentence-structure to linear and stanzaic

structure is similarly brilliant.... Within these sentences there is considerable variety of structure regardless of length, this variety affecting not merely the sentence but the rhythm of the line and of the group of lines. Winters was perfectly right about "To Heaven," and the same observations must be brought to bear on the verse of "The Slow Pacific Swell" and "On a View," if those poems are to be fully appreciated; Winters' own departure from the confines of this small stanzaic form are even more frequent and marked than Jonson's. His sense in 1931 of how far the heroic couplet had been stretched by didactic poets using the syntax of explanation certainly derived in part also from Henry Vaughan's "The Lamp": Tis dead night round about: Horrour doth creepe And move on with the shades; stars nod and sleepe, And through the dark aire spin a firie thread Such as doth gild the lazie glow-worms bed. Yet, burn'st thou here, a full day; while I spend My rest in Cares, and to the dark world lend These flames, as thou dost thine to me; I watch That houre, which must thy life, and mine dispatch; But still thou doest out-goe me, I can see Met in thy flames, all acts of piety; Thy light, is Charity; thy heat, is Zeale: And thy aspiring, active fires reveale Devotion still on wing; Then, thou dost weepe Still as thou burn'st, and the warme droppings creepe To measure out thy length, as if thou'dst know What stock, and how much time were left thee now. . . .

800 I AMERICAN Although Winters did not comment upon the play of syntax across the couplets here, Vaughan was probably an even more adventurous model in this regard than Jonson. And by 1929 Winters' need for such a form was apparent. As early as 1924, when "The Rows of Cold Trees" appeared, his poems show a desire to write longer poems that could be successfully descriptive and discursive, poems that could sustain a line of statement over many lines. "The Rows of Cold Trees" was not successful, and neither was his subsequent attempt to elaborate a larger form, the "Fire Sequence" (1927). Vaughan and Jonson seem to have shown Winters a way of accomplishing what he and Crane had failed to achieve. In Winters' hands this form was so effective that he could write satiric verse, like that in "The Critiad"; meditative poems, likb "The Slow Pacific Swell" and "On a View"; and psychological-visionary poetry, like that of "A Vision." It was kn all-purpose form for a short while, and the result was great poetry. In 1934 Winters published a pamphlet of mostly short poems, Before Disaster; and he was sure enough of his intent to set out a thematic and stylistic apology for the poetry in a foreword. Winters was proud of the fact that he was both poet and critic. The poems in this collection were not so ambitious as those of The Journey, but there are a few excellent ones here -and significant reasons too for Winters' modesty. In 1934, he knew that war was coming. Just how intellectuals and poets ought to comprehend and represent the historical events leading to war and the cultural effects of those events was a more difficult matter for him than for many of his contemporaries—consequently, he managed to write fine poems on this theme. By the Road to the Air-Base The calloused grass lies hard Against the cracking plain:

WRITERS Life is a grayish stain; The salt-marsh hems my yard. Dry dikes rise hill on hill: In sloughs of tidal slime Shell-fish deposit lime, Wild sea-fowl creep at will. The highway, like a beach, Turns whiter, shadowy, dry: Loud, pale against the sky, The bombing planes hold speech. Yet fruit grows on the trees; Here scholars pause to speak; Through gardens bare and Greek, I hear my neighbor's bees.

This is a deliberate revision of a famous poem by William Carlos Williams that Winters admired, "By the Road to the Contagious Hospital." Williams' poem concerns the coming of spring; Winters' the coming of war. The first three quatrains suggest, through the imagistic techniques that Winters had long mastered, that the planes taking off on maneuvers from the air base near his home will render the landscape below as barren as the one from which the bay waters have retreated. However, even before the adversative last quatrain, he suggests an ambiguous doubt in the last line of the third quatrain: the planes seem to "hold speech" in the sense that their noise prevents one from speaking; but there is also the suggestion that what the bomber planes "hold," that is, carry, can be understood as a form of statement (presumably about American willingness to curb militarily the growth of fascism). In the last quatrain, Winters' doubt is plain and unresolved. He juxtaposes (though with that nonmodernist signpost "yet") apparently opposed aspects of life in the Palo Alto area: the military, domestic, and academic lives in fact all proceed in close proximity, and may even be systematically interdependent. Yet just how one

YVOR WINTERS / 801 aspect may depend upon another, Winters does not presume to explain; to express that humility in the face of so difficult and momentous a situation, the modernist methods of juxtaposition and verbal or imagistic echo ("Shell-fish deposit lime" / "bombing planes"; "planes hold speech" / "scholars pause to speak"; "bombing planes" / "neighbor's bees") were exactly right. Winters was sufficiently impressed by the complexity of political events in 1934 to see the need to refrain from judgment. After going through the most important changes of his poetic career between 1928 and 1931, and writing the great poems of The Journey, Winters continued to develop in still another direction in the early 1930's. After 1931 he seems to have written only five other poems in his major form, the enjambed heroic couplet: "Alcmena" (1935), "Time and the Garden" (1940), "A Dedication in Postscript" (1940), "To Edwin V. McKenzie" (1941), and "Moonlight Alert" (1943). He wrote many poems in shorter lines and many in quatrains of various line lengths. The most unusual form he developed in these decades was based on the prosody of Emily Dickinson ("There's a certain slant of light") and Fulke Greville ("Sonnet LVI"), although William Blake ("The Tyger") may have been in his memory too. "Midas" (1932), "Chiron" (1932), "Orpheus" (1934), "Dedication for a Book of Criticism" (1934), "To David Lamson" (1940), and "Two Old-Fashioned Songs" (1957) are all written in an oddly truncated trochaic tetrameter. The very best poem in this meter is "Before Disaster," originally published in September 1933 in the New Republic. Evening traffic homeward burns, Swift and even on the turns, Drifting weight in triple rows, Fixed relation and repose. This one edges out and by,

Inch by inch with steady eye. But should error be increased, Mass and moment are released; Matter loosens, flooding blind, Levels driver to its kind. Ranks of nations thus descend, Watchful, to a stormy end. By a moment's calm beguiled, I have got a wife and child. Fool and scoundrel guide the State. Peace is whore to Greed and Hate. Nowhere may I turn to flee: Action is security. Treading change with savage heel, We must live or die by steel. This poem includes, just below the title, the date "Winter, 1932-3," a season of changes. Roosevelt had won the election of 1932 and was waiting to take over the presidency from Herbert Hoover, Stanford University's most famous alumnus—evidently a fool in Winters' eyes. A year earlier, Japan had established a puppet state in Manchuria, after betraying its own pledge to the League of Nations to withdraw its army from there. In Europe, Hitler assumed the chancellorship of Germany in January 1933; in February the Reichstag burned; in March he was given dictatorial powers. The disaster Winters foresaw, of course, arrived in time. And the poem suggests that there was no way for Europeans, Asians, or Americans to rise above or anyway escape the calamitous course of history. Hope lay only in skillful, astute maneuvering within a situation governed largely by necessity; the conspicuous rhythm of the poem makes just this point by pulsing emphatically along, four beats and seven syllables to a line—without a single substitution: "Nowhere may I turn to flee." Within the historical process, the range of practical moral activity is not great, although this was never a cause of despair or even cha-

802 I AMERICAN grin for Winters, who is a bit wrongly thought of as a moralist. In 1922 he told Harriet Monroe that he was interested in art and intellectual activity and not in morality. He was a pragmatic man who measured one poem against another, who had no trouble understanding the need, in some circumstances, for Machiavellian strategies: The Prince The prince or statesman who would rise to power Must rise through shallow trickery, and speak The tongue of knavery, deceive the hour, Use the corrupt, and still corrupt the weak. And he, who, having power, would serve the State, Must now deceive corruption unto good, By indirection strengthen love with hate, Must love mankind with craft and hardihood: Betray the witless unto wisdom, trick Disaster to good luck, escape the gaze Of all the pure at heart, each lunatic Of innocence, who draws you to his daze: And, this frail balance to immortalize, Stare publicly from death through marble eyes. Winters finally had great admiration for those individuals who, after disciplining their feelings, were able to compel corrupt systems to serve noble ends, but they always were, for both Winters and Machiavelli, lone individuals. In March 1933, one of these individuals died, and Winters was moved to write "On the Death of Senator Thomas J. Walsh," an elegy that appeared in the New Republic: An old man more is gathered to the great. Singly, for conscience's sake, he bent his brow:

WRITERS

He served that mathematic thing, the State, And with the great will be forgotten now. The State is voiceless: only, we may write Singly our thanks for service past, and praise The man whose purpose and remorseless sight Pursued corruption for its evil ways. How sleep the great, the gentle, and the wise! Aged and calm, they couch the wrinkled head. Done with the wisdom labor could devise, Humbly they render back the volume read— Dwellers amid a peace that few surmise, Matters of quiet among all the dead. Thomas J. Walsh was a senator from Montana from 1913 to 1933, when he died on his way to Washington to assume his duties as Roosevelt's newly appointed attorney general. He was a liberal Democrat who advocated woman suffrage and child labor amendments; he tried, against serious opposition, to uphold the exemption, under the Clayton Act, of unions from antitrust prosecution. Most important, for this poem, he investigated the leasing of oil rights in California and Montana and uncovered the Teapot Dome and Elk Hills scandals. The one modifier that is significantly repeated in the poem is "Singly," which takes pride of place in two lines. Winters, like Charles Olson and Robert Lowell, held to the New Deal notion that leadership counts; one resistant individual can make all the difference. In fact, the state is almost a fiction, a "mathematic thing." In political contexts, Winters was a loyal and active member of various groups, such as the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, but of course in literary battles he saw himself as that one individual, and he was in the habit of referring to himself as "the Old Man." In 1937, after publishing six collections of

YVOR WINTERS / 803 verse and many essays and reviews, Winters' first critical book, Primitivism and Decadence, appeared. The opening sentences of this classic of modern criticism give an indication of why he deserves a distinguished place in the history of criticism: Before attempting to elucidate or to criticize a poetry so difficult and evasive as that of the best moderns, it would appear wise to summarize as clearly as possible those qualities for which one looks in a poem. We may say that a poem in the first place should offer us new perceptions, not only of the exterior universe, but of human experience as well; it should add, in other words, to what we have already seen. This is the elementary function for the reader. The corresponding function for the poet is a sharpening and training of his sensibilities; the very exigencies of the medium as he employs it in the act of perception should force him to the discovery of values which he never would have found without the convening of all the conditions of that particular act, conditions one or more of which will be the necessity of solving some particular difficulty such as the location of a rhyme or the perfection of a cadence without disturbance to the remainder of the poem. Winters was a direct and explicit critic, at a time when others were not beyond coyness. His ability to state so forthrightly what is to be expected from poetry, for both readers and writers, puts him well beyond the conventions of academic criticism: poet-critics, not professorcritics, say at the outset why poems count. And they count, for Winters, because they add to human knowledge, not because they teach old truths. Like other New Dealers, Winters believed in progress, even in literature, where it has always been rare to imagine overall improvement. The poet makes progress not so much by examining unheard-of subjects as by

exploring language along new paths; like Pound and Eliot, Winters conceived of language as the richest repository of human experience, the wisest, most learned teacher. Finding a rhyme, one may discover an unrecognized truth, hearing one may chart a proper action, for a poem renders "greater the possibility of intelligence in the course of future action; and it should offer likewise a means of inducing certain more or less constant habits of feeling, which should render greater the possibility of one's acting, in a future situation, in accordance with the findings of one's improved intelligence." Poems are instruments of contemplation, but contemplation for this 1930's critic was the proper preparation for action. Not without reason, Winters is generally considered a severe critic. Even in his first book his edge is clear. He would not suffer Robinson Jeffers, another West Coaster, quietly: "his writing, line by line, is pretentious trash." Whether or not he was right is usually not the first question that arises. Winters was impolite. There is a story, one among many like it, that is still told at Stanford English department luncheons: one of his colleagues once complained to Winters that at departmental social affairs the Old Man would talk about Airedales and fruit trees but seldom about literature. 'That's because none of you know anything about literature," Winters is said to have replied. After quoting his friend Allen Tate's assessment of his late friend Hart Crane, Winters said simply, "This seems to me sheer nonsense." And about another poet from whom he learned a great deal Winters wrote: "Mr. Pound resembles a village loafer who sees much and understands little." These breaches of decorum unsettle academics but not poets. Ezra Pound was equally outrageous and never lost a friend on that account. Poets are expected to speak their minds, as professors are not; they dance to different pipers. But to think

804 I AMERICAN of Winters as simply arrogant is a little (though not entirely) misleading. He was arrogant. But part of the story is that in print he was sometimes more importantly modest than his academic contemporaries. He did not claim originality as a critic; Sir Philip Sidney, Matthew Arnold, and Cardinal Newman were his avowed predecessors. More important, he was modest about the capacity of critical language to account for the literary process: It should be remembered in connection with this and other definitions that a critical term ordinarily indicates a quality, and not an objectively demonstrable entity, yet that every term in criticism is an abstraction, that is, in a sense, is statistical or quantitative in its own nature. This means that no critical term can possibly be more than a very general indication of the nature of a perception. Although Winters is known for having rushed into the area of evaluation, where others have tread more quietly, in this early volume he was not at all naive about the mysteriousness and "logical" status of the evaluative process. The definition of canons of judgment, he said, rests upon "certain feelings of Tightness and completeness." [They] can never be exact beyond misconstruction, but by dint of careful description and the use of good examples, one may succeed in communicating standards with reasonable accuracy—to those, at least, to whom it is important that communication should be made. For if values cannot be measured, they can be judged; and the bare existence of both art and criticism shows the persistence of the conviction that accuracy of judgment is at least ideally possible, and that the best critics, despite the inevitable duller moments, approximate accuracy fairly closely: by that, I mean that great men tend to

WRITERS

agree with each other, and the fact is worth taking seriously. For all his statements of principle, Winters was a pragmatist: one poem must be measured more against another than against an eternal standard, and principles command only as much authority as the instances they cover. Winters is one of the greatest critics to have written in detail about matters of poetic style, but subject matter was more important for him than for almost any of his contemporaries. He wrote with a hierarchy of subjects in mind, and in doing so he spoke with the voice of tradition: If a poem, in so far as it is good, represents the comprehension on a moral plane of a given experience, it is only fair to add that some experiences offer very slight difficulties and some very great, and that the poem will be the most valuable, which, granted it achieves formal perfection, represents the most difficult victory. Modern critics often try to be democratic and in doing so pass by opportunities to make important distinctions regarding matter and manner as well. Poems that represent revery and conversation, Winters claimed, "tend to great similarity notwithstanding the subject matter, and they simply are not the most vigorous or important feelings of which the human being is capable." Some matters are more important than others, and paraphrase makes this distinction clearest. Certain poems are more or less betrayed by paraphrase than others, according to their investment in formal uniqueness. It is easy enough to say that paraphrase encompasses what is least important to poetry, but Winters claimed, against fashion, that "many poems cannot be paraphrased and are therefore defective." He was clear about poetry's obligation to its subject, as very few of his contemporaries were. When poets took for granted the

YVOR WINTERS / 805 connection between the sign and its referent, Winters became edgy: [when] the denotative power of language is impaired, the connotative becomes proportionately parasitic upon denotations in previous contexts, for words cannot have associations without meanings; and if the denotative power of language could be wholly eliminated, the connotative would be eliminated at the same stroke, for it is the nature of associations that they are associated with something. This means that non-rational writing, far from requiring greater literary independence than the traditional modes, encourages a quality of writing that is relatively derivative and insecure. Critics who claim that poetry is autotelic, as many of his influential contemporaries did, in Winters' view were, perhaps unwittingly, trying to make poetry trivial. On the connection between the sign and its referent, everything depends. Winters is rightly thought of as a formalist; the great virtue of his first critical book is the close, logical, and explicit connections drawn between moral values and literary techniques. The analytical categories he defined (pseudoreference, imitative fallacy, "convention") and refined (romantic irony, free verse) rest upon an analysis of larger values. "One feels, whether rightly or wrongly, a correlation between the control evinced within a poem and the control within the poem behind it." In Winters' criticism there is no question why certain faults of expression are commonly spoken of as corruptions of style. Developing the terminology of Friedrich Schlegel and Irving Babbitt, Winters said: The essence of romantic irony . . . is this: that the poet ridicules himself for a kind or degree of feeling which he can neither approve nor con-

trol; so that the irony is simply the act of confessing a state of moral insecurity which the poet sees no way to improve. No one has written with greater specificity about this difficult and widely used rhetorical term. And there, in the details (his analysis of Hart Crane's diction or of the heroic couplet), Winters is most useful as a critic. He was an innovative and acute analyst of prosody: he sometimes focused on the subtle relationship between the scansion of a metrical foot and of a word (a trochaic word, for example, stretched over the boundary between two iambic metrical feet); he devised a system of scanning free verse (in the nearly half-century since he proposed this system, almost no headway has been made in the prosodic analysis of free verse); he argued provocatively (though unconvincingly, to my mind) that free verse has a special capacity for a rhythm that runs on rapidly from line to line, conveying meaning in a fast and loose fashion and tending toward a "breathless rush" in which only the most intense feelings are expressed. He was able to show repeatedly that the most exact analysis of poetic technique always offers ways of understanding the meaning of poems. Coming when it did in his career, this first critical book not surprisingly addresses often directly the issues that determined his development as a poet. The argument for metrical poetry, for instance, is that of a recent convert, though in this book he shows himself the closest analyst of free verse of his time. But the most interesting connection between the poetry and prose concerns his very special sense of poetic convention. He defines convention as "the initial assumption of feeling, or value, to which the poem is laying claim." In order to establish a convention, in Winters' sense, generally accepted literary devices may be employed, but

806 I AMERICAN they themselves do not constitute the convention. Conventional language, then, is not in itself stereotyped language, though a strongly defined convention may safely carry a little stereotyped language: in fact stereotyped language may often be used deliberately to establish a convention. . . . In so far as any passage is purely conventional, that is, conventional as distinct from perceptual, it does not represent a perception of its own content, the feeling it assumes is not justified within the passage in question. This is a curious use of the words "convention" and "conventional." Conventions, by this account, are not the inherited weight of literary tradition; they are newly established by individual poets for the purposes of a particular poem. It makes sense that an enthusiastic New Dealer would propose that a term formerly used to designate the limits and rules established by literary history should now be used to indicate the particular program that an individual poet considers relevant to the particular poetic problems before him. Winters' use of the word gives the poet a great deal of freedom, but the retention of this particular term ought to remind one that in the past poets could assume as generally accepted norms of feeling with regard to particular subjects. The modern poet is more on his own in this regard and must improvise. This difficult explanation of convention has a direct bearing on Winters' own poetry, which is most striking in terms of diction. In his early poems, and probably because of the isolation of convalescence, he evolved a stable of words that sometimes seem to constitute the rudiments of a personal code—"cold," "stone," "silent," "alone," "bees." (Several of these words actually came—through the influence of Robert Bly and W. S. Merwin, not Winters—to constitute a generation's poetic diction forty years later.) And the best of his later poems often in-

WRITERS

corporate antique and stereotyped words and phrases; he is a consciously anachronistic poet. Freshness of phrasing generally counts for less with him than accuracy of tone. To establish tone, to express his attitude toward his subject with exactness and brevity, he employs his own code words (in the later poems, "pure," "perfect," "the mind," "the brain," "dust," "wisdom," "justice") and the traditional language and patterns of phrasing that are recognized as having once been "poetic." This very deliberate, even willful, use of words permits him to situate his own utterances in implicit relation to the utterances of older poets or earlier poems of his own. His repetition (three times) of the phrase "the great" in "On the Death of Senator Thomas J. Walsh," for example, may seem artless, but it establishes a dignified, stoical norm of feeling derived from the elegiac and panegyrical traditions. This is accomplished without Winters' having to attempt what could not be managed here: the discursive definition of greatness and identification of "the great." Few poets of Winters' time would have attempted to write a political elegy invoking such feelings. Winters could do so because he had thought his way through the relationship of particular feelings to particular subjects—and because he was an artful poet. The importance of Primitivism and Decadence does not depend, however, on interest in Winters' poetry. After almost a half-century and any number of studies of modernist poetry, it is still one of the two or three most instructive books on the subject. In 1937 it was a stunningly radical and independent book advocating unfashionable causes (to take one little-noticed example: exposition in poetry). Two years earlier a version of the book had served as Winters' doctoral dissertation at Stanford. The initial readers criticized it seriously enough that the chairman of the English department relieved them of responsibility for the project and "di-

YVOR WINTERS / 807 rected" the dissertation. Winters was the last person to have to defend his dissertation in a special, second oral examination. He paid a high price for intellectual independence and for working as both a professor and a poet. His superiors at Stanford once attempted unsuccessfully to fire him, but they succeeded in firing his untenured friend and student, James Vincent Cunningham. Winters was a member of the Stanford faculty for twenty-one years before he was made professor at the age of forty-nine. The director of his dissertation, William Dinsmore Briggs, commanded his respect, and Winters listened when Briggs urged him to study American literature. Maule's Curse: Seven Studies in the History of American Obscurantism (1938) was intended as a sequel to Primitivism and Decadence; Winters wanted to examine the "relationship of the history of ideas to the history of literary forms," which meant that this book would focus more on subject matter than its predecessor did. In fact, much of the book is a meditation on the proper importance of subject matter in poetry. The essay on Poe is Winters' only fully negative critical essay; for all the other writers he ever criticized extensively, Winters felt some significant measure of admiration. Poe is criticized most strenuously for believing that subject matter was of little consequence to poetry: If, indeed, certain human experiences are admitted [by Poe] as legitimate subjects, they are admitted, as we shall see, because the poet cannot write without writing about something— even the most irresponsible use of language involves an inescapable minimum of statement, however incomplete or dismembered; and those experiences are admitted which seem to involve the minimum of complexity. Poe, Winters claims, displayed a comprehensive ignorance of the history of ideas, and this limitation left him "thoroughly at the mercy of

contemporaneity." Although Winters stresses the importance of the history of ideas in this book, and later in others, he was careful to say that "to explain a man's place in history is not the same thing as to judge his value"; understanding and evaluation are finally separate processes. This book is directed chiefly to understanding. The proper place of subject matter in the evaluation of poetry is, as Winters saw it, complicated: "truth is not poetry; poetry is truth and something more." Emerson^ for instance, fares poorly by this measure, because his poetry is "gnomic or didactic" and based upon ideas that "will not stand inspection"; consequently, the poetry is "poor in spite of a good deal of vigorous phrasing." This is not to say, however, that there are subjects upon which Winters could not imagine good poems; he claimed that Arthur Rimbaud's "Larme," "an excursion into the incoherencies of dream-consciousness," surpassed, by virtue of style, Poe's attempts to deal with the same subject. And Winters championed the poetry of Jones Very, of whose ideas he explicitly disapproved. Rimbaud and Very, unlike Emerson, render the truth of certain experiences, even though the ideas they derive from those experiences seem unsound to Winters; Emerson, as a didactic poet, stayed with the ideas, and insofar as they were poor ideas his poems suffer. A genuinely original poem, Winters says, presents not a new idea but "personal intelligence" brought to bear upon an experience, and that intelligence shows in "the minutiae of style." Intelligence, he thought, rests upon the assumption that judgment can be more or less sound and that the human will is a consequential faculty. In American thought, Unitarianism and Puritanism (Emerson and Very) collaborated to discount the importance of the will. The alternative intellectual position, which Winters espoused, derived from Aristotle's M-

808 I AMERICAN chomachean Ethics and survived through the work of the church fathers and the institution of the Catholic church. But Winters held this position on strictly intellectual grounds; as late as 1950 he said with some disappointment and trepidation, "I cannot find my way to Nazareth." Maule's Curse was an important book in the development of Winters' thought; he could not have written it a decade earlier, when he planned a doctoral dissertation that would defend, surprisingly, the intellectual and artistic tradition represented by Emerson, Dickinson, Williams, and Crane. But as a study in the history of ideas, the book will not bear comparison, in terms of the depth of its learning, the refinement of its analytical categories, and its representation of the transmission of ideas, with the best studies of its kind. As a study of literary ideas, it is useful and provocative, even though as literary criticism it does not show Winters at his best; in discussing fiction, always a secondary genre for Winters, he is often impressionistic (as when he describes the stylistic qualities of James Fenimore Cooper and Henry James) and sometimes even a bit laborious (as in the plot summary of Moby Dick). He was a better critic of poetry than of prose, a better analyst of poetic form and literary ideology than a historian of ideas, though unfortunately the history of ideas became increasingly important to his critical work in later years. With these two critical books out in the world, Winters felt that the time was right for a large collection of his poems. He had hoped, in 1938, that James Laughlin of New Directions would publish The Moralists: Poems 1928-1938. Instead, in 1939 and 1940 Winters, a little bitterly, printed by hand on his own press the paperback collection Poems, which spanned his entire career: The kind of political maneuvering which appears to be a prerequisite at present to the pub-

WRITERS

lication of a book of poems is impossible from Los Altos, even if one possesses, as I do not, the taste or the talent for it.... No copies of this book will be sent to magazines for review. The three best new poems in this collection all deal with the theme of time; the two earliest of these are retrospective. In the last five lines of "On Rereading a Passage from John Muir" (1937), Winters reflects on a road not taken: I might have been this man: a knowing eye Moving on leaf and bark, a quiet gauge Of growing timber and of climbing fly, A quiet hand to fix them on the page— A gentle figure from a simpler age. Muir wanted to know the landscape firsthand, through his senses, which is why he had himself bound to a tree in a storm. In 1937 Winters knew that in his poetry and his criticism he had taken on the burden of ideas rather than sensual experience and, knowing that he could have remained a descriptive poet, as committed to the life of the senses as the naturalist, or that he could have become the protozoologist he once planned to be, he was not without a sense of what had been given up, although he expressed no real regret about his choices. In 1938 a more powerful poem on this subject appeared—"A Summer Commentary": When I was young, with sharper sense, The farthest insect cry I heard Could stay me; through the trees, intense, I watched the hunter and the bird. Where is the meaning that I found? Or was it but a state of mind, Some old penumbra of the ground, In which to be but not to find? Now summer grasses, brown with heat, Have crowded sweetness through the air; The very roadside dust is sweet; Even the unshadowed earth is fair.

YVOR WINTERS / 809 The soft voice of the nesting dove, And the dove in soft erratic flight Like a rapid hand within a glove, Caress the silence and the light. Amid the rubble, the fallen fruit, Fermenting in its rich decay, Smears brandy on the trampling boot And sends it sweeter on its way. By 1938 it was clear that Winters was—to put it mildly—a master of the tetrameter quatrain. The theme here is Wordsworthian, as the first line of the second quatrain makes obvious, though the treatment is not. What have been lost are the delicate acuteness of the senses and a conviction of the meaningfulness of the natural process. The recompense? Not a philosophic mind, but a greater appetite. And the answer comes only in images, not in what Winters had, since "The Cold" (1925), spoken of as "commentary." In 1938 Winters moved through the landscape with the intensity of a booted hunter, catching sensations at their fullest, enjoying the crushing, not the watching, of the natural process. The last three stanzas combine the senses of sight and smell, taste and touch, to leave a convincing account of the richness of decay— his own, as well as the season's. This appetite for intensity, immediacy, and condensation is examined and restrained in the best new poem in Poems (1940): Time and the Garden The spring has darkened with activity. The future gathers in vine, bush, and tree: Persimmon, walnut, loquat, fig, and grape, Degrees and kinds of color, taste, and shape. These will advance in their due series, space The season like a tranquil dwelling-place. And yet excitement swells me, vein by vein: I long to crowd the little garden, gain Its sweetness in my hand and crush it small And taste it in a moment, time and all!

These trees, whose slow growth measures off my years, I would expand to greatness. No one hears, And I am still retarded in duress! And this is like that other restlessness To seize the greatness not yet fairly earned, One which the tougher poets have discerned— Gascoigne, Ben Jonson, Greville, Raleigh, Donne, Poets who wrote great poems, one by one, And spaced by many years, each line an act Through which few labor, which no men retract. This passion is the scholar's heritage, The imposition of a busy age, The passion to condense from book to book Unbroken wisdom in a single look, Though we know well that when this fix the head, The mind's immortal, but the man is dead. Winters considered this one of his three or four best poems. The norm of feeling, the convention, this poem assumes can be stated plainly: the ravenous, dark underside of the carpe diem topos, expressed most forcefully in the close of Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress": Now let us sport us while we may; And now, like amorous birds of prey, Rather at once our time devour, Than languish in his slow-chapt power. Let us roll all our strength, and all Our sweetness, up into one ball: And tear our pleasures with rough strife, Through the iron gates of life. Thus, though we cannot make our sun Stand still, yet we will make him run. Winters wrote his poem to control the Marveil in him; John Muir and any descriptive poet know how much depends upon the "Degrees and kinds of color, taste, and shape" that would

810 I AMERICAN be prematurely sacrificed to the reckless gluttony Winters felt in himself. What Winters felt, he said, was the pressure of his time, those years when the United States and the Soviet Union were arming feverishly for the inevitable war with Germany. In Poems (1940), The Giant Weapon (1943), and his Collected Poems (1952, 1960), "Time and the Garden" was placed just after "An Elegy, for the U.S.N. Dirigible, Macon," which closes with these quatrains: Who will believe this thing in time to come? I was a witness. I beheld the age That seized upon a planet's heritage Of steel and oil, the mind's viaticum:

WRITERS

and twenty-eight poems from earlier collections to form a new edition of his poems; after The Giant Weapon he published only a broadside, To the Holy Spirit (1947); a pamphlet of three poems; and three editions of his collected poems (1952, 1960, 1966). His writing of poetry had slowed down, though he still had a few excellent poems to write. The poem that gave The Giant Weapon its title is placed at the exact center of the volume. Here is the concluding strophe of "To a Military Rifle":

Crowded the world with strong ingenious things, Used the provision it could not replace, To leave but Cretan myths, a sandy trace Through the last stone age, for the pastoral kings.

I cannot write your praise When young men go to die; Nor yet regret the ways That ended with this hour. The hour has come. And I, Who alter nothing, pray That men, surviving you, May learn to do and say The difficult and true, True shape of death and power.

The dirigible Macon, based in Sunnyvale, very near to Winters' home, was used to protect the Pacific fleet. Early in 1935, it ran into severe winds off the coast of Point Sur, and the captain was forced to make an emergency landing on the water, destroying the ship but preserving nearly all of the crew. Winters was no critic of the war effort, least of all on the West Coast, where much of his energy was absorbed by a commitment to the civilian defense. Yet he saw in himself, and in his culture, its technology and history (see the fine poem, "John Sutter" [1935], on the history of American rapacity), a greedy, imprudent hunger for purity that might end disappointingly. What launched the Macon was a brainy need for perfection that, in the inevitable struggle with adverse circumstance, would leave behind only "a sandy trace." In 1943 Winters put together five new poems

The preceding twenty-one lines of the poem describe the new M-l rifle as a perfect weapon of destruction whose time has come. Winters was able to write deeply moving poems about World War II because he was candid enough to admit into his poetry a good deal of the complexity of the time. The M-l was a thing to be grateful for in 1942, when the U.S. Army stepped up its adoption of the weapon: it helped win the war against fascism, and Winters held by that objective. Yet warfare technology rests upon an immoral assumption that "life is general," " . . . individual men / Are counted not at all." To maintain this assumption even during a war, he knew, entails cultural loss. The discriminations that poets, philosophers, and historians learn, in time and after sustained effort, to articulate and try to teach to the next generation—these count for rather little before the M-l. In the stately, measured speech of this

YVOR WINTERS / 811 last strophe, Winters faces the mix of his own feelings: he supported American entry into the war, even though his life's work was devoted to refining distinctions that are eliminated from the cultural consciousness by war. The poem derives from the tension between his political understanding of the world in 1942 and his lifelong commitment to values that go beyond the historical moment. This is a great political lyric. In 1943 Winters wrote another first-rate poem about World War II, "Moonlight Alert," which appeared in 1944. Whereas "To a Military Rifle" consists of dignified, meditative speech about the relationship of various ideas and values to an object, "Moonlight Alert" renders an experience in largely descriptive language; in Winters' terms, the first is mainly "conventional," and the later poem represents perception. The sirens, rising, woke me; and the night Lay cold and windless; and the moon was bright, Moonlight from sky to earth, untaught, unclaimed, An icy nightmare of the brute unnamed. This was hallucination. Scarlet flower And yellow fruit hung colorless. That hour No scent lay on the air. The siren scream Took on the fixity of shallow dream. In the dread sweetness I could see the fall, Like petals sifting from a quiet wall, Of yellow soldiers through indifferent air, Falling to die in solitude. With care I held this vision, thinking of young men Whom I had known and should not see again, Fixed in reality, as I in thought. And I stood waiting, and encountered naught. Winters returned to his major form of more than a decade earlier, the enjambed heroic couplet, for this stunning poem. And although the subject matter—the death of young men in

World War II—was rather new for him ("Summer Noon: 1941" and "Night of Battle, Europe: 1944, as regarded from a great distance" also examine this subject), his treatment of the subject goes back in part to his earliest poems, such as "The Immobile Wind" (1920), "Alone" (1921), and "The Cold" (1925), on the dichotomy between sensual and mental experience. The horror of this nighttime air-raid alert for Winters is that it leaves him suspended in the vacancy of his thought. The siren invades the senses so thoroughly that the flowers and fruit lose their color and odor, and the young soldiers he imagines as falling like fruit; dead, they are mere objects, but alive he encounters naught. And he expresses his inability to comprehend this subject fully with a stylistic gesture of respect for the enemy; the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth lines quoted imagine the deaths of Japanese soldiers within the descriptive conventions of the haiku; the horrible dissonance between the beauty of the image and the muddy deaths of young men suggests how remotely displaced Winters felt, by his art and his age, from the terrible experience of his culture. There are other war poems in which Winters expresses regret of the deaths of young men like his students, sadness over the loss that the culture suffers when education is interrupted, and pain at being so removed from the struggle (he had tried unsuccessfully to enlist in Army Intelligence in 1941), but "Moonlight Alert" is exceptional. The poem presents a terrifying experience in verse that is masterfully managed (consider, as one small detail, the play of trochaic words through this iambic poem). Robert Lowell said that Winters' poems "pass Housman's test for true poetry—if I remembered them while shaving, I would cut myself." "Moonlight Alert" and "To a Military Rifle" will be read for some time to come. Also in 1943 Winters published his third book of criticism, The Anatomy of Nonsense,

572 / AMERICAN WRITERS and the provocative title is instructive. The book begins with a chapter, "Preliminary Problems," examining twelve problems in the theory of criticism, and The Function of Criticism (1957) similarly opens with "Problems for the Modern Critic of Literature." Probably because he had come to a coherent understanding of the canons of contemporary taste that interfered with the appreciation of his own poems, but perhaps too because in the 1940's the chairman of his department was trying to have him fired, Winters seems to have decided at that time to devote most of his energy to criticism and teaching; The Giant Weapon was his last collection of new poems. In 1952 and 1960 he added his new poems to the old and published the Collected Poems. In The Anatomy of Nonsense and his subsequent prose books, Winters deliberately elaborated a system of critical analysis and evaluation. He speaks casually of "my theory" and claims, as Eliot and Pound had, that "a really finished critic" needs the talents of both a poet and a scholar. "Unless the critics are forthcoming, literature runs the risk of falling into the hands of the barbarians." By 1957 he knew very well that his poems were behind him; as he grew older, he struck his habitual posture of the Old Man and indulged his own dogmatism. "There comes a time in the lives of some men when the spectacle is no longer informative but the theory is packed with meaning." His last book, Forms of Discovery (1967), was finished while he was dying of cancer of the tongue; it was expressly meant to round out his career as a critic. The older he grew, the more important systematic criticism became to him. The last four critical books—The Anatomy of Nonsense, Edwin Arlington Robinson, The Function of Criticism, and Forms of Discovery—actually add only a little to Winters' theoretical position; on that level, they mainly repeat principles that were clear enough in Primitivism and Decadence and Maule's Curse.

One new emphasis, however, deserves special notice: madness. The moral argument of The Anatomy follows from a curious first principle: if we are able to recognize the fact of insanity — . . . that is, the fact of the obvious maladjustment of feeling to motive, we are forced to admit the possibility of more accurate adjustment, and, by necessary sequence, of absolutely accurate adjustment, even though we admit the likelihood that most people will attain to a final adjustment but very seldom indeed. This assumption that insanity is an inherent evil rests not on argument but on observation—"a single look at a psychopathic ward is sufficient." Sometime in the late 1930's Winters saw one of his students institutionalized after a severe breakdown, and in 1947 he likened the treatment of tuberculosis to that of some forms of insanity; he had more than one way of imaginatively comprehending—and perhaps too a reason for fearing—madness. He was convinced that some forms of insanity "can be both induced and cured"—ideas count at both ends of this process. In his later criticism, Winters' sense of the history of ideas is clear. Most important is his notion in The Anatomy that single individuals have ideas. The unity of the thirteenth-century church owed "far less to the spirit of the age than to the mind of Thomas Aquinas." If Pope had "possessed as sharp a mind as Samuel Johnson the history of the age might easily have been greatly different from what it was." The last sentence of the book reveals how enabling a sense of history this was—especially for a lonely professor of poetry who devoted a great deal of effort to his graduate students: "A handful of brilliant poets, even if congenitally minor, scattered judiciously throughout our best universities, might easily begin to turn us a little in the direction of civilization." After the spectacle of World War II, Winters was more con-

YVOR WINTERS / 813 vinced than ever that a solitary thinking individual—even a poet—could turn the world around: "The Gospels gave a new direction to half the world; Mein Kampf very nearly reversed that direction. The influence of Rimbaud and of Mallarme is quite as real but has operated more slowly and with less of obvious violence." How artistic literature functions is "quite as important a fact as atomic fission"— a bold claim in 1947. On the first page of The Function of Criticism he argues that the critical understanding of literature in general, the theoretical understanding expressed by poets, critics, and scholars, actually determines what literature will be; theory in fact governs history. Understanding, Winters claims, offers the only way of escaping the determinism of history, but it is a perfectly effective way; he held by this rationalist article of faith throughout his career. Winters' last book shows only too plainly the literary pitfalls of this approach to the history of ideas. The greatest poets, in Winters' view, those, such as Greville, Jonson, Herbert, and Bridges, who wrote best about the best ideas, "are trying to exhibit the truth, they are not trying to exhibit themselves, and they tend to resemble each other." Literary history counts for rather little in the presence of what Winters took to be the great ideas; greatness rises above the distinctions that literary historians labor over. Forms of Discovery is an objectionable book on many counts. It was completed with genuine urgency; Winters knew he was dying (the last word is "dust"). And impatience shows: it is often redundant; many of the judgments (such as that of the earl of Rochester, to take an incidental example) are unsupported by analysis; sometimes, as in the case of Samuel Johnson, Winters, who was formerly capable of identifying stunning poems with surprising acuteness, made perverse choices of individual titles; it is impressionistic (Jonathan Swift's "lightness and his wit are so laborious that I, for

one, find him somewhat dull reading") where only great care could possibly render Winters' case convincing; the analyses are often wooden, as in the allegorization of "The Idea of Order at Key West"; and rhetorically this is Winters' most high-handed and least cogent performance ("Lord Byron [1788-1824] seems to have died a natural death, and I am willing to let him rest..."). Yet the worst failure of this ambitious book does not follow from the urgency of the occasion: Winters dismisses most of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century poetry with few qualms because for him the history of ideas, as he understood it, had nothing to do with continuity. In 1957, when he was writing parts of this book, Winters told Malcolm Cowley that a simple knowledge of history would greatly improve contemporary criticism of poetry. But historical knowledge that is too simple can produce crude explanations. Winters owed his subject, the history of English and American poetry, fuller, more refined treatment than he provides in Forms of Discovery; too great a faith in the independence of ideas, it seems, allowed him to try to cheat literary history. The great pity is that so sharp a critic closed his career bluntly. Fortunately, he brought his poetic career to a more dignified conclusion. Winters took his daughter to the San Francisco airport in 1954, and she departed for Radcliffe College. In "At the San Francisco Airport," one of his very last poems, he acknowledges that she is leaving him behind in an important sense: But you and I in part are one: The frightened brain, the nervous will, The knowledge of what must be done, The passion to acquire the skill To face that which you dare not shun. The rain of matter upon sense Destroys me momently. The score:

814 I AMERICAN There comes what will come. The expense Is what one thought, and something more— One's being and intelligence. This is the terminal, the break. Beyond this point, on lines of air, You take the way that you must take; And I remain in light and stare— In light, and nothing else, awake.

This is a great conclusion to a poet's work. The first stanza quoted offers a frank and mixed inventory of personal fears, weaknesses, and strengths; the last two lines of the stanza give a tight, clear, and subtle account of how passion, deliberation, skill, courage, and fear come together. In the penultimate stanza, the syntax is toughly assertive, but behind that the rhythm falters once (the only substitution in this metrically regular poem), in the third foot of the third line, implying a tissue of terror that will not bear full exposure. This is a great poem of acceptance. Winters knows that he must face his own approaching death empty-handed, without illusion of immortality. The machinery of transcendence—the easy resort of poems on death—is only that, machinery: an airplane takes his young daughter, not her aging father, away from the earth "on lines of air." Winters reaches for none of the customary consolations; this is an honest, modern, and forthrightly atheistic poem uttered in a tone sound enough to live with the restraint of plain truth. Winters' major subject as a poet was the extent to which intelligence can open itself to turbulent, meaningless experience, on the one hand, and to the vacancy of solitude, on the other. However, his greatest poem ("On a View of Pasadena from the Hills") turns this subject around to show the limited extent to which the corrosiveness of historical experience can be resisted. Both ways, this is a grand and permanent subject. Winters has said that a poet can

WRITERS

be termed great who has written well about a good subject. Surely he was right that greatness in poetry rests largely on subject matter. In his own terms, there should be no question of his greatness as a poet: he has written with power and intelligence about an important, humane subject. His particular power can be located exactly: he is a masterful strophic poet, with few equals. He could always play syntax against or over stanzaic forms cunningly. Only the simpler, more recognizable stanzaic patterns (the heroic couplet, quatrain, sonnet) interested him, never the display forms—canzonas, sestinas, villanelles—because meter was always an order that was meaningful only to the degree to which it was stretched, opposed, violated. Metrical order always highlights the tough intellectual drive of his syntax. Winters had a distinctly intelligent way of writing about the perils of mind. His poetry, though, surely has its limits. Winters knew what his subject was early, and he returned to it, like Wallace Stevens, relentlessly. His poems are chaste in the sense that they hold to this subject, untouched by the ideas that were in the air or by the other arts of his time. He does not deliver a comprehensive image of his culture, nor did he try. The last paragraph of his last book drives home one last time a point he registered frequently—against Whitman, and Eliot usually: "Finally, let us beware of saying that the best poets of our time deal with the subjects which are most important to our time." The imitative fallacy defines the formal version of this notion: that the form of poetry should reflect the form or formlessness of actual experience. Winters rightly advises caution here, for there are obvious and fatal dangers to measuring poems by their contemporaneity. Yet the greatest poetry articulates the beliefs, aspirations, and experiences of a whole culture; Homer, Vergil, Dante, Shakespeare are the indisputable measures of greatness. Pound and Eliot (and of course Hart Crane) played for just

YVOR WINTERS / 815 these stakes, which is why they were drawn to long forms. They took risks and suffered failures that Winters did not, and their accomplishments can be distinguished in kind from his. Winters is best spoken of as a master of a great, permanent subject who wrote during a period of broad and deep cultural change. Pound and Eliot are greater poets because they represent life in a fuller historical moment than Winters imagines. In no way did he resist his time; it was they, after all, who conceived of history degeneratively. But he knew, and may even have regretted, that he did not often reach out to the historical experience of his culture. When that experience reached him, as it did when his father died in Los Angeles and he wrote "On a View," and when the bombers patrolled the Pacific coast and he wrote "Moonlight Alert," and when the U. S. Army adopted the M-l and he wrote "To a Military Rifle"—when history was his, he wrote unforgettably. Winters wanted to be both poet and critic. His weaknesses as a critic have been widely and vigorously expounded. He seemed notoriously insensitive—though only as a critic, not as a poet—to the poetry of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to the poets who were most obviously committed to the subjects of their time. His emphasis on judgment made him distrustful of irony and, more important, of dramatic methods generally; he showed an unwillingness to have confidence in an audience's ability to make proper sense of a literary experience. This is one reason why he could not write about the major poetic forms—drama and epic. (His taste in drama was not fine: Macbeth, as he saw it, was Shakespeare's best tragedy.) The relationships between people were not a major subject, in his view, and this is another reason for his not appreciating dramatic and riarrative poetry, not to mention prose fiction. His emphasis on the history of ideas did damage to his criticism, because he analyzed ideas schematically; the result was often a simplified history, purged

of the complicating details of transmission and misunderstanding, which, after all, render the history of ideas a rich intellectual subject. In the end, he did not understand literary history as a continuous process. The breaches in his account of English and American poetry are dizzying and often appalling. His strengths as a critic follow directly from his interests as a poet. But he did construct a refined, well-fllustrated account of poetry as the fullest expression of human intelligence; he left neither doubt nor mystification about its importance. He legitimated, once again, unfashionable aspects of critical analysis: convention, prosody, subject matter. And, more than any other modern critic, he succeeded at discovering or gaining attention for unrecognized or neglected poets: Fulke Greville, Barnabe Googe, Charles Churchill, Jones Very, Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, Robert Bridges. Long before fashion caught up with him, he praised Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, Allen Tate, Theodore Roethke, Stanley Kunitz; long after fashion passed him by, he continued to praise Edwin Arlington Robinson. He discerned literary history in the making. Finding publishers and readers for unrecognized poets was a serious matter to which Winters brought intelligence and taste—and perseverence. By all accounts, he was a great teacher of poets. When they were young men, with unpublished manuscripts in hand, Winters showed the breadth of understanding and the discrimination to sponsor, as fellows or students, Edgar Bowers, J. V. Cunningham, Donald Hall, Donald Justice, Philip Levine, Thorn Gunn, Robert Pinsky, and James McMichael. He took this job seriously and hoped to influence literary history by supporting and attempting to guide young poets. Can his success be doubted? The author of "On a View of Pasadena from the Hills," "Before Disaster," "To a Military Rifle," and "Moonlight Alert" will not be long forgotten.

816 I AMERICAN

WRITERS

Selected Bibliography

Uncollected Essays and Reviews, edited by Francis Murphy. Chicago: Swallow, 1973,

WORKS OF YVOR WINTERS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

POETRY

The Immobile Wind. Evanston, 111.: Monroe Wheeler, 1921. The Magpies Shadow. Chicago: Musterbookhouse, 1922. The Bare Hills. Boston: Four Seas, 1927. The Proof. New York: Coward-McCann, 1930. The Journey and Other Poems. Ithaca, N. Y.: Dragon Press, 1931. Before Disaster. Tryon, N. C.: Tryon Pamphlets, 1934. Poems. Los Altos, Calif.: Gyroscope Press, 1940. The Giant Weapon. Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1943. Collected Poems. Denver: Alan Swallow, 1952. Rev. ed., 1960. The Early Poems ofYvor Winters, 1920-28. Denve Alan Swallow, 1966. Collected Poems. Manchester: Carcanet, 1978. CRITICISM AND PROSE

Primitivism and Decadence. A Study of American Experimental Poetry. New York: Arrow Editions, 1937. Maule's Curse: Seven Studies in the History of American Obscurantism. Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1938. The Anatomy of Nonsense. Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1943. Edwin Arlington Robinson. Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1946; repr. 1971. In Defense of Reason. New York: Swallow Press/ William Morrow, 1947. The Function of Criticism: Problems and Exercises. Denver: Alan Swallow, 1957. On Modern Poets. New York: Meridian Books, 1959. The Poetry of W. B. Yeats. Denver: Alan Swallow, 1960. Forms of Discovery. Critical and Historical Essays on the Forms of the Short Poem in English. Chicago: Alan Swallow, 1967.

Lohf, Kenneth A., and Eugene P. Sheehy. Yvor Winters: A Bibliography. Denver: Alan Swallow, 1959.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL STUDIES Davie, Donald. "Winters and Leavis: Memories and Reflections." Sewanee Review, 87:608-18 (Fall 1979). Fields, Kenneth. "The Free Verse of Yvor Winters and William Carlos Williams." Southern Review, n.s. 3:764-75 (July 1967). Graff, Gerald. "Yvor Winters at Stanford." American Scholar, 44:291-98 (Spring 1975). Hyman, Stanley Edgar. The Armed Vision. Rev. ed., New York: Vintage, 1955. Kaye, Howard. "The Post-Symbolist Poetry of Yvor Winters." Southern Review, n.s. 7:176-97 (January 1971). Levin, David. "Yvor Winters at Stanford." Virginia Quarterly Review, 54:454-73 (Summer 1978). Lowell, Robert. "Yvor Winters: A Tribute." Poetry, 98:40-43 (April 1961). Parkinson, Thomas. Hart Crane and Yvor Winters: Their Literary Correspondence. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978. Powell, Grosvenor. Language as Being in the Poetry of Yvor Winters. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980. Ransom, John Crowe. The New Criticism. Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1941. Stephens, Alan. "The Collected Poems of Yvor Winters." Twentieth Century Literature, 9, no. 3:127-39 (October 1963). Wellek, Rene. "Yvor Winters Rehearsed and Reconsidered." Denver Quarterly, 10, no. 3:1-27 (Autumn 1975). —ROBERT VON HALLBERG

SUPPLEMENT II Index

Index Arabic numbers printed in bold-face type refer to extended treatment of a subject

ABC of Color, An: Selections from Over a Half Century of Writings (Du Bois), 186 "Abortion, The" (Sexton), 682 About the House (Auden), 24 "Abraham" (Schwartz), 663 "Accountability" (Dunbar), 197, 204 "Adam and Eve" (Shapiro), 708, 712 Adams, Henry, 93-94, 105 "Addressed to a Political Shrimp, or, Fly upon the Wheel" (Freneau), 267 "Adventures of a Book Reviewer" (Cowley), 137, 142 "Advice to a Raven in Russia" (Barlow), 65, 74, 80, 83 Advice to the Privileged Orders, Part I (Barlow), 80 "Aesthetics" (Mumford), 476 Africa, Its Geography, People, and Products (Du Bois), 179 Africa, Its Place in Modern History (Du Bois), 179 "African Roots of War, The" (Du Bois), 174 "Afrika Revolution" (Baraka), 53 "AFRO-AMERICAN LYRIC" (Baraka), 59 "Afternoon" (Ellison), 238 "Afternoon Miracle, An" (O. Henry), 390 After the Genteel Tradition (Cowley), 143 Age of Anxiety, The (Auden), 2, 19, 21 Ah Sin (Harte), 354-355 "Alcmena" (Winters), 801 Alcott, Bronson, 290 Aldrich, Thomas Bailey, 192 "Alexander Crummell— Dead" (Dunbar), 207, 208209 "ALL IN THE STREET" (Baraka), 53 "All My Pretty Ones" (Sexton), 681-682 All My Pretty Ones (Sexton), 678,679-683 "All Night, All Night" (Schwartz), 665

"ALL REACTION IS DOOMED!!!" (Baraka), 59 All the Good People I've Left Behind (Oates), 510, 522, 523 "Alone" (Winters), 786, 811 "Along the Color Line" (Du Bois), 173 Alpine Christ and Other Poems, The (Jeffers), 419 "Alpine Christ, The" (Jeffers), 415,419 Alvarez, A., 99 "AM/TRAK" (Baraka), 60 "Ambition Bird, The" (Sexton), 693 "America" (Ginsberg), 5859,317 "America, America!" (poem) (Schwartz), 665 "America! America!" (story) (Schwartz), 640, 658-659, 660 "America Independent" (Freneau), 261 American Caravan: A Yearbook of American Literature (ed. Mumford), 482 American Historical Novel, The(Lri&y), 125 American Journal (Hayden), 367 "American Liberty" (Freneau), 257 American Mercury (newspaper), 69 American Negro, The (Thomas), 168 "American Poet" (Shapiro), 701 "American Soldier, The" (Freneau), 269 "American Village, The" (Freneau), 256 American Village, The (Freneau), 256, 257 Anarchiad, The, A Poem on the Restoration of Chaos and Substantial Night, in Twenty Four Books (Barlow), 70 Anatomy of Nonsense, The (Winters), 811,812 "And Hickman Arrives" (Ellison), 248 —And I Worked at the

819

Writer's Trade (Cowley), 137, 139, 141, 143, 147, 148 "Angel, The" (Buck), 127 Angel of Bethesda, The (Mather), 464 "Angels of the Love Affair" (Sexton), 692 Angle of Ascent (Hayden), 363, 367, 370 Angry Wife, The (Sedges), 125 Ankor Wat (Ginsberg), 323 "Anna Who Was Mad" (Sexton), 692 Another Country (Baldwin), 40 Another Time (Auden), 15 "Answer, The" (Jeffers), 423 "Ante-Bellum Sermon, An" (Dunbar), 203-204 "Antiquities" (Mather), 452 "Apology for Bad Dreams" (Jeffers), 427, 438 Apology for Poetry (Sidney), 105 "Apostle of the Tules, An" (Harte), 356 Appeal to the World, An (Du Bois), 184 "April" (Winters), 788 "April Today Main Street" (Olson), 581 Arbuthnott, John (pseudonym), see Henry, O. Archaeologist of Morning (Olson), 557 "Argonauts of '49, California's Golden Age" (Harte), 353,355 Art and Technics (Mumford), 483 Ascent of F6, The (Auden), 11, 13 "As I Walked Out One Evening" (Auden), 13 Assassins, The (Oates), 512, 517-519 "Atavism of John Tom Little Bear, The" (O. Henry), 410 "At Shaft 11" (Dunbar), 212 "At the Birth of an Age" (Jeffers), 432 "Au Bal Musette" (Van Vechten), 735 Auden, W. H., 1-28

"August 1968" (Auden), 25 "Aunt Jemima of the Ocean Waves" (Hayden), 368, 379 Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, The (Johnson), 33, 194 Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois. The (Du Bois), 159,186 "Auto Wreck" (Shapiro), 706 "Autumn Musings" (Harte), 336 Awake and Sing! (Odets), 530,531,536-538,550 Awful Rowing Toward God, The (Sexton), 694-696 Babcock, Elisha, 69 "Backwacking" (Ellison), 248 "BahaVllah in the Garden of Ridwan" (Hayden), 370, 378 Baldwin, James, 40 "Ballad of Nat Turner, The" (Hayden), 378 "Ballad of Remembrance, A" (Hayden), 368, 372, 373 Ballad of Remembrance, A (Hayden), 367 "Ballad of Sue Ellen Westerfield, The" (Hayden), 364 "Ballad of the Children of the Czar, The" (Schwartz), 649 "Ballet of a Buffoon, The" (Sexton), 693 "Ballet of the Fifth Year, The" (Schwartz), 650 "Banjo Song, A" (Dunbar), 197 Baptism, The (Baraka), 40, 41-42,43 Baraka, Amiri (LeRoi Jones), 29-63, 247, 250 "Bare Hills, The" (Winters), 790 Bare Hills, The (Winters) 786, 788 Barlow, Joel, 65-86, 268 Barlow, Ruth Baldwin (Mrs. Joel Barlow), 69 "Baudelaire" (Schwartz), 663 Bean, Robert Bennett, 170 Be Angry at the Sun (Jeffers), 434

820 I BEAU—COLL "Beauties of Santa Cruz, The" (Freneau), 260 Befo' de War: Echoes in Negro Dialect (Gordon), 201 "Before Disaster" (Winters), 801,815 Before Disaster (Winters), 786, 800 "Begat" (Sexton), 693 "Beginning and the End, The" (Jeffers), 420-421,424 "Beginning of Decadence, The" (Jeffers), 420 Bellow, Saul, 109 "Bells, The" (Sexton), 673 Beowulf, 6 Berryman, John, 109 "BETANCOURT" (Baraka), 33,34 "Between the World and Me" (Wright), 228 Between Time and Timbuktu (Vonnegut), 753, 759 Beyond Criticism (Shapiro), 703,711 "Biafra: A People Betrayed" (Vonnegut), 760 Biblia Americana (Mather), 442 Big Knife, The (Odets), 546, 547, 548 Big Sea, The (Hughes), 233234 "Bill" (Winters), 792 "Birthmark, The" (Ellison), 237-238 "Bitter Farce, A" (Schwartz), 640, 657-658 "Black Art" (Baraka), 49, 50-51, 59,60 "Black Art, The" (Sexton), 682 Black Arts Movement, 34, 53 Black Boy (Wright), 235-236 Black Cargoes: A History of the Atlantic Slave Trade (Cowley), 140 "BLACK DADA NIHILISMUS" (Baraka), 39, 41 Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing (ed. Baraka), 53 Black Flame, The (Du Bois), 159,185-186 Black Folk, Then and Now: An Essay in the History and Sociology of the Negro Race (Du Bois), 159, 178, 183,185 Black Magic: Collected Poetry 1961-1967 (Baraka), 45, 49-50 Black Mass, A (Baraka), 46, 48-49, 56, 57 Black Mountain School, 30

Blackmur, Helen Dickson (Mrs. R. P. Blackmur), 90 Blackmur, R. P., 87-112, 136,543,643 Black Music (Baraka), 47, 51 Black Reconstruction (Du Bois), 159, 162, 171, 182 Black Renaissance, 173 Black Spear, The (Hayden), 375 Blind Bow-Boy, The (Van Vechten), 737, 740-742 "Blind Man's Holiday" (O. Henry), 401 Blithedale Romance (Hawthorne), 280 Blood on the Forge (Attaway), 234-235 "Blue Juniata" (Cowley), 144 Blue Juniata: Collected Poems (Cowley), 140 Blues People: Negro Music in White America (Baraka), 30, 31, 33-35, 37, 41, 42, 53 "Boat, The" (Sexton), 692 "Bodies" (Gates), 520 "Bohemian, The" (Harte), 339 "Bones of a House" (Cowley), see "Blue Juniata" Bonifacius (Mather), 461, 464 Book of Folly, The (Sexton), 691,692-694 Book of Roses, The (Parkman), 597,598 Bourgeois Poet, The (Shapiro), 701, 703, 704, 713, 714-716 Bowles, Paul, 17 "Bowl of Blood, The" (Jeffers), 434 Brackenridge, Hugh Henry, 65 "Break, The" (Sexton), 689 Breakfast of Champions (Vonnegut), 755, 759, 769, 770, 777-778 "Breast, The" (Sexton), 687 Brecht, Bertolt, 10, 26, 56 "Briar Rose (Sleeping Beauty)" (Sexton), 690 "Brick Layer's Lunch Hour, The" (Ginsberg), 318 "Bride in the 30*s, A" (Auden), 9 Brides of the South Wind: Poems 1917-1922 (Jeffers), 419 "BRIDGE, THE" (Baraka), 32,36 "Bridge Burners, The" (Van Vechten), 733 Bridges, Robert, 21 "Brief Debut of Tildy, The" (O. Henry), 408

"Brief Encounters on the Inland Waterway" (Vonnegut), 760 Bright Procession (Sedges), 125 "Britain's Negro Problem in Sierra Leone" (Du Bois), 176 "British Prison Ship, The" (Freneau), 261 Britten, Benjamin, 17 "Broken Balance, The" (Jeffers), 426 "Bronze Buckaroo, The" (Baraka), 49 Brooks, Van Wyck, 137 Broom (periodical), 138 Brown, Charles Brockden, 65, 292 Brown Decades, The (Mumford), 475, 478, 491-492 Buck, PearlS., 113-134 Buckminster, Joseph, 66-67, 69 Bucolics (Auden), 21, 24 "Buick" (Shapiro), 705 "Builders of the Bridge, The" (Mumford), 475 Bullins, Ed, 34, 42 Burke, Edmund, 80 Burke, Kenneth, 136 "Burly Fading One, The" (Hayden), 366 Burroughs, William, 320, 328 Burrow, Trigant, 6 By the North Gate (Gates), 504 Cabbages and Kings (O. Henry), 394, 409 Cable, George Washington, 198 "Cadillac Flambe" (Ellison), 248 Californians (Jeffers), 415, 418, 420 "California Oaks, The" (Winters), 798 Call Me Ishmael (Olson), 556 Call of the Gospel, The (Mather), 448 "Galloway's Code" (O. Henry), 404 "Call to Arms" (Mumford), 479 Campbell, James Edwin, 202 "Canal, The: A Poem on the Application of Physical Science to Political Economy" (Barlow), 73 Canary in a Cat House (Vonnegut), 758 Cantos, The (Pound), 5, 420, 557, 564, 644 "Capt Christopher Levett (of York)" (Olson), 576, 577

Captain Craig (Robinson), 192 "Captain Jim's Friend" (Harte), 337 "Captain Jones's Invitation" (Freneau), 261 Cargill, Oscar, 117 Cassady, Neal, 309, 311 "Caste in America" (Du Bois), 169 Cat's Cradle (Vonnegut), 758, 759, 767-768, 770, 771,772 "Cawdor" (Jeffers), 431 "Change, The: Kyoto-Tokyo Express" (Ginsberg), 313, 329 "Changing Same, The" (Baraka), 47, 51, 53 Channing, William Ellery, 285 Channing, William Henry, 280, 285 "Chaperone, The" (Van Vechten), 728 Chekhov, Anton, 6 Chesnutt, Charles Waddell, 174, 193,211 "Child Is the Meaning of This Life, The" (Schwartz), 659-660 "CHILD OF THE THIRTIES" (Baraka), 60 Childwold (Gates), 519-520 "Chiron" (Winters), 801 Christian Philosopher, The (Mather), 463-464 "Chronicle of Race Relations, A" (Du Bois), 182 "Cinderella" (Sexton), 691 "Citizen Cain" (Baraka), 49 City in History, The (Mumford), 495 City Without Walls (Auden), 24 Clara's Ole Man (Bullins), 42 Clarke, James Freeman, 280 Clash by Night (Odets), 531, 538,544-546,550,551 "CLASS STRUGGLE" (Baraka), 55 "CLAY" (Baraka), 54 Clorindy (Cook), 199 "Coal: Beginning and End" (Winters), 791 "Coast-Range Christ, The" (Jeffers), 414, 419 "Coast-Road, The" (Jeffers), 425 Codman, Florence, 92, 93 Coghill, Nevill, 4 Cohen, Hettie, 30 "Cold, The" (Winters), 790791,809,811 "Collapse of Tomorrow, The" (Mumford), 482

COLL—DUTC / 821 Collected Poems (Winters), 791,810 Collected Poems: 1940-1978 (Shapiro), 703, 717 Collected Poetry (Auden), 18 Collection of Poems, on American Affairs, and a Variety of Other Subjects . . . (Freneau), 274 Color and Democracy: Colonies and Peace (Du Bois), 184,185 "Colored Americans" (Dunbar), 197 Color Line, The (Smith), 168 Columbiad, The (Barlow), 67, 72, 73, 74, 75-77, 79 "Columbian Ode" (Dunbar), 199 "Columbus to Ferdinand" (Freneau), 255 Command the Morning (Buck), 129 "Commencement Day Address, The" (Schwartz), 660 "Commentary" (Auden), 13 "Complete Life of John Hopkins, The" (O. Henry), 405 "Compliments of the Season" (O. Henry), 392, 399 "Compline" (Auden), 23 Condensed Novels and Other Papers (Harte), 342 Condition of Man, The (Mumford), 483, 484, 486, 495-496, 498 Conduct of Life, The (Mumford), 485, 496-497 Confidence Man, The (Van Vechten), 737 Conjure Woman, The (Chesnutt), 193 "Connecticut Valley" (Cowley), 141-142 "Conrad Aiken: From Savannah to Emerson" (Cowley), 143 "Conscientious Objector, The" (Shapiro), 710 "Conscription Camp" (Shapiro), 705 Conspiracy of Kings, The (Barlow), 80 Conspiracy of Pontiac, The (Parkman), 590, 595, 596, 599-600 "Constructive Work" (Du Bois), 172 "Coriolanus and His Mother" (Schwartz), 643, 644-645 Corso, Gregory, 30 "Council of State, A" (Dunbar), 211,213 Count Frontenac and New France Under Louis XIV (Parkman), 607, 609-610

Country Girl, The (Odets), 546, 547, 548-549 "Country of Elusion, The" (O. Henry), 407 "Country Printer, The" (Freneau), 269 Cowiey, Marguerite Frances Baird (Mrs. Malcolm Cowley), 138,139 Cowley, Malcolm, 103, 135156 Cowley, Muriel Maurer (Mrs. Malcolm Cowley), 139 Crane, Hart, 89, 152 "Creative and Cultural Lag" (Ellison), 229 "Credo" (Du Bois), 169 "Credo" (Jeffers), 424 Creeley, Robert, 30 "Cressy" (Harte), 354, 356 "Cretan Woman, The" (Jeffers), 435 Crisis (periodical), 157, 158, 170, 173-174, 175, 181 "Criteria of Negro Arts" (Du Bois), 181 Criterion (periodical), 12 "Critiad, The" (Winters), 794,799 "Crow Jane" (Baraka), 38 "Crucifix in the Filing Cabinet" (Shapiro), 712 "Crusade of the Excelsior, The" (Harte), 336, 354 Crying of Lot 49, The (Pynchon), 618, 619, 621, 630633 "Cuba Libre" (Baraka), 33 Culture of Cities, The (Mumford), 492,494-495 Curiosa Americana (Mather), 463 "Daddy" (Plath), 688 Daily Worker (newspaper), 10 "Daisy" (Oates), 523 Dance of Death, The (Auden), 10 "Dancing the Jig" (Sexton), 692 "Dangers of Authorship, The" (Blackmur), 147 Dark Princess: A Romance (DuBois), 179, 181-182 "Darkling Summer, Ominous Dusk, Rumorous Rain" (Schwartz), 661 Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil (Du Bois), 178, 180, 183 Darreu, Robert Donaldson, 89,98, 102 "DAS KAPITAL" (Baraka), 55 Davidson, Donald, 139

Davis, Richard Harding, 393 "Dawnbreaker" (Hayden), 370 Day of the Locust, The (Pynchon), 626 Dead Lecturer, The (Baraka), 31,33,35-37,49 Deadline at Dawn (Odets), 546 "Dear Judas" (Jeffers), 431432, 433 Death Notebooks, The (Sexton), 691,694,695 Death of Malcolm X, The (Baraka), 47 "Death of the Fathers, The" (Sexton), 692 "Death on All Fronts" (Ginsberg), 326 "Death to Van Gogh's Ear!" (Ginsberg), 320, 322, 323 "December Ecologue" (Winters), 794 Declaration of Gentlemen and Merchants and Inhabitants of Boston, and the Country Adjacent, A (Mather), 450 "Dedication in Postscript, A" (Winters), 801 "Dedication for a Book of Criticism" (Winters), 801 De La Mare, Walter, 4 "Departure, The" (Freneau), 264 "De Rerum Virtute" (Jeffers), 424 "Desolation, A" (Ginsberg), 313 Dial (periodical), 168, 279, 291,474 Dickinson, Emily, 4 Dickson, Helen, see Blackmur, Helen Dickson "DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT, THE" (Baraka), 54 "Did You Ever Dream Lucky?" (Ellison), 246 "Difficulties of Modernism and the Modernism of Difficulty" (Poirier), 136 "Dilettante, The: A Modern Type" (Dunbar), 199 "Dinner at , A" (O. Henry), 402 DiPrima, Diane, 30 "Dirge" (Dunbar), 199 "Dirty Word, The" (Shapiro), 710 "Discovery" (Freneau), 258 "Distrest Shepherdess, The" (Freneau), 258 "Diver, The" (Hayden), 368, 372, 373 Dixon, Thomas, Jr., 169, 171, 177

"Dr. Bergen's Belief" (Schwartz), 650 ^Doctor of the Heart, The" (Sexton), 692 "Does Education Pay?" (Du Bois), 159 "Dog and the Playlet, The" (O. Henry), 399 Dog Beneath the Skin. The (Auden), 10 "DON JUAN IN HELL" (Baraka), 33 "Doors, Doors, Doors" (Sexton), 681 "Dos Passos: Poet Against the World" (Cowley), 143, 145 Double Agent, The (Blackmur), 90, 108, 146 Double Axe, The (Jeffers), 416,434 "Double Image, The" (Sexton), 671,677-678 Double Man, The (Auden), 16 Douglass, Frederick, 157, 195, 196, 292, 378 "Do We Understand Each Other?" (Ginsberg), 311 Do with Me What You Will (Oates), 506,515-517 Dragon Seed (Buck), 124 "Draught" (Cowley), 141, 142 "Dream, A" (Ginsberg), 312 "Dream, The" (Hayden), 368,377 "Dreaming the Breasts" (Sexton), 692 Dream of the Golden Mountains, The (Cowley), 139, 141, 142, 144 "Drowsy Day, A" (Dunbar), 198 "Drug Store" (Shapiro), 705 Du Bois, Nina Gomer (Mrs. W. E. B. DuBois), 158 Du Bois, Shirley Graham (Mrs. W. E. B. Du Bois), 186 DuBois, W. E. B., 33,56,61, 157-189, 195 Duke of Deception, The (Wolff), 97 Dunbar, Alice Moore (Mrs. Paul Laurence Dunbar), 195,200,217 Dunbar, Paul Laurence, 174, 191-219 Dunning, William Archibald, 170 Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept (Du Bois), 159, 183, 186 Dutchman (Baraka), 38, 40, 42-44, 54, 55

822 I DWIG—FURN Dwight, Timothy, 65, 69 "Dying Elm, The" (Freneau)? 258 "Dying Indian, The" (Freneau), 262 "Earth, The" (Sexton), 696 "Easter Ode, An" (Dunbar), 196 East Wind: West Wind (Buck), 114-115 "Ecologue" (Ginsberg), 326 "Ecologues of These States 1969-1971" (Ginsberg), 325 "Economics of Negro Emancipation in the United States, The" (Du Bois), 174 Edsel (Shapiro), 703, 704, 717-719 Education of Black People, The(Du Bois), 186 "Edwin Arlington Robinson" (Cowley), 144 Edwin Arlington Robinson (Winters), 812 "Eighth Ditch, The" (Baraka), 40 "Electrical Storm" (Hayden), 370 "Elegies for Paradise Valley" (Hayden), 363 "Elegy, for the U.S.N. Dirigible, Macon" (Winters), 810 Eleven Essays in the European Novel (Blackmur), 91, 111 "El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz" (Hayden), 379 Eliot, T. S., 1,4, 8, 20, 30,91, 98, 103, 136,314 "Elizabeth Gone" (Sexton), 674, 681 Ellison, Fanny McConnell (Mrs. Ralph Ellison), 241 Ellison, Ralph, 33, 221-252 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 280, 288 "Emporium" (Shapiro), 705 "Empty Hills, The" (Winters), 792, 793, 796 Empty Mirror, Early Poems (Ginsberg), 308, 311, 313314,319,329 "Energy Vampire" (Ginsberg), 326 "Enforcement of the SlaveTrade Laws, The" (Du Bois), 161 English Prosody and Modern Poetry (Shapiro), 710 "Enough for a Lifetime" (Buck), 127 "Entropy" (Pynchon), 619, 621

Epistle to a Godson (Auden), 24 "Epithalamium" (Auden), 15 "Ere Sleep Comes Down to Soothe the Weary Eyes" (Dunbar), 199,207-208 Essay on Rime (Shapiro), 702,703,708-711 Essays To Do Good (Mather), 461,467 "Europe! Europe!" (Ginsberg), 320, 322 "Exile" (Gates), 523 "Evil Seekers, The" (Sexton), 696 Exile. The (Buck), 119, 131 Exile's Daughter, The (Spencer), 121 Exile's Return (Cowley), 136, 138, 140, 141, 144, 147, 148 Expense of Greatness, The (Blackmur), 90, 107 Expensive People (Oates), 509,510-511 Experimental Death Unit #1 (Baraka), 46 "Exploring the Magalloway" (Parkman), 591 "Ezra Pound's Very Useful Labors" (Schwartz), 644 "Fable, The" (Winters), 792, 793, 796 "Facing West from California's Shores" (Jeffers), 437-438 Faith for Living (Mumford), 479-480 Fall of America, The: 19651971 (Ginsberg), 323, 325327 "Famous New York Trials" (Ellison), 230 Fanatics, The (Dunbar), 213214 'Farmer's Wife, The" (Sexton), 676 "Far Rockaway" (Schwartz), 649 "Father and Son" (Schwartz), 650 Father Bombo's Pilgrimage to Mecca (Freneau), 254 Faulkner-Copley File, The (Cowley), 140, 141 "Fauna" (Jeffers), 415 Faust (Goethe), 16 "Featherbed for Critics, A" (Blackmur), 93, 151 Feathers (Van Vechten), 736, 749 "February" (Ellison), 229 "Female Frailty" (Freneau), 258 "Festival Aspect, The" (Olson), 585

"Fiction Writer and His Country, The" (O'Connor), 148 Fiedler, Leslie, 87 Field, Eugene, 197 "Fifty Years Among the Black Folk" (Du Bois), 169 Fighting Angel (Buck), 119, 131 Figures of Time (Hayden), 367 "Finding of Zach, The" (Dunbar), 212 Findings and Keepings: Analects for an Autobiography (Mumford), 481,483 Finnegans Wake (Joyce), 2 Firecrackers (Van Vechten), 740, 742-744, 749 "Fire Sequence" (Winters), 791,796,800 "Fireworks" (Shapiro), 707 "1st Letter on Georges" (Olson), 578 "First Things First" (Auden), 13 "First Thought, Best Thought" (Ginsberg), 327 "First Views of the Enemy" (Oates), 508 "First Wife, The" (Buck), 127 "Fish in the unruffled lakes" (Auden), 8-9, Fisher, Dorothy Canfield, 117 "Fitzgerald: The Romance of Money" (Cowley), 143 Flagons and Apples (Jeffers), 413,414,417-418 "Flee on Your Donkey" (Sexton), 683, 685 Floating Bear (periodical), 30 Flowering Peach, The (Odets), 533, 547, 549-550 "Fly, The" (Shapiro), 705 "Flying Home" (Ellison), 235, 238-239 Folks from Dixie (Dunbar), 211-212 "Footnote to Howl" (Ginsberg), 316-317 Ford, Ford Maddox, 107 "FOR HETTIE" (Baraka), 32 "FOR HETTIE IN HER FIFTH MONTH" (Baraka), 32, 38 "For John, Who Begs Me not to Enquire Further" (Sexton), 676 "For Johnny Pole on the Forgotten Beach" (Sexton), 675 "Form Is Emptiness" (Baraka), 51 "For Mr. Death Who Stands

with His Door Open" (Sexton), 695 Forms of Discovery (Winters), 812,813 "For My Lover, Returning to His Wife" (Sexton), 688 For Spacious Skies (Buck), 131 "FOR THE REVOLUTIONARY OUTBURST BY BLACK PEOPLE" (Baraka), 55 For the Time Being (Auden), 2, 17, 18 "Fortress, The" (Sexton), 682 Fortune, T. Thomas, 159 45 Mercy Street (Sexton), 694, 695, 697 Foss, Sam Walter, 197 Four Black Revolutionary Plays (Baraka), 45 Four Million, The (O. Henry), 394, 408 Four Quartets (Eliot), 1 "14 Men Stage Head Winter 1624/25" (Olson), 574 Fourteen Stories (Buck), 126 France and England in North America (Parkman), 596, 600-605,607,613-614 "Freak Show, The" (Sexton), 695 "Frederick Douglass" (Dunbar), 197, 199 "Frederick Douglass" (Hayden), 363 "Free Fantasia: Tiger Flowers" (Hayden), 363, 366 Freeman's Journal (periodical), 260, 261 Freneau, Eleanor Forman (Mrs. Philip Freneau), 266 Freneau, Philip, 65, 253-277 "Friends" (Sexton), 693 "Friendship" (Emerson), 290 From Jordan's Delight (Blackmur), 91 "From the Corpse Woodpiles, From the Ashes" (Hayden), 370 "From the Dark Side of the Earth" (Oates), 510 "Frost: A Dissenting Opinion" (Cowley), 143 Frost, Robert, 4, 19, 26, 103 Frye, Northrop, 101 Fuller, Margaret, 279-306 "Full Moon" (Hayden), 370 "Full Moon: New Guinea" (Shapiro), 707 Fulton, Robert, 73 Function of Criticism, The (Winters), 812,813 "Funnel" (Sexton), 675 "Furnished Room, The"

FURY—IMMO / 823 (Hayden), 386-387, 394, 397, 399, 406, 408 "Fury of Flowers and Worms, The" (Sexton), 694 "Fury of Rain Storms, The" (Sexton), 695 Gabriel Conroy (Harte), 354 "Gale in April" (Jeffers), 423 "Gambler's Wife, The" (Dunbar), 196 Garden of Earthly Delights, A (Gates), 504, 507-509 Garvey, Marcus, 175, 180 Gates of Wrath, The; Rhymed Poems (Ginsberg), 311, 319 "Gegenwart" (Goethe), 26 General Died at Dawn, The (Odets), 546 "General Gage's Confession" (Freneau), 257 "General Gage's Soliloquy" (Freneau), 257 Genesis: Book One (Schwartz), 640,651-655 Gentle Grafter, The (O. Henry), 410 "Georgia: Invisible Empire State" (Du Bois), 179 Giant Weapon, The (Winters), 810 "Giant Woman, The" (Gates), 523 "GIBSON" (Baraka), 54 Gift of! the Black . Folk, The: The Negroes in the Making of America Bois), 179 "Gift of the Magi, The" (O. Henry), 394, 406, 408 Ginsberg, Allen, 30, 32, 58, 307-333 Giovanni, Nikki, 54 "Give Your Heart to the Hawks" (Jeffers), 433 "Glutton, The" (Shapiro), 705 God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (Vonnegut), 758, 767, 768-769,771,772 Goddess Abides, The (Buck), 129,131-132 Go Down, Moses (Hayden), 365 "God Save the Rights of Man" (Freneau), 268 "God's Peace in November" (Jeffers), 420 God's Trombones (Johnson), 201 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 26 Golden Boy (Odets), 538, 539,540-541,546,551 Golden Day, The (Mumford),

471, 475, 477, 483, 484, 488-489, 493 Golden Era (newspaper), 338, 339, 341 Good Earth, The (Buck), 115-117, 118, 125, 132 Good European, The (Blackmur), 91 "Good-Bye to the Mezzogiorno" (Auden), 19 Gordon, Caroline, 139 Gordon, Eugene, 170 Go Tell It on the Mountain (Baldwin), 170 Grant, Madison, 170 "Grave, The" (Winters), 795, 796 Gravity's Rainbow (Pynchon), 617, 618-619, 621625, 627, 630, 633-636 Great Gats by, The (Fitzgerald), 626 Great Goodness of Life: A Coon Show (Baraka), 47 "Great Lawsuit, The" (Fuller), 292 "Greater Torment, The" (Blackmur), 92 "Green Automobile, The" (Ginsberg), 322 "Green Door, The" (O. Henry), 395 Green Memories (Mumford), 474,475,479,480-481 Green Pastures, The (Connelly), 223 "Greene-ing of the Portables, The" (Cowley), 140 Group Theatre, 529-530, 543, 547-548 Group Theatre of London, 10 "Guerrilla Handbook, A" (Baraka), 36 "Gulls" (Hayden), 367 Gunderode: A Translation from the German (Fuller), 293 Half-Century of Conflict, A (Parkman), 600,607,610 "Hangman, The" (Sexton), 680, 691 Happy Birthday, Wanda June (Vonnegut), 759, 776-777 Hard Facts (Baraka), 54, 55, 58 Hardy, Thomas, 4, 26 Harlem Renaissance, 739 Harper, Frances E. Watkinss 201-202 Harris, Joel Chandler, 192, 201 Harte, Anna Griswold, 341 Harte, Bret, 335-359, 399 Hartford Wits, 65, 69, 268 Hasty-Pudding, The (Barlow), 74,77-80

"Haunted Oak, The" (Dunbar), 207, 208 "Having Snow" (Schwartz), 652 "Hawthorne in Solitude" (Cowley), 143 Hayden, Robert, 361-383 "Head-Hunter, The" (O. Henry), 403 Heart of Happy Hollow, The (Dunbar), 214 Heart of the West (O. Henry), 410 Heart-Shape in the Dust (Hayden), 365, 366 "Heathen Chinee, The" (Harte), 350-351,352 Heavenly Conversation, The (Mather), 460 "Heavy Bear Who Goes with Me, The" (Schwartz), 646 "HEGEL" (Baraka), 53 "Hegemony of Race, The" (Du Bois), 181 Hemingway, Ernest, 221 "Hemingway in Paris" (Cowley), 144 "Hemingway: The Old Lion" (Cowley), 143 Henry, O., 385-412 Henze, Hans Werner, 24 "Her Kind" (Sexton), 687 "Herman Melville" (Auden), 14 Herman Melville (Mumford), 471,476,489-491 "Hermit of Saba, The" (Freneau), 259 Herne, James A., 198 "Hidden Name and Complex Fate" (Ellison), 245 "Hill-Top View, A" (Jeffers), 417 "His Bride of the Tomb" (Dunbar), 196 "History is the Memory of Time" (Olson), 574 "Hoarder, The" (Sexton), 692 Holmes, John, 87 Homage to Clio (Auden), 24 "Homage to the Empress of the Blues" (Hayden), 379 Home: Social Essays (Baraka), 45, 61 Home on the Range (Baraka), 47 "Honkytonk" (Shapiro), 705 Hope, Lynn, 38 Hopkins, Lemuel, 70 Horae Canonicae (Auden), 21 Horizon (periodical), 172, 176 House Divided, A (Buck), 118 House of Earth trilogy (Buck), 118, 123

"House of Night, The" (Freneau), 259, 260 "Housewife" (Sexton), 682 Housman, A. E., 4 Howe, Irving, 99 Howells, William Dean, 198, 352 "How I Went to the Mines" (Harte), 336 "Howl" (Ginsberg), 31, 307, 308, 311, 315-317, 319, 321-322, 327,713,716 Howl and Other Poems (Ginsberg), 308, 317-318, 319 "How to Write a Memoir Like This" (Oates), 509 "How We Danced" (Sexton), 692 "How You Sound??" (Baraka), 30 Hughes, Langston, 31, 33, 61, 170, 173, 181, 227, 228, 233, 361 "Human Universe" (Olson), 565, 567 Human Universe (Olson), 571 Humphreys, David, 65, 69, 70, 268 "Hungerfield" (Jeffers), 416417,436 Hungerfield and Other Poems (Jeffers), 422 Hungry Ghosts, The (Oates), 504,510 "Hunting Is Not Those Heads on the Wall" (Baraka), 45 "Hurricane, The" (Freneau), 262 "Hurry up Please It's Time" (Sexton), 694, 695 Hurston, Zora Neale, 33 "Hymie's Bull" (Ellison), 229 "HYMN FOR LANIE POO" (Baraka), 31,37 "'I Am Cherry Alive,' the Little Girl Sang" (Schwartz), 663 / Got the Blues (Odets), 530 "I Have Increased Power" (Ginsberg), 313 "I Have Seen Black Hands" (Wright), 228 "I Remember" (Sexton), 680 Illustrations of Political Economy (Martineau), 288 Image and Idea (Rahv), 146 "Imitations of Drowning" (Sexton), 684, 686 "Immobile Wind, The" (Winters), 788, 811 Immobile Wind, The (Winters), 786

824 I IN—LITT "In a Hollow of the Hills" (Harte), 354 In Battle for Peace: The Story of My 83rd Birthday (Du Bois), 185 "In Celebration of My Uterus" (Sexton), 689 "In Cold Hell, in Thicket" (Olson), 558, 563-564, 566, 572, 580 In Cold Hell, in Thicket (Olson), 571 In Defense of Ignorance (Shapiro), 703, 704, 713-714 "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities" (Schwartz), 641, 649,654 In Dreams Begin Responsibilities (Schwartz), 642, 645650 In Old Plantation Days (Dunbar), 214 In Ole Virginia (Page), 201 In Our Terribleness (Some elements and meaning in black style) (Baraka), 52, 53 "In Praise of Limestone" (Auden), 20-21 "In Sickness and in Health" (Auden), 15 In the Garret (Van Vechten), 735 "In the Naked Bed, in Plato's Cave" (Schwartz), 646649 "In the Old World" (Oates), 503, 504 "In the Region of Ice" (Oates), 520 "In Time of War" (Auden), 8, 13 "Indian Burying Ground, The" (Freneau), 264, 266 "Indian Student, The" (Freneau), 264 Ingersoll, Robert Green, 198 "Inhumanist, The" (Jeffers), 423, 426 Interpretations and Forecasts: 1922-1972 (Mumford), 481 Interpreters and Interpretations (Van Vechten), 729, 733-734 "Interrupted Conversation, An" (Van Vechten), 735 Invisible Man (Ellison), 40, 170, 221, 224, 226-227, 230, 231-232, 235, 236, 241-245 "lone" (Dunbar), 199 "Irenicon" (Shapiro), 704 "Iron Hans" (Sexton), 691 Irving, Washington, 335 Irwin, William Henry, 192

Isherwood, Christopher, 10, 11, 13 "Islands, The" (Hayden), 373 "Isolation of Modern Poetry, The" (Schwartz), 644 "It Always Breaks Out" (Ellison), 248 "It Is a Strange Country" (Ellison), 238 "It's Nation Time" (Baraka), 53 It's Nation Time (Baraka), 52,53 "Jacob" (Schwartz), 663 Jailbird (Vonnegut), 760, 779-780 James, Henry, 94-95 "James Whitcomb Riley (From a Westerner's Point of View)" (Dunbar), 198 Jarrell, Randall, 109, 135 "Jeff Briggs's Love Story" (Harte), 355 Jeffers, Robinson, 413-440 Jeffers, Una Call Kuster (Mrs. Robinson Jeffers), 414 "Jefferson Davis as a Representative American" (Du Bois), 161 J-E-L-L-O (Baraka), 47 Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century, The (Parkman), 597, 603605 "Jesus Asleep" (Sexton), 693 "Jesus Papers, The" (Sexton), 693 "Jesus Raises Up the Harlot" (Sexton), 693 Johannes in Eremo (Mather), 453 John Brown (Du Bois), 171172 "John Burke" (Olson), 579, 580 "John Burns of Gettysburg" (Harte), 343 "John Coltrane: Where Does Art Come From?" (Baraka), 60 "John, John Chinaman" (Buck), 128 "John Sutter" (Winters), 810 Johnson, James Weldon, 33, 194, 200, 202-203, 206207 Jones, Everett LeRoi, see Baraka, Amiri "Jose's Country" (Winters), 789, 790 "Journey, The" (Winters), 795 Journey and Other Poems, The (Winters), 786, 794, 795, 796, 799, 800, 801

Journey to a War (Auden Isherwood), 13 Joyce, James, 136 "Juneteenth" (Ellison), 248 "K, The" (Olson), 558, 563, 569 "Kaddish" (Ginsberg), 319, 327 Kaddish and Other Poems, 1958-1960 (Ginsberg), 309, 319-320 Kallman, Chester, 15, 17, 24, 26 Karl Shapiro's America (film), 703 Kazin, Alfred, 143 "Keep A-Inchin Along" (Van Vechten), 744 Kerouac, Jack, 31, 307, 309, 318,328 "Kind Sir: These Woods" (Sexton), 673 Kinfolk (Buck), 126 King, Starr, 341,342 "Kingfishers, The" (Olson), 557, 558-563, 582 "King of the Bingo Game" (Ellison), 235, 238, 240241 "King over the Water" (Blackmur), 107 "King Pandar" (Blackmur), 92, 102 Kirstein, Lincoln, 90, 97 "Kiss, The" (Sexton), 687 "Kodachromes of the Island" (Hayden), 367, 380 La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West (Parkman), 595,598, 605-607 "La Tigresse" (Van Vechten), 735, 738 "Lager Beer" (Dunbar), 193 Lane, Homer, 6 Language As Gesture (Blackmur), 108 Last and Lost Poems of Delmore Schwartz (ed. Phillips), 661, 665 "Lauds" (Auden), 23 Laughlin, Jay, 94 Lawrence, D. R, 1,9, 20,89 "LEADBELLY GIVES AN AUTOGRAPH" (Baraka), 49 "Learning to Read" (Harper), 201-202 "LECTURE PAST DEAD CATS" (Baraka), 52 Lee, Don L., see Madubuti, Haki R. "Legend of Monte del Diablo, The" (Harte), 339 "Legend of Sammtstadt, A" (Harte), 355

Leland, Charles, 193 "Lesson, The" (Dunbar), 199 Lesson of the Masters: An Anthology of the Novel from Cervantes to Hemingway (ed. Cowley-Hugo), 140 "Letter, May 2, 1959" (Olson), 579, 580 Letter, A, Addressed to the People of Piedmont, on the Advantages of the French Revolution, and the Necessity of Adopting Its Principles in Italy (Barlow), 80, 81 "Letter to E. Franklin Frazier" (Baraka), 49 "Letter to Elaine Feinstein" (Olson), 561 Letter to Lord Byron (Auden), 11 "Letter to Lord Byron" (Mumford), 494 Letters on Various Interesting and Important Subjects .. . (Freneau), 272 "Letters Written on a Ferry While Crossing Long Island Sound" (Sexton), 683 "Letting Down of the Hair, The" (Sexton), 692 "Liar, The" (Baraka), 36 Liberal Imagination, The (Trilling), 146 "Liberation" (Winters), 791 Life ofPhips (Mather), 451, 452, 459 "LIKE, THIS IS WHAT I MEANT!" (Baraka), 59 "Lines Written at Port Royal" (Freneau), 264 Lion and the Archer, The (Hayden), 366, 367 Lion and the Honeycomb, The (Blackmur), 91 "Lion for Real, The" (Ginsberg), 320 Literary History of the United Staies (Spiller), 95 "Literary Importation" (Freneau), 264 Literary Situation, The (Cowley), 135, 140, 144, 146, 147, 148 "Little Brown Baby" (Dunbar), 206 "Little Brown Jug" (Baraka), 51 "Little Girl, My Stringbean, My Lovely Woman" (Sexton), 686 "Little Local Color, A" (Henry), 399 "Little Morning Music, A" (Schwartz), 662-663 "Little Peasant, The" (Sexton), 690

LITT—MUSI / 825 "Little Testament of Bernard Martin, Aet. 30" (Mumford), 472, 473, 474 "Live" (Sexton), 684, 686 Live or Die (Sexton), 670, 683-687 Living Reed, The (Buck), 129-130 Locke, Alain, 53, 176, 182, 228, 247 "Locus" (Hayden), 361-362, 381 Logan, Rayford W., 171, 194 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 291,353 Long Love, The (Sedges), 125 Look, Stranger! (Auden), 11 Lords of the Housetops (Van Vechten), 736 Lost Galleon and Other Tales, The (Harte), 344 "Lost Sailor, The" (Freneau), 264 "Love" (Olson), 571 "Love and the Hate, The" (Jeffers), 434-435 Love of Landry, The (Dunbar), 212 Love Poems (Sexton), 687689 "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The" (Eliot), 5 "Lovers, The" (Buck), 128 "Lover's Garden, A" (Ginsberg), 311 "Loving Shepherdess, The" (Jeffers), 432 "Loving the Killer" (Sexton), 688 Lowell, James Russell, 197, 291,352 "Lower the Standard" (Shapiro), 715 "Low-Lands" (Pynchon), 620, 624 "Luck of Roaring Camp, The" (Harte), 335, 344, 345-347 "Lullaby" (Auden), 9 "Lynching of Jube Benson, The" (Dunbar), 214 Lyrics of Love and Laughter (Dunbar), 207 Lyrics of Lowly Life (Dunbar), 197, 199,200,207 Lyrics of the Hearthside (Dunbar), 206 Lytle, Andrew, 139 McClure, Michael, 32 McConnell, Fanny, see Ellison, Fanny McConnell McCullers, Carson, 17 MacNeice, Louis, 17, 24 "MacSwiggen" (Freneau), 259 Mad heart (Baraka), 47 Madubuti, Haki R. (Don L.

Lee), 34, 247 Magnolia Christi Americana (Mather), 441, 442, 452455, 460, 467, 468 Magpie's Shadow, The (Winters), 786,788 "Maiden Without Hands" (Sexton), 691 Majors and Minors (Dunbar), 197, 198 "Making a Living" (Sexton), 695 "MALCOLM REMEMBERED (FEB. 77)" (Baraka), 60 "Malcolm Cowley and the American Writer" (Simpson), 147 "Maldrove" (Jeffers), 418 "Malest Cornifici Tuo Catullo" (Ginsberg), 315 Mallarme, Stephane, 1 "Mai Paso Bridge" (Jeffers), 415,420 Malraux, Andre, 221, 232 "Mammon and the Archer" (O. Henry), 394, 408 Mann, Erika, 11 Mannix, Daniel P., 140 "Man of No Account, The" (Harte), 339 Man Who Lived Underground, The (Wright), 40 "Man's Pride" (Jeffers), 417 Mansart Builds a School (Du Bois), 185-186 Manuductio Ad Ministerium (Mather), 465-467 "Many Happy Returns" (Auden), 15 "Many-Windowed House, A" (Cowley), 137 Many-Windowed House, A (Cowley), 141, 143 Manyan Letters (Olson), 571 "Mara" (Jeffers), 434 "Margrave" (Jeffers), 426 "Marijuana Notation" (Ginsberg), 313 "Market" (Hayden), 368, 369 Markings (Hammarskjold),26 "Mars and Hymen" (Freneau), 258 Martineau, Harriet, 282, 288, 294 "Master Player, The" (Dunbar), 200 Mather, Cotton, 441-470 Maule's Curse: Seven Studies in the History of American Obscurantism (Winters), 807-808,812 Maximus Poems, The (Olson), 555, 556, 563, 564-580, 584 Maximus Poems IV, V, VI (Olson), 555, 580, 582-584

Maximus Poems 1-10, The (Olson), 571 Maximus Poems Volume Three, The (Olson), 555, 582,584-585 "Maximus, to Gloucester" (Olson), 574 "Maximus to Gloucester, Letter 19 (A Pastoral Letter)" (Olson), 567 "Maximus to Gloucester, Sunday July 19" (Olson), 580 "Maximus, to himself (Olson), 565, 566, 567, 569, 570, 572 "Maximus to himself June 1964" (Olson), 584 Mayer, Elizabeth, 16 Mazzini, Giuseppe, 299 "Meaningless Institution, A" (Ginsberg), 313 Medea (Jeffers), 435 "Melancholia" (Dunbar), 194 Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli (Fuller), 280, 283, 285 Memorable Providences (Mather), 458 "Memorial for the City" (Auden), 20 Mencken, H. L., 136 Men Must Act (Mumford), 479 "Menstruation at Forty" (Sexton), 686 Mercy Street (Sexton), 683, 689 "Meriwether Connection, The" (Cowley), 142 Merry-Go-Round, The (Van Vechten), 734, 735 "Metaphysics" (Ginsberg), 313 Mickiewicz, Adam, 299 "Midas" (Winters), 801 "Middle Passage" (Hayden), 363, 375-376 "Midnight Consultations, The" (Freneau), 257 Midnight Cry, A (Mather), 460 "Midnight Show" (Shapiro), 705 Miller, Joaquin, 351 "Milton by Firelight" (Snyder), 314 Mind Breaths: Poems 19721977 (Ginsberg), 326 "Mind Is Shapely, Art Is Shapely" (Ginsberg), 327 "Miracle of Lava Canyon, The" (Henry), 389, 390 "Mirages, The" (Hayden), 373 "Miranda" (Buck), 128 Miscellaneous Works of Mr. Philip Freneau, Containing

His Essays and Additional Poems (Freneau), 263, 264, 266 "Miss Emily and the Bibliographer" (Tate), 103 "Mr. Cornelius Johnson, Office-Seeker" (Dunbar), 211,213 "Mr. Thompson's Prodigal" (Harte), 354 "Mister Toussan" (Ellison), 238 "M'liss: An Idyl of Red Mountain" (Harte), 339 Modernism, 1, 8 "Monet's 'Waterlilies'" (Hayden), 361-362 Montcalm and Wolfe (Parkman), 596, 609, 610, 611613 Moon (periodical), 172 "Moonlight Alert" (Winters), 801,811,815 Moore, Marianne, 21 "Moose Wallow, The" (Hayden), 367 "Morality and Mercy in Vienna" (Pynchon), 620, 624 "Moral Thought, A" (Freneau), 262 "Morro Bay" (Jeffers), 422 "Moss of His Skin" (Sexton), 676 Mother, The (Buck), 118119 "Mother and Jack and the Rain" (Sexton), 686 Mother Night (Vonnegut), 757,758,767,770,771 "Motion, The" (Olson), 571 Motion of History, The (Baraka), 55, 56 "Mourning Poem for the Queen of Sunday" (Hayden), 379-380 "Movie" (Shapiro), 707 "Muck-A-Muck" (Harte), 342 Mumford, Lewis, 471-501 Mumford, Sophia Wittenberg (Mrs. Lewis Mumford), 474, 475 "Mundus et Infans" (Auden), 15 "Municipal Report, A" (Henry), 406-407 "Musee des Beaux Arts" (Auden), 14 Music After the Great War (Van Vechten), 732 Music and Bad Manners (Van Vechten), 733 "Music for Museums?" (Van Vechten), 732 "Music for the Movies" (Van Vechten), 733

826 I MUSI—OVER Music of Spain, The (Van Vechten), 734, 735 "Music Swims Back to Me" (Sexton), 673 "My Alba" (Ginsberg), 320, 321 "My First Book" (Harte), 343 "My Metamorphosis" (Harte), 339 "My Sad Self' (Ginsberg), 320 My Works and Days (Mumford), 475, 477, 481 "Mystery, The" (Dunbar), 199,210 "*Mystery Boy* Looks for Kin in Nashville" (Hayden), 366, 372 "Myth of the Isolated Artist, The" (Gates), 520 Myth of the Machine, The (Mumford), 476, 478, 482, 483, 493, 497 Nabokov, Vladimir, 2 Nashville Agrarians, 139, 142 National Gazette (periodical), 266-267, 269 "Nation Is Like Ourselves, The" (Baraka), 53 Native Son (Wright), 170, 235-236 Neal, Larry, 53 "Need for a Cultural Base to Civil Rites & Bpower Mooments, The" (Baraka), 48 Negro, The (Du Bois), 178, 179,185 Negro, The: The Southerner's Problem (Page), 168 "Negro Artisan, The" (Du Bois), 166 "Negro Citizen, The" (Du Bois), 179 "Negro Farmer, The" (Du Bois), 167 Negro in American Civilization, The(Du Bois), 179 "Negro in Large Cities, The" (Du Bois), 169 "Negro in Literature and Art, The" (Du Bois), 174 Negro in Nevs York, The (Ellison), 230 "Negro in the Black Belt, The: Some Social Sketches" (Du Bois), 166 "Negro Love Song, A" (Dunbar), 204 Negro Quarterly (periodical), 237 "Negro Schoolmaster in the New South, A" (Du Bois),, 168 "Negro Takes Stock, The" (Du Bois), 180 "Negro Theatre, The" (Van

Vechten), 735 "Negroes of Farmville, Virginia, The: A Social Study" (Du Bois), 166 "Nehemias Americanus" (Mather), 453 "New Age of the Rhetoricians, The" (Cowley), 135 New Challenge (periodical), 228-229, 232 New Critics, 87-88, 90, 103, 106-107, 135, 136, 137, 318, 416, 639, 698, 703, 713 "New England Sabbath-Day Chace, The" (Freneau), 273 New Negro, The (Locke), 176 New Negro movement, 233 "Newport of Anchuria" (Henry), 409 New Republic (periodical), 139, 140, 142 "New Republic Moves Uptown, THe" (Cowley), 142 New Year Letter (Auden), 14, 16 "New Year's Eve" (Schwartz), 640, 656-657 "'Next to Reading Matter'" (Henry), 399 Niagara movement, 168, 172, 176, 177, 180 Nigger Heaven (Van Vechten), 739, 744-746 "NIGGY THE HO" (Baraka), 54 "Night, Death, Mississippi" (Hayden), 369 "Night-Blooming Cereus, The" (Hayden), 367 Night-Blooming Cereus, The (Hayden), 367, 373 "Night in New Arabia, A" (Henry), 402 Night Music (Odets), 541, 543, 544 "Night-Side" (Oates), 523 Night-Side (Oates), 522 "Night-Talk" (Ellison), 248 "1929" (Auden), 6 "No Change of Place" (Auden), 5 None but the Lonely Heart (film), 546 "Nones" (Auden), 22-23 Nones (Auden), 21 "Noon Walk on the Asylum Lawn" (Sexton), 673 "NOTES FOR A SPEECH" (Baraka), 33 "Notes for an Autobiography" (Van Vechten), 749 "Not They Who Soar" (Dunbar), 199 "Numbers, Letters" (Baraka), 50

"O Daedalus, Fly Away Home" (Hayden), 377-378 O. Henry Biography (Smith), 395 Oak and Ivy (Dunbar), 198 Oates, Joyce Carol, 503-527 "Ode for Memorial Day" (Dunbar), 199 "Ode: My 24th Year" (Ginsberg), 312 "Ode on Human Destinies" (Jeffers), 419 "Ode to Ethiopia" (Dunbar), 199, 207, 208, 209 Odets, Clifford, 529-554 "Of Alexander Crummell" (Du Bois), 170 "Of Booker T. Washington and Others" (Du Bois), 168 "Of the Coming of John" (Du Bois), 170 "Of the Culture of White Folk" (Du Bois), 175 "Of the Passing of the FirstBorn" (Du Bois), 170 "Of the Sorrow Songs" (Du Bois), 170 "Of the Wings of Atlanta" (Du Bois), 170 O'Faolain, Sean, 101 O'Hara, John, 109 "Old Apple-Tree, The" (Dunbar), 198 "Old Farmer, The" (Jeffers), 418 "Old Homestead, The" (Dunbar), 198 "Old Memory, An" (Dunbar), 198 "OF Doc Hyar" (Campbell), 202 Old Regime in Canada, The (Parkman), 600, 607, 608609,612 "OP Tunes, The" (Dunbar), 197 Olson, Charles, 30, 328, 555587 "On a Honey Bee, Drinking from a Glass and Drowned Therein" (Freneau), 273 "On a View of Pasadena from the Hills" (Winters), 795, 796-799, 814 "On Burroughs' Work" (Ginsberg), 320 "On Certain Political Measures Proposed to Their Consideration'" (Barlow), 82 "On first Looking Out through Juan de la Cosa's Eyes" (Olson), 565, 566, 570, 579 "On Lookout Mountain" (Hayden), 380 "On the Coast of Maine" (Hayden), 381

"On the Death of Senator Thomas J. Walsh" (Winters), 802, 806 "On the Fall of General Earl Cornwallis" (Freneau), 261 "On the Folly of Writing Poetry" (Freneau), 263 On the Frontier (AudenSherwood), 13 "On the Powers of the Human Understanding" (Freneau), 274 "On the Religion of Nature" (Freneau), 275 "On the River" (Dunbar), 193 "On the System of Policy Hitherto Pursued by Their Government" (Barlow), 82 "On the Uniformity and Perfection of Nature" (Freneau), 275 "On the Universality and Other Attributes of the God of Nature" (Freneau), 275 "On the Writing of Novels" (Buck), 121 On This Island (Auden), 11 "One Man's Fortunes" (Dunbar), 211,212-213 "ONE NIGHT STAND" (Baraka), 32 "Operation, The" (Sexton), 675, 679 "Opinion" (Du Bois), 173 Options (Henry), 410 Oration Delivered at Washington, July Fourth, 1809 (Barlow), 80, 83 Orators, The (Auden), 6, 7, 11, 18-19 Ordeal of Mansart, The (Du Bois), 185-186 Oregon Trail, The (Parkman), 592, 595-596, 598, 606 "Original Sin" (Jeffers), 426 "Orpheus" (Winters), 801 Orwell, George, 143 "Other, The" (Sexton), 692 Other Gods: An American Legend (Buck), 123, 130131 "Other War, The" (Cowley), 144 "Our Martyred Soldiers" (Dunbar), 193 "Out of the Hospital and Under the Bar" (Ellison), 246 "Outcasts of Poker Flats, The" (Harte), 345, 347348 Outcroppings (Harte), 343 "Over Kansas" (Ginsberg), 320

OVER—READ / 827 Overland Monthly (periodical), 344, 345, 350, 351352 "Oysters" (Sexton), 692 Paid on Both Sides: A Charade (Auden), 6, 18-19 "Painted Head" (Ransom), 103,314 Pan-African movement, 172, 175 "Papa and Mama Dance, The" (Sexton), 688 Papers on Literature and Art (Fuller), 292, 299 Paradise Lost (Odets), 530, 531,538-539,550 Parkman, Francis, 589-616 Parties (Van Vechten), 739, 747-749 "Parting Glass, The" (Freneau), 273 "Party, The" (Dunbar), 198, 205-206 "Passage in the Life of Mr. John Oakhurst, A" (Harte), 353-354 "Passenger Pigeons" (Jeffers), 437 "Pastiches et Pistaches" (Van Vechten), 732 Paterna (Mather), 451 "Paterson" (Ginsberg), 314315,321,329 Paterson (Williams), 557, 564, 625 Patriot, The (Buck), 122-123 "Pavement, The" (Olson), 571 Pavilion of Women (Buck), 125-126 "Pennsylvania Planter, The" (Freneau), 268 "Peacock Room, The" (Hayden), 374-375 Pentagon of Power, The (Mumford), 498 "PEOPLE BURNING, THE" (Baraka), 49 Person, Place and Thing (Shapiro), 702, 705 Peters, S. H. (pseudonym), see Henry, O. Peter Whiffle: His Life and Works (Van Vechten), 728-729, 731, 735, 738741, 749 "Petition, A" (Winters), 785 Philadelphia Negro, The (Du Bois), 158, 163-164, 166 "Philistinism and the Negro Writer" (Baraka), 39, 44 Philosopher of the Forest (pseudonym), see Freneau, Philip "Phoenix Lyrics" (Schwartz), 665

Phylon (periodical), 158, 182 "Picture, The" (Olson), 574 "Pictures of Columbus, the Genoese, The" (Freneau), 258 Pioneers of France in the New World (Parkman), 599,602 Place of Love, The (Shapiro), 702, 706 "Plain Language from Truthful James" (Harte), see "Heathen Chinee, The" Planet News: 1961-1967 (Ginsberg), 321 "Plantation a beginning, a" (Olson), 573 Player Piano (Vonnegut), 756,757, 760-765 "Plunkville Patriot" (O. Henry), 389 Poe, Edgar Allan, 385,410 Poem, A, Spoken at the Public Commencement at Yale College, In New Haven; September 1, 1781 (Barlow), 67-68, 74, 75 "POEM FOR ANNA RUSS AND FANNY JONES, A" (Baraka), 58 "Poem for Black Hearts, A" (Baraka), 50 "POEM FOR DEEP THINKERS, A" (Baraka), 55 "Poem For Willie Best, A" (Baraka), 36 "Poem on the Memorable Victory Obtained by the Gallant Captain Paul Jones" (Freneau), 261 "POEM SOME PEOPLE WILL HAVE TO UNDERSTAND, A" (Baraka), 49 "Poem That Took the Place of a Mountain" (Olson), 582 Poems (Auden), 6 Poems, The (Freneau), 263 Poems (Winters), 809, 810 Poems 1940-1953 (Shapiro), 703,711 Poems of a Jew (Shapiro), 703,712-713 Poems of Philip Freneau, Written Chiefly During the Late War (Freneau), 261 "Poems of These States" (Ginsberg), 323, 325 Poems Written and Published During the American Revolutionary War (Freneau), 273, 274 Poems Written Between the Years 1768 and 1794 (Freneau), 269 "Poet, The" (Dunbar), 207, 209-210

"Poet and His Song, The" (Dunbar), 199 "Poet and the World, The" (Cowley), 145 Poetry (periodical), 139 "Poetry and Belief in Thomas Hardy" (Schwartz), 666 Poetry and the Age (Jarrell), 135 Poetry and Truth (Olson), 583 "Poetry for the Advanced" (Baraka), 58 "Poetry Wreck, The" (Shapiro), 717 Poetry Wreck, The: Selected Essays (Shapiro), 703, 704, 717 "Point, The" (Hayden), 373 Police (Baraka), 47 "Political Fables" (Mather), 450 "Political Litany, A" (Freneau), 257 "Political Poem" (Baraka), 36 Pope, Alexander, 70, 71 Porter, William Sydney, see Henry, O. "Posthumous Letter to Gilbert White" (Auden), 26 "Postscript" (Du Bois), 173 Pound, Ezra, 1, 8, 20, 30, 91, 136 "Pound Reweighed" (Cowley), 143 "Power of Fancy, The" (Freneau), 255 Power of Sympathy, The (Brown), 74 "Praises, The" (Olson), 558, 560, 563, 564 "PRAYER FOR SAVING" (Baraka), 52-53 "Prayer on All Saints* Day" (Cowley), 138, 153 Prayers for Dark People (Du Bois), 186 Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note (Baraka), 31,33-34,51,61 "Prelude to the Present" (Mumford), 471 "Prescription of Painful Ends" (Jeffers), 424 "Present State of Poetry, The" (Schwartz), 666 "PRES SPOKE IN A LANGUAGE" (Baraka), 60 "Priesthood, The" (Winters), 786 "Prime" (Auden), 22 Primer of Ignorance, A (Blackmur), 91 "Primitive Black Man, The" (Du Bois), 176 Primitivism and Decadence

(Winters), 786, 803-807, 812 "Prince, The" (Winters), 802 "Principles" (Du Bois), 172 Pritchett, V. S., 143 "Privatation and Publication" (Cowley), 149 "Problem of Housing the Negro, The" (Du Bois), , 168 "Proem, The: By the Carpenter" (O. Henry), 409 "Projective Verse" (Olson), 30, 555, 556, 557 "Prologue to Our Time" (Mumford), 473 Promise, The (Buck), 124 Proof, The (Winters), 786, 791,792-794 "Propaganda of History, The" (Du Bois), 182 "Prosody" (Shapiro), 710 Prospect of Peace, The (Barlow), 67, 68, 75 Prospectus of a National Institution, to Be Established in the United States (Barlow), 80, 82 "Protestant Easter" (Sexton), 684 "Prothalamion" (Schwartz), 649, 652 "Psalm" (Ginsberg), 312 Pynchon, Thomas, 557, 617638 Quest of the Silver Fleece, TVu? (Du Bois), 176-178 "Rabbi, The" (Hayden), 363, 369 "'RACE LINE' IS A PRODUCT OF CAPITALISM, THE" (Baraka), 61 Rahv, Philip, 136 Rainer, Luise (Mrs. Clifford Odets), 544 "Rainy Day, The" (Buck), 127 Raise Race Rays Raze: Essays Since 1965 (Baraka), 47, 52, 55 Rake's Progress, The (opera), 24 "Ramble of Aphasia, A" (Henry), 410 Ransom, John Crowe, 90, 91, 136, 137, 139,318,639 "Rape, The" (Baraka), 40 "Rape of Philomel, The" (Shapiro), 720 "Rapunzel" (Sexton), 691 "Ration" (Baraka), 50 Reactionary Essays on Poetry and Ideas (Tate), 106, 146 "Ready Or Not" (Baraka), 50

828 / REAL—SPOR "Real Horatio Alger Story, The" (Cowley), 143 Reality Sandwiches, 1953-60 (Ginsberg), 315, 320 "Recapitulations" (Shapiro), 701,702,708,710-711 Recent Killing, A (Baraka), 55 "Recent Negro Fiction" (Ellison), 233, 235 "Reconstruction and Its Benefits" (Du Bois), 171 "RED AUTUMN" (Baraka), 55 Reed, Ishmael, 34 "Reflections on the Constitution of Nature" (Freneau), 274 "Religion" (Dunbar), 199 "Remembering Allen Tate" (Cowley), 153 Renewal of Life series (Mumford), 476, 479, 481, 482, 485, 495, 497 "Repetitive Heart, The: Eleven Poems in Imitation of the Fugue Form" (Schwartz), 645-646 "Report on the Barnhouse Effect" (Vonnegut), 756 "REPRISE OF ONE OF A. G.'S BEST POEMS" (Baraka), 59 "Reserved Memorials" (Mather), 446, 449 "Return of Spring" (Winters), 791 "Reveille, The" (Harte), 342343 "Revolutionary Theatre, The" (Baraka), 42 Rexroth, Kenneth, 307, 436 "Rhythm & Blues" (Baraka), 37-38 "Richard Hunt's 'Arachne'" (Hayden), 374 Riley, James Whitcomb, 192, 193,196, 197 "Ringing the Bells" (Sexton), 672, 687 Rising Glory of America, The (Freneau), 67, 253, 256, 263 "Rising of the Storm, The" (Dunbar), 199 "River Profile" (Auden), 26 "Rivington's Last Will and Testament" (Freneau), 261 Roads of Destiny (O. Henry), 410 "Roan Stallion" (Jeffers), 428-429 Robinson, Edwin Arlington, 191 Robinson, Sylvia (Mrs. Amiri Baraka), 45

Rocket to the Moon (Odets), 541-543, 544 Rolling Stone (periodical), 388, 389 Rolling Stones (O. Henry), 410 "Romanticism Comes Home" (Shapiro), 713 "Roof, the Steeple, and the People, The" (Ellison), 248 Roth, Philip, 99 "Rowing" (Sexton), 696 "Rowing Endeth, The" (Sexton), 696 "Rows of Cold Trees, The" (Winters), 790-791,800 "Rumpelstiltskin" (Sexton), 690 "Runagate Runagate" (Hayden), 377 "Rural South, The" (Du Bois), 174 S-l (Baraka), 55, 57 "Sabotage" (Baraka), 49, 53 Sacred and Profane Memories (Van Vechten), 735, 749 "Sacred Chant for the Return of Black Spirit and Power" (Baraka), 51 Sacred Wood, The (Eliot), 136,146 "Sacrifice, The" (Oates), 523 "Sad Dust Glories" (Ginsberg), 376 Sad Dust Glories: Poems Written Work Summer in Sierra Woods (Ginsberg), 326 Sanchez, Sonia, 34 "Santa" (Sexton), 693 Santayana, George, 107 "Sarah" (Schwartz), 663 "Sather Gate Illumination" (Ginsberg), 329 Scarlet Letter, The (Hawthorne), 386 Schwartz, Delmore, 102, 109, 639-668 "Science" (Jeffers), 426 "Science Favorable to Virtue" (Freneau), 274 "Screamers, The" (Baraka), 38 "Screeno" (Schwartz), 660 Sea and the Mirror, The: A Commentary on Shakespeare's "The Tempest" (Auden), 2, 18 Secession (periodical), 138 Second Flowering, A (Cowley), 135, 141, 143, 144, 147, 149 Second World, The (Blackmur), 91

"Secret Integration, The" (Pynchon), 624 "Secret of the Russian Ballet, The" (Van Vechten), 732 Sedges, John (pseudonym), see Buck, Pearl S. Selected Poems (Hayden), 363, 364, 367 Selected Poetry of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones (Baraka), 58 "Self-Portrait" (Mumford), 471 "Sentimental Journey" (Oates), 522, 523 "Sepia High Stepper" (Hayden), 379 "September 1, 1939" (Auden), 13 "Sermon for Our Maturity" (Baraka), 53 "Seurat's Sunday Afternoon Along the Seine" (Schwartz), 663-665 "Sext" (Auden), 22 Sexton, Anne, 669-700 Shadow and Act (Ellison), 245-246 "Shame" (Oates), 520 Shapiro, Karl, 701-724 Shenandoah (Schwartz), 640, 651-652 "Shenandoah" (Shapiro), 704 "Shield of Achilles, The" (Auden), 21,25 Shield of Achilles, The (Auden), 21 "Ships" (O. Henry), 409 "Shoes" (O. Henry), 409 Shore Acres (Herne), 198 "SHORT SPEECH TO MY FRIENDS" (Baraka), 35 "Shrouded Stranger, The" (Ginsberg), 312 Sidnee Poet Heroical, The (Baraka), 55 Sidney, Sir Philip, 104-105 Silent Partner, The (Odets), 539 Sirens of Titan, The (Vonnegut), 757, 758, 760, 765767 "Six Persons" (Baraka), 53 "Sky Line, The" (Mumford), 475 Slapstick (Vonnegut), 753, 754, 778 Slaughterhouse-Five (Vonnegut), 755, 758-759, 760, 770,772-776 Slave, The (Baraka), 42,44, 56 Slave Ship: A Historical Pageant (Baraka), 47-49, 53, 56-57 "Slick Gonna Learn" (Ellison), 237-238

"Slim Greer" series (Hayden), 369 "Slim in Hell" (Hayden), 369 "Slow Pacific Swell, The" (Winters), 790, 793, 795, 796,799 "Small Rain, The" (Pynchon), 620 "Small Wire" (Sexton), 696 "Smelt Fishing" (Hayden), 367 "Snob, The" (Shapiro), 705 "Snow" (Sexton), 696 "Snow Bound at Eagle's" (Harte), 356 "Snowstorm, The" (Oates), 523 "Sociological Habit Patterns in Linguistic Transmogrification" (Cowley), 143 "Soldier's Testament, The" (Mumford), 473 "Solstice" (Jeffers), 433, 435 "Some Foreign Letters" (Sexton), 674 "Some Good News" (Olson), 575, 576, 577 "Somewhere in Africa" (Sexton), 684-685 "Song" (Dunbar), 199 "Song" (Ginsberg), 317 "Song of Advent, A" (Winters), 789 "Song of Innocence, A" (Ellison), 248 "Song on Captain Barney's Victory" (Freneau), 261 "Songs of Maximus, The" (Olson), 567 Son of the Morning (Oates), 518,519,520-522 Sow (Buck), 117-118 "S O S" (Baraka), 50 "So Sassafras" (Olson), 574 Souls of Black Folk. The (Du Bois), 33, 40, 160, 168170, 176, 183 "Sound and Fury" (O. Henry), 402 "Southerner's Problem, The" (Du Bois), 168 "Spain" (Auden), 12-13, 14 Speaking and Language (Shapiro), 721 Special View of History, The (Olson), 566, 569, 572 Spender, Stephen, 11 "Sphinx" (Hayden), 373 Spider Bay (Van Vechten), 746 "Spiders" (Schwartz), 665 Splendid Drunken Twenties, The (Van Vechten), 739744 Sport of the Gods, The (Dunbar), 193,200,207, 214-217

SPRI—UNCA / 829 "SPRING SONG" (Baraka), 60 Spy, The (Freneau), 260 "Square Business" (Baraka), 49 Stanton, Frank L., 192 "Starry Night, The" (Sexton), 681 "Statues, The" (Schwartz), 654, 659 Stedman, Edmund Clarence, 192 "Sterne" (Schwartz), 663 Stevens, Wallace, 9, 18 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 404-405 Sticks and Stones (Mumford), 475, 483, 487-488 "Stigmata" (Gates), 520 "Stirling Street September" (Baraka), 51 Stoddard, Charles Warren, 192,341,351 "Stolen Calf, The" (Dunbar), 196 "Stormy Weather" (Ellison), 233 Story of Utopias, The (Mumford), 475, 483-486, 495 Story on Page One, The (Odets), 546 "Strength of Gideon, The" (Dunbar), 212 Strength of Gideon and Other Stories, The (Dunbar), 211,212 Strictly Business (O. Henry), 410 "Strivings of the Negro People" (Du Bois), 167 "Study of the Negro Problems, The" (Du Bois), 165 Successful Love and Other Stories (Schwartz), 661, 665 "Such Counsels You Gave to Me" (Jeffers), 433 "Sumach and Goldenrod: An American Idyll" (Mumford), 475 "Summer Commentary, A" (Winters), 808 Summer Knowledge (Schwartz), 662, 665 "Summer Night, A" (Auden), 8 "Summer Noon: 1941" (Winters), 811 Summer on the Lakes in 1843 (Fuller), 279, 295-296 " 'Summertime and the Living ...'"(Hayden), 363,366 "Sunflower Sutra" (Ginsberg), 317, 321 Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United

States of America, 16381870(Du Bois), 157, 162 "Swift" (Schwartz), 663 "Sylvia's Death" (Sexton), 671,684,685 System of Dante's Hell, The (Baraka), 39-41, 55 "System of Dante's Inferno, The" (Baraka), 40 Tales (Baraka), 39, 55 Tales of the Argonauts (Harte), 337, 348, 351 "Talking to Sheep" (Sexton), 695 "Tamar" (Jeffers), 427-428, 436 Tamar and Other Poems (Jeffers), 416, 419 "Target Study" (Baraka), 49-50, 54 Technics and Civilization (Mumford), 479, 493, 497 Technics and Human Development (Mumford), 497 Tate, Allen, 90-91, 96, 98, 103-104, 136, 139, 144, 150, 151,318,643 Tatooed Countess, The (Van Vechten), 726-728, 738, 742 Tell Me Your Answer True (Sexton), 683 "Tennessee's Partner" (Harte), 345, 348-350 "Terce" (Auden), 22 "Terms in Which I Think of Reality, The" (Ginsberg), 311 Thank You, Fog (Auden), 24 "Thanksgiving, A" (Auden), 26 "Thanksgiving for a Habitat" (Auden), 24 "That I Had the Wings" (Ellison), 238 them (Gates), 503,511-514 "There was a Youth whose Name was Thomas Granger" (Olson), 558, 560, 563 "These Are My People" (Hayden), 365 Think Back on Us . . . (Cowley), 139, 140, 142 This Proud Heart (Buck), 119-120 Thomas, Edward, 4 "Those Times ..." (Sexton), 670, 684 "Three Avilas, The" (Jeffers), 418 "THREE MOVEMENTS AND A CODA" (Baraka), 50 "Three Vagabonds of Trinidad" (Harte), 338

Thurber, James, 143 "Thurso's Landing" (Jeffers), 433 Tiger in the House, The (Van Vechten), 736 Till the Day I Die (Odets), 530, 533-536, 552 "Time and the Garden" (Winters), 801,809 Time Is Noon, The (Buck), 129. 130-131 "Tired and Unhappy, You Think of Houses" (Schwartz), 649 "To Abolish Children" (Shapiro), 717 To Abolish Children and Other Essays (Shapiro), 703 "To a Caty-Did, the Precursor of Winter" (Freneau), 274275 "To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Triumph" (Sexton), 683 "To a Military Rifle" (Winters), 810,811,815 "To a Republican, with Mr. Paine's Rights of Man" (Freneau), 267 "To an Old Poet in Peru" (Ginsberg), 322 "To Aunt Rose" (Ginsberg), 320 To Bedlam and Part Way Back (Sexton), 672-678 "To Crispin O'Conner" (Freneau), 268 "To Edwin V. McKenzie" (Winters), 801 "To His Father" (Jeffers), 415 "To Lose the Earth" (Sexton), 684, 685 , "To Sir Toby" (Freneau), 269 "To Sophy, Expectant" (Mumford), 475 "To the Americans of the United States" (Freneau), 271 To the Holy Spirit (Winters), 810 "To the Keeper of the King's Water Works" (Freneau), 269 "To the Memory of the Brave Americans Under General Greene" (Freneau), 262, 274 "To the Peoples of the World" (Du Bois), 172 "To the Pliocene Skull" (Harte), 343-344 "To the Stone-Cutters" (Jeffers), 420 "Tobin's Palm" (O. Henry), 408

Tocqueville, Alexis de, 281, 282, 284 "TODAY" (Baraka), 55 "Today" (Ginsberg), 328 Toilet, The (Baraka), 37, 4042 "Tom Brown at Fisk" (Du Bois), 160 "Tommy's Burglar" (Henry), 399, 401 Tomo Cheeki (pseudonym), see Freneau, Philip "Touch, The" (Sexton), 687 "Tour 5" (Hayden), 381 "Tower Beyond Tragedy, The" (Jeffers), 429-430 Townsman, The (Sedges), 124-125 "Track Meet, The" (Schwartz), 665 Transcendentalists, 279, 289, 291} "Transcontinental Highway" (Cowley), 141 Transformations (Sexton), 689-691 "Treasure of the Redwoods, A" (Harte), 337 Trial of a Poet, The (Shapiro), 710 Trimmed Lamp, The (Henry), 410 Triple Thinkers, The (Wilson), 146 Triumph of the Spider Monkey, The (Gates), 522 Triumphs of the Reformed Religion in America (Mather), 453 "Troop Train" (Shapiro), 707 Trumbull, John, 65, 69, 70, 268 "Truth the Dead Know, The" (Sexton), 681 "Tuesday April 25th 1966" (Olson), 585 Tuskegee movement, 169, 172 Twain, Mark, 193, 344, 354, 385 "Twenty-Four Poems" (Schwartz), 646, 649 "Twins of Table Mountain, The" (Harte), 355 "Twist, The" (Olson), 570 Two Letters to the Citizens of the United States, and One to General Washington (Barlow), 80 Two Men of Sandy Bar (Harte), 354 "Tyrian Businesses" (Olson), 567, 568, 569 Uncalled, The (Dunbar), 200, 211,212

830 I UNCL—ZOLA Uncle Remus tales (Harris), 201 Uncle Tom's Cabin (Stowe), 170 Uncle Tom's Children (Wright), 228, 235 "Under the Rose" (Pynchon), 620 "Unexpressed" (Dunbar), 199 "Unidentified Flying Object" (Hayden), 368 "University" (Shapiro), 704705,717 "Unknown Girl in the Maternity Ward" (Sexton), 676 "Unprofitable Servant, The" (O. Henry), 403 Up from Slavery (Washington), 169 Upstairs and Downstairs (Vonnegut), 757 "Us" (Sexton), 687 Utopia 14 (Vonnegut), 757 K (Pynchon), 618, 620-622, 627-630 "V-Letter" (Shapiro), 707 V-Letter and Other Poems (Shapiro), 702, 706 Van Doren, Carl, 395 "Vanity of Existence, The" (Freneau), 262 Van Vechten, Carl, 725-751 Vaudeville for a Princess (Schwartz), 661-662 "Veracruz" (Hayden), 371, 373 Vassal! Morton (Parkman), 595, 597-598 "Vernal Ague, The" (Freneau), 258 "Verses Made at Sea in a Heavy Gale" (Freneau), 262 "Vespers" (Auden), 23 "Victor" (Mumford), 476 View from 80, The (Cowley), 141, 144, 153 "Vision, A" (Winters), 785, 795 Vision of Columbus, The (Barlow), 67, 68, 70-75, 77,79 "Voice of Rock, The" (Ginsberg), 313 Voice of the City, The (O. Henry), 410 Voice of the Negro (Barber), 168

Voices in the House (Sedges), 125 Vonnegut, Kurt, 557, 689, 753-816 "Vowels 2" (Baraka), 51 "Waif of the Plains, A" (Harte), 354 Waiting for Lefty (Odets), 529, 530-533, 540 "Walking Home at Night" (Ginsberg), 313 "Wall, The" (Sexton), 696 "Walled City" (Gates), 524 Walsh, Richard J., 119, 130 Wampeters, Foma, & Granfalloons (Vonnegut), 758, 759-760, 776, 779 "Wan Lee, the Pagan" (Harte), 351 "Wanting to Die" (Sexton), 684, 686 Warren, Robert Penn, 139 Washington, Booker T., 157, 160, 167, 168, 171,225 Waste Land, The (Eliot), 4, 5, 11,96 "Watershed, The" (Auden), 5 "Way It Is, The" (Ellison), 245 Webster, Noah, 77 "Welcome Morning" (Sexton), 696 Welcome to the Monkey House (Vonnegut), 758 "Western Ballad, A" (Ginsberg), 311 "Westward Beach, A" (Jeffers), 418 "We Wear the Mask" (Dunbar), 199, 207, 209-210 "What I Believe" (Mumford), 479 "What Is Civilization? Africa's Answer" (Du Bois), 176 "What the Arts Need Now" (Baraka), 47 What Was the Relationship of the Lone Ranger to the Means of Production? (Baraka), 58 "What You Want" (O. Henry), 402 "When De Co'n Pone's Hot" (Dunbar), 202-203 "When Malindy Sings" (Dunbar), 200, 204-205

"When the Frost Is on the Punkin" (Riley), 202 "When We Gonna Rise" (Baraka), 48 "WHEN WE'LL WORSHIP JESUS" (Baraka), 54 "Whistling Dick's Christmas Stocking" (O. Henry), 390, 392 White, E. B., 143 White-Haired Lover (Shapiro), 703, 717 "White Snake, The" (Sexton), 691 "Whitman: The Poet and the Mask" (Cowley), 143 "Who Be Kind To" (Ginsberg), 323 "Wichita Vortex Sutra" (Ginsberg), 319, 321, 323325, 327 Wieners, John, 32 "Wifebeater, The" (Sexton), 693 Wilcox, Ella Wheeler, 197 "Wild Honey Suckle, The" (Freneau), 253, 264, 266 Wild in the Country (Odets), 546 "William Faulkner's Legend of the South" (Cowley), 143 Williams, Charles, 15, 16 Williams, William Carlos, 9, 30,308,318,421,443 Wilson, Edmund, 19, 90, 106, 136, 137, 143 Wings of the Dove, The (James), 94-95 Winters, Yvor, 416,666, 785816 "Witch Doctor" (Hayden), 368, 380 "With Mercy for the Greedy" (Sexton), 680 With Shuddering Fall (Oates), 504-506 "Wolfe: Homo Scribens" (Cowley), 144 Wolff, Geoffrey, 97 Women at Point Sur, The (Jeffers), 430-431 Women in the Nineteenth Century (Fuller), 279, 292, 294-296 Wonderland (Oates), 511, 512,514-515 Wonders of the Invisible

World, The (Mather), 456459, 460, 467 Words for Dr. Y (Sexton), 698 "Words in the Mourning Time" (Hayden), 370-371 Words in the Mourning Time (Hayden), 361,366,367 Wordsworth, William, 4 "Work Notes—'66" (Baraka), 47 "Work on Red Mountain, The" (Harte), 339 World and Africa. The: An Inquiry into the Part Which Africa Has Played in World History (Du Bois), 184-185 "World and the Door, The" (O. Henry), 402 "World Is a Wedding, The" (Schwartz), 655-656, 657 World Is a Wedding, The (Schwartz), 643, 654-660 World's Body, The (Ransom), 146 "Worlds of Color" (Du Bois), 175 Worlds of Color (Du Bois), 185-186 Wright, Richard, 17,40,221, 228, 235, 250 Writers on the Left (Aaron), 137 Y & X (Olson), 556 "Year of Mourning, The" (Jeffers), 415 "Years of Birth" (Cowley), 149 Yeats, William Butler, 1, 4,9, 20, 26, 361 "Yes and It's Hopeless" (Ginsberg), 326 "You All Know the Story of the Other Woman" (Sexton), 688 "You, Dr. Martin" (Sexton), 673 "Young" (Sexton), 680 "Young Child and His Pregnant Mother, A" (Schwartz), 650 "Your Face on the Dog's Neck" (Sexton), 686 Yugen (periodical), 30 "Zeus over Redeye" (Hayden), 380 Zola, Emile, 117